For many students applying to highly selective colleges, the hardest Early Decision question is not whether they have a first choice. It is what to do when their first choice and their best strategic choice may not be the same school.
A student might love Brown but have a stronger admissions profile for Vanderbilt. Another might prefer Princeton, where there is no binding ED program, but wonder whether applying early elsewhere would improve the odds of having a highly selective acceptance by December. A third may be deciding whether to take an ambitious shot in November and preserve an ED II option if it does not work out.
This is what happens when a binding admissions program becomes part of a highly competitive process.
ED is often discussed as an expression of preference: identify the college you love most and apply. For students targeting the most selective universities, the calculation is much more complicated. The decision also involves academic positioning, institutional priorities, the strength of the application and what opportunities will remain if the answer is no.
This is where headline acceptance rates can become misleading. A college may admit a substantially larger percentage of its early applicants than its Regular Decision applicants, but the two pools are not interchangeable. Recruited athletes, legacy applicants and students filling particular institutional needs can all be represented differently in the early round. A higher ED acceptance rate does not necessarily tell an individual applicant how much applying early changes his or her odds.
The more useful question is: Where does this particular student have the strongest combination of enthusiasm and realistic admissions opportunity?
That can create opportunity cost. Using a binding early decision application at one university means not using it at another. A student who takes a long shot at an exceptionally selective college may be comfortable with that trade. Another may decide that securing a strong chance at a different school they would be excited to attend matters more.
ED II adds another layer. At colleges that offer this round, students who are denied or deferred in December can make a second binding choice later in the cycle, typically in January. That can make an ambitious first application more reasonable for some students, but only if the second choice has been considered before the first decision arrives. Otherwise, ED II can become a response to disappointment rather than part of a coherent application strategy.
The best ED decisions combine several judgments that are easy to consider separately: how much the student wants the school, how competitive the application actually is, what is being sacrificed by applying there, and what the rest of the plan looks like if the answer is no.
For some students, that analysis leads directly back to the college they loved from the beginning. For others, it changes the name on the application.
Choosing an ED school is partly about identifying a first choice. It is also about deciding how much opportunity you are willing to spend on it.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
