Where ED and REA Matter Most: The Data on Early Admissions

Are you applying to a top 50 college and wondering if you should apply early decision or restrictive early action? In this blog, I’m going to go through the data on early admissions percentiles so that you can figure out where there is a major advantage for applying early versus not that much advantage to help you make a decision of where, if anywhere, you should apply early.

What we’ve done is we compiled the data from these colleges in terms of their ED or restrictive early action percentile of admission, and then we’ve also found the regular decision admission rate, which is what percent of students who apply during the regular time or who are admitted during the regular time got in. Then, we’re going to calculate what we call the ED/RD advantage, which is essentially by what factor students are more likely to get in if they apply early.

Now I will also admit that there are some confounding factors here that we can’t necessarily exactly get down to. For example, some colleges on this list are extremely competitive, and most students know they shouldn’t really spend their restrictive early action or early decision on that school unless they think they have a shot of getting in. Places like Harvard and Stanford are so popular and yield so well that sometimes students say they’re not going to spend their early decision on Harvard because they’re going to ED to Columbia, where they feel like they have a better shot of getting in. The pool at Harvard is probably stronger than the pool at Columbia in the first round, but then all those students that thought they could get into Harvard are applying to Columbia in the next round. So, there are some sort of factors we can’t completely figure out per se.

The other thing that I’ll say is that some schools may have fewer students who are highly qualified apply early because those students think they can get into really great other universities, but they kind of catch the fall off. A school, for example, like Case Western may get a lot of students who thought they might be able to get into Stanford with their stats, but they might not have had the activities or the story to get them in. But they’re really strong engineering students, and they might end up at Case Western, but Case Western isn’t prioritizing early decisions highly. And so they might fall off, but even though the ratio is 0.89—meaning the admission rate is higher in regular than it is early—it doesn’t mean that if you apply early you’re ruining your chances. You might get rolled into the regular pool, and they might just wait to decide on you. It also may be that Case Western’s early pool is less competitive than its regular pool, and that’s what accounts for that discrepancy. It’s not that it’s actually easier or harder to get in, but again, there are these factors that we can’t completely unpack. So, knowing that and taking that with a grain of salt, this is one piece of data you can use but know that it’s a little messy.

High Advantage

Here is my high advantage list, which are schools where I think there is a very clear relationship between early decision and a higher admin rate. Two statistics I’m looking at to make this list are the ratio of our ED% to RD% and what percent of enrolled students came from ED rounds. I’m looking for numbers that are around half of the class or more, and sometimes they’re a little bit lower than that, depending on the profile of the school.

But some of the schools, for example, Notre Dame has a 1.45 ratio of admission regular versus early, but they fill 82% of their class with early decision applicants. I don’t know what that says to you, but that tells me if 82% of the kids that are going to Notre Dame applied early, your best bet is to apply early if you want to go. Despite that it’s only a 1.45 advantage percentile wise, it really feels like restricted EA is the way to go if you want to go to Notre Dame because they’re filling 80% of their class with EA.

Starting at the top, we have NYU. We don’t have the data for them for this year, but I am putting it on this list because, in my experience as a consultant, I have always found that ED at NYU is a smoother ride, and you can get in with lower stats than you can in a regular round. UChicago is another school that does not share their data, but they heavily admit from early decision applicants (and to a lesser extent, early action.) Moving on there’s Dartmouth, Northeastern, Barnard, Tulane, Columbia, Colby, Middlebury, Northwestern, Grinnell, University of Miami, Vanderbilt, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Williams, Davidson, Haverford, Amherst, Tufts, Emory, Wash U St. Louis, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, and Notre Dame.

So, again, this is my best return on investment for your ED. If you’re applying to any of these ED or restrictive early action—depending on which plan they offer—there is some advantage.

Some Advantage

Next up are colleges where I see some advantage to applying early. Generally, these colleges have between about a 2x to 3x advantage. Around 40 to 60 percent of their class is filled by students who are on an early admission plan. These are Harvard, Hamilton, Yale, Duke, Cornell, Boston, Bowdoin, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Wellesley, Rice, Washington and Lee, Pomona, Villanova, Lehigh, and Boston College.

Again, there are lots of factors we can’t totally parse out, but there are early admission rates that are clearly double or more of what we’re used to seeing. So, there’s got to be some advantage at the majority of these schools. You are getting a leg up at Boston College, for example, where it’s 15.26% versus 28.14%. And when 53.36% of the class is filled early, if you want to go to BC, applying early is going to be a good plan.

Possible Advantage

So, my next list is schools where I believe that there is a possible advantage to applying early. And again, this is the point on the list where we start to get into confounding factors. All these schools have a probability that increases by up to double. It might be close to double, but I want you to be looking at the statistics here. If their ED of the percent enrolled is over 40 percent, the ED might have a little bit of weight. And there’s also two schools on this list that we really don’t know about, and my general advice in this range is to ask admissions. You can talk to admissions counselors and ask if there is an advantage if you apply early. Sometimes they’re going to give you a straight answer, but the other thing that happens with early admissions is that colleges run out of space in particular programs. Even schools that aren’t on my list right now: for example, Purdue, which doesn’t have an early decision program. It’s good to apply early because programs like nursing and computer science fill up, and then they don’t have space and they can’t admit you because they already admitted too many students. So, that’s another consideration, especially if you’re applying to state schools or schools that don’t offer early decision or restrictive early action.

The two schools on here with no data are Stanford and Caltech. Caltech has a new restrictive early action program. It’s brand new, so we don’t really have data on it. And Stanford is trying to deemphasize the single choice early action because their pool for single choice early action is really strong. I’ve actually had two students that I’ve worked with get into Stanford in the last two years, and both of them applied single-choice early action and ended up getting in in March. So, they’re not counted in the statistics, but they still applied single choice early action and got in, just not during that first round. I’ve also had students get in regular to Stanford without doing any early action. From my personal experience, I can see how people get into Stanford applying early, but people get into Stanford by not checking that early box too. And the pool is extremely strong early there.

Moving on to the rest of the list: Carleton College, American University, Brandeis, Smith, Santa Clara, Syracuse, Loyola Marymount, University of Virginia, George Washington University, University of Rochester, and Rochester Institute of Technology. And again, these might seem negligible. University of Rochester only looks like 1.1, but about 40% of the class gets filled early. So that might be a question that I would ask the admissions officers. I know the percentiles don’t totally tell the story here, but again, those confounding effects are the kinds of things that could come into play with these colleges. You might want to do a little bit more research and see how that goes.

Little Advantage

Finally, my last list is colleges where there is little, if any, advantage going with restrictive early action or early decision. So these are schools where there appears to potentially be an increase in admission rate up to about 1.41%, but they’re not necessarily filling more than about a third of their class with early decision or early action candidates. These are Texas Christian, William and Mary, Elon University, SMU, Fordham, Carnegie Mellon, University of Denver, Howard, Case Western, and Baylor. I have talked specifically to Carnegie Mellon reps, and they looked me in the eye and said that they don’t care if you apply earlier or not. Statistically, it looks like the ratio is 1.2, so there’s about a 20% increase in value here versus the situation, but only about a third of their class, 36%, came from ED.

There is one advantage, which is that you find out early. So if these are actually your first choice schools and if you know your dream school is on this list, there’s still a reason to apply early. And that’s because you really want to go there, and you know 100% that you would go there if you got in. If that’s the case, de-stress yourself and apply early. But if that’s not the case, at this level you may not need to apply early. Again, you can reach out to these colleges if you’re not sure if early decision would be an advantage.

Hope you guys found this helpful!

Early Decision Advantage