As elite college admissions tighten, early decision faces new scrutiny
Thousands of high school seniors received an early holiday gift this month: admission to their first choice college through early decision, often called “ED.” With binding ED, students apply to one school in November, agree to enroll if admitted and receive an answer in mid-December — months before many of their peers will even apply through the regular admission cycle.
Supporters say ED can be a win-win: Students save time and win an admissions advantage while colleges assemble a more predictable incoming class. Critics, however, say it favors students from affluent families who can commit without comparing financial aid offers across schools, rewards strategy over merit and distorts the broader admissions process.
Now, the practice faces a new challenge: A class-action lawsuit accusing elite colleges of illegally colluding to enforce ED commitments that drive up college costs.
How did elite college admissions become a “game of chess”?
Getting into America’s most selective colleges has become vastly more competitive and complex. In the early 2000s, the acceptance rate of Ivy League schools and their peer institutions ranged from roughly 10% to 25%. Today, most of these schools accept fewer than 8% of all applicants, according to the self-reported data.
Selective colleges are flooded with applications, in part because platforms like the Common App make it easier for students to apply to many schools, including colleges and universities where they have slim odds or limited interest. Another contributing factor: many schools no longer require standardized test scores, once seen as a cut off point for applicants.
Students hoping to attend a college with a single-digit to low-teen acceptance rate “must learn to play the game,” said Daniel Cullen, a former deputy under secretary and senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Education. Most high school seniors think they’re playing checkers, but these schools are playing chess, he told Straight Arrow News.
“It’s become harder for these kids to differentiate themselves” from thousands of other strong candidates, said Cullen. In the most competitive environments, he said, grade inflation, intensive admissions coaching and ever-higher test scores have made the applicant pool look increasingly similar on paper.
As bleak as it sounds, “you have to carefully craft a persona and lean into extracurriculars that knit perfectly into some narrative about your life passion.” But you can abandon that “passion” the moment you arrive on campus, Cullen said.
Another increasingly common strategy, counselors say, is to apply through ED. (ED is more restrictive than early action, where students also apply early but with no commitment to attend if admitted.)
Why are more students choosing early decision?
At many selective colleges, students who apply through ED are two to three times more likely to be admitted than students in the regular admissions cycle. That edge is why counselors tell students to use their shot at ED wisely, on a top-choice school that’s ambitious but not unrealistic.
For colleges, ED offers enrollment predictability and boosts their “yield” — the share of admitted students who enroll, a key metric used in college rankings.
Some top-tier schools now fill a whopping half to two-thirds of their first-year class with ED admits, leaving everyone else to scramble for fewer remaining spots.
Middlebury College in Vermont, for instance, accepted about 68% of its current first-year class through ED. Its reported ED acceptance rate was 30%, while its overall acceptance rate was just 11%, according to data collected by College Transitions.
Dartmouth College, where 58% of first-years were admitted via ED, reported an ED admission rate of 19% compared to an overall admit rate near 5%. (A key caveat: the ED pool is self-selecting and, on average, may be more qualified than the broader applicant pool. As a result, the acceptance rate gaps are not clean measures of “advantage.”)
Why is early decision under attack?
A central criticism of ED is that it asks students to commit before they can compare financial aid offers across schools. While ED agreements typically allow applicants to back out if enrollment creates a “financial hardship,” experts say this option is rarely exercised.
Students from higher-income ZIP codes are significantly more likely to apply ED than students from lower- income neighborhoods, according to a 2023 analysis by Common App. The same study found that Asian students are the most likely to submit an ED application (23%), followed by white students (12%), Latino students (9%), then Black students (8%).
Locking in “full-pay” students from affluent families early in the process is a feature, not a bug, of the ED system, Cullen said. Early decision is especially high stakes for both students and institutions as the gap widens between the sticker price (now often approaching $100,000 per year when living costs are included) and what most students actually pay with financial aid.
Lawsuit claims early decision violates antitrust law
Some critics argue that ED goes beyond gamesmanship into something more troubling: systematic collusion.
A federal class action lawsuit filed in August by three students and a recent graduate targets 32 selective colleges and universities, including Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania, two application platforms and a trade group.
Plaintiffs accused these schools of illegally conspiring to inflate college costs by working together to enforce ED commitments that are not, in fact, legally binding. They allegedly do this by sharing admitted student lists and mutually agreeing not to recruit, and in some cases to penalize or reject any applicant who tries to back out of an ED commitment.
“Early decision applicants lose choice and negotiation leverage, while Regular Decision applicants are left to scramble for an artificially diminished number of admission slots doled out at lower acceptance rates,” said Benjamin Brown, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in a statement shared with SAN. The ED system “is only made possible by an agreement not to compete” and therefore violates antitrust law, Brown added.
Jude Robinson, a plaintiff who currently attends Vassar College, said the pressure to apply via ED set him back.
“It does not seem fair that, in order to put my chances of admission on a level playing field with my peers, I had to give up the right to compare the cost of attendance at different schools,” Robinson said. “I thought I would get more financial aid than I did.”
The colleges deny the allegations. In a joint motion to dismiss filed last month, the institutions argued ED is an optional arrangement that can benefit students who want early certainty, and they disputed the claim that it drives up tuition. The defendants characterized the lawsuit’s claims as a “far-fetched conspiracy theory” and said their ED process is not anticompetitive but actually “preserves — and indeed, promotes— competition among schools.”
Outside the most selective campuses, early decision is limited
Even as competition intensifies at the nation’s most selective schools, Cullen noted that outside that rarified slice of higher education “college admission is actually, if anything, getting easier.”
While dozens of private highly selective schools lean into ED to fill their first-year class, most American colleges and universities “just don’t have the market power to support this practice,” he said.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
