ED Isn’t Intended to Serve Applicants. You Should Probably Use it Anyway.

There is little doubt that binding Early Decision (ED) admission programs advantage schools more than they do applicants. For one, institutions that offer early decision benefit from 100% yield (or close!) for students admitted via ED, all of whom have chosen that institution and therefore expressly want to be there. 100% yield gives colleges more control over shaping their incoming freshman class, which in turn allows them to fulfill institutional needs and priorities. They get to do all of this while protecting a sizable chunk of their financial aid budgets. After all, ED candidates are more likely to be full-pay students. Even more, calculating institutions can boost their selectivity by offering ED. If half their class (or more!) is locked in by the first of the year, then regular decision and early action acceptance rates plummet.

The downsides for institutions are scant, with the most notable being the periodic scathing media coverage about how ED disproportionately benefits privileged applicants.

But is ED win-win? Do students benefit in the same way that institutions do? Sadly, not really.

Of course, ED admits have the advantage of knowing where they are headed earlier in the cycle and saving themselves from the agonizing wait for regular decision results. They can also put their finger on the scale, boosting their shot at a top-choice institution that they may otherwise not be able to get into. But there are well-documented costs.

For one, ED forces many students to select a top choice school before they are ready. They may still be visiting schools, researching options, and figuring out what they want to study well into fall. ED might cut this exploration process off at the pass. This matters because, as much as we forget this part, applicants are not mini-adults. They are teenagers. Teenagers’ minds change. And not because they are flighty, frightened, or flippant but because they are constantly absorbing new information and perspectives. The world of college is still new and unfamiliar to most of them.

And then there is the privilege question. Cost-sensitive applicants are frequently loath to apply ED because an acceptance denies them the ability to compare financial aid packages. This works against these applicants because the ED system as a whole disproportionately and detrimentally impacts students’ chances in the regular decision (RD) round. And so we arrive at the negative feedback loop. Plummeting RD admit rates incentivize students to apply to more and more schools. Colleges face greater yield uncertainty and therefore rely more heavily on ED. RD rates go even lower, and so on.

Nevertheless, students who can afford to apply and commit via ED should. Students admitted via ED have, on average, better results than students who land in the RD round. This is because institutions with ED admit rates in the 20–30% range regularly have sub-10% RD rates. Students who land in the RD round thus find themselves in a much more competitive pool. This is risky.

What’s your risk tolerance? This, we would argue, is the lens through which students (and their families) should be considering their ED choice.

The equation is relatively straightforward. The higher the reach, the greater the risk. This is because that applicant has a higher likelihood of landing in the hyper-competitive RD pool. The lower the reach, the lower the risk because that candidate is more likely to receive and accept an ED offer and avoid the RD round. Students with greater risk tolerance can afford to apply to a higher reach school than those with lower risk tolerance.

So, who is the student with a greater risk tolerance? We look for a few qualities: they have target and likely schools on their list that they love; they place less emphasis on one specific school and more on a broad range of outcomes; when possible, they have guaranteed (or likely) admission to an in-state institution they would happily attend. This student can go after a high reach in the ED round and feel relatively comfortable that if they land in the RD pool, things will turn out just fine.

A student with lower risk tolerance, by contrast, might be focused on a single school, be more prestige-oriented, and be less excited about the target and likely schools on their list. This student is better off targeting a more attainable reach where they are more likely to receive an offer of admission come December.

Of course, all students must factor cost and financial need into the calculation above, as this will impact risk tolerance as well.

Setting aside the arguments about ED itself, the beauty of this approach is that if you consider the landscape through the lens of risk tolerance, the only bad ED plan is one where a risk-averse student applies to a high-reach school. After all, if we are going to be stuck with the ED system as it is today, the least you can do is make it work for you.