The Early Decision Arithmetic Nobody Runs For You
The early advantage is real, it is smaller than the table suggests, and most of it belongs to students whose files were never in doubt.
Leo Cao
Every spring a parent shows me a table of admit rates and asks why anybody applies in the regular round. At a selective school the early number is often several times the regular one, and printed side by side like that it looks like a decision that makes itself.
The early pool is not a smaller copy of the regular pool. Recruited athletes are inside it. So are the children of alumni and of faculty, and most of the students a school has been in conversation with since junior year. Those groups are admitted at rates that have nothing to do with the calendar, and every one of them sits inside the headline number.
Take them back out and what is left for a student with no hook is a real edge that is a great deal smaller than the table implies. I am not going to print a figure for it. The honest answer is that it moves by school and by year and that nobody outside the office can compute it, and a number invented for a blog post is exactly the kind of thing families then plan around. It is not nothing. It is not what the table says.
What a binding application genuinely buys is certainty for the school. An office cares about how many admitted students actually enroll more than it will say in public, and a binding commitment removes that question completely. In a marginal case that carries weight, and marginal is where most students live.
What it costs is your position on price. The offer arrives in December, before any other offer exists to compare it against, and the conversation a family can have in April holding three letters is not available to you in the winter. The school knows that too. If the money has to work out, that is the trade you are agreeing to.
So run the net price calculator in September rather than in the week of the deadline. Every college is required to publish one, they are usually buried a couple of clicks past the tuition page, and fifteen minutes with last year’s tax return gets you close enough to know whether a school is a twelve thousand dollar school or a sixty thousand dollar school for your family. If the answer only works after a negotiation you have not had yet, that school is not an early decision school.
Merit money runs on a separate calendar and it complicates this further. At some schools the scholarship deadline falls earlier than the regular application and needs a form nobody mentions on the tour. If merit is part of the plan, find those dates in September. A November 1 deadline is not something to discover on October 28.
There is a second cost that families almost never price in. An early application has to be finished in October, which means the rest of the file has to be finished in October as well, or your student spends the three weeks after submitting it writing eleven supplements at speed. Trading a small statistical edge for a worse application at every other school on the list is a bad deal, and it is the most common way this goes wrong in my practice.
Here is the sentence I give families. Apply early to the school your student would attend without hesitating, if the price already works without a negotiation. If two schools fit that sentence, neither of them is the one, and you have learned something useful about the list before it cost you anything.
If your student is still unsure in October, that is not a planning failure. Seventeen-year-olds change their minds in November for good reasons. The regular round exists, and it admits most of the class.
If you want somebody reading your student’s file with you this year, that is the work we do. The first call is forty-five minutes and it costs nothing.