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Early decision ( ED) or early acceptance is a type of early admission used in college admissions in the United States for admitting freshman to undergraduate programs. It is used to indicate to the university or college that the candidate considers that institution to be their top choice through a binding commitment to enroll; in other words, if offered admission under an ED program, and the financial aid offered by the school is acceptable, the candidate must enroll at that institution and withdraw all applications to other institutions. Applying early decision brings a greater statistical chance of being accepted.
Candidates applying early decision typically submit their applications mid-October to early November of their senior year of high school and receive a decision around mid-December. In contrast, students applying regular decision typically must submit their applications by January 1 and receive their admissions decision by April 1. Students can know sooner where they will attend, removing uncertainty and the need for multiple applications and the associated costs.
Typically, a candidate who has applied early decision can receive one of three outcomes in December. They may be admitted (bound to attend the school which admitted them), rejected (they will not be able to attend the school), or deferred (they will be reconsidered for admission with the second round of early decision applications or with the regular decision pool and notified later with their final decision). Generally, when an applicant is deferred, they are released from their binding commitment.
Many colleges now offer a second early decision plan: early decision II ( ED II). The application typically due in late December to early January and decision in mid-February. Although the application deadline of early January is the same as for regular decision, the early decision II application is a binding commitment, with the benefits and drawbacks to the applicant and the college being similar to early decision I in most respects. The early decision II timeline is designed to allow students to apply to a new "first choice" school after they find out in mid- to late December they have been unsuccessful in their early decision or early action application to their original first choice, or to allow students that did not apply early decision I to apply under an early decision plan. It is intended as another chance for applicants to show commitment, and another tool for the school to protect its admission yield.
A student who backs out for other reasons may be "blacklisted" by the early decision college, which may contact the student's high school guidance office, and prevent it from sending transcripts to other colleges, and high schools generally comply with such requests. In addition, the jilted college may contact other colleges about the withdrawal, and the other colleges would likely revoke their offers of acceptance as well.
Critics of the program argue that binding an applicant, especially one that is typically seventeen or eighteen years old, to a single institution is unnecessarily restrictive.
A contrasting view is that by applying earlier in the year, the accepted ED students have "first crack at the money," particularly at competitive schools without large endowments. In any case, if a highly desirable ED admittee may withdraw because of financial concerns, the college "may pull out all the stops" to prevent this, and that the possibility of backing out for financial reasons gives an applicant some form of negotiating leverage. Universities with very large endowments may be unique in their ability to provide aid equally generously to students regardless of their application plan.
Some college counselors speculate that ED can serve to mitigate the problem of students failing to Matriculation to a particular school in favor of a "superior" one. For example, one college might only admit a candidate deemed qualified for another, 'superior' college under ED, for in regular decision, should that student be admitted to the 'superior' competitor, that student would be unlikely to attend the college that originally offered the ED admission.
In 2009, the average early acceptance rate according to one estimate was 15% greater than regular decision applicants. There is less agreement, however, whether it will help a borderline student win acceptance to a competitive college. Early decision candidates tend to have stronger educational credentials than regular decision candidates, and as a result, these candidates would have been admitted whether they applied by early or regular methods, and therefore the greater statistical likelihood of acceptance may have been explained by membership in the stronger applicant pool. But the commitment of an early decision application demonstrated by a borderline student can still be beneficial; "colleges really want qualified students who want them" and are more likely to offer acceptances to students ready to make a full commitment.
Most institutions include data on the number of ED applicants and ED admits in their annual Common Data Set (a few institutions do not release a Common Data Set at all), and trends for an individual institution can be readily complied. At the most competitive schools, the number of ED applicants has increased at a more rapid pace than regular decision applicants. Although the ED admit rate has declined at these schools in recent years, the absolute number of ED admits has managed to increase while the absolute number of regular decision admits has fallen rapidly and all the admit rates have also fallen.
A few schools have seen ED applicants more than double in the 2012–2019 period, including Rice University (2,628 ED apps in 2019–20 compared to 1,230 ED apps in 2012–13), Emory, NYU (13,842 ED I and ED II apps in 2019–20; 5,778 in 2012–13), and Boston University (4,700 ED I and ED II apps in 2019–20; 1,069 in 2012–13). The number of ED admits has also doubled at NYU and Boston University over this period, and although the increase of ED admits at other schools has been less dramatic, that increase has nonetheless reduced the number of RD admits meaningfully because half the class or more is now being filled by ED admits. At WashU and NYU, about 60% of the class is now taken up at the ED stage.
In recent years, there has been a marked trend in the number of ED applicants, and in the proportion of the class being admitted via the ED process. As of 2019–20, almost every highly selective college (where admission rates are below 25%) admits more students through ED than it did a decade ago, but among them, there has been a remarkable shift in the admission strategy of a few schools resulting in as much as 60% of the class being selected from the ED pool compared to 30–35% only a few years ago.
A similar trend exists across the most competitive liberal arts colleges in early decision application and admission numbers, with over 50% of the class being filled at these schools from ED admits compared to only about 44% in 2012–13. Notably, the absolute number of ED admits has increased, even though the number of RD admits, the RD admit rate, the ED admit rate and the overall admit rate have all gone down.
| +Admission statistics for early decision at US research universities with admit rate averaging <25% in Fall 2019–2022 16 universities: Columbia, Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Rice, WashU, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, NYU, Boston University (data from Common Data Set or school publications) !Freshman Year !ED Apps (a) !ED Admits (b) !ED Admit Rate (b/a) !Total Enrollment (c) !Enrollment filled by ED Admits (b/c) !Total Apps (d) !Total Admits (e) !Overall Admit Rate (e/d) !RD Apps (d-a) !RD Admits (e-b) !RD Admit Rate (e-b)/(d-a) | |||||||||||
| 2012–13 | 38,840 | 11,471 | 29.5% | 32,373 | 35.4% | 438,455 | 90,978 | 20.7% | 399,615 | 79,507 | 19.9% |
| 2013–14 | 41,668 | 11,965 | 28.7% | 32,246 | 37.1% | 461,805 | 89,149 | 19.3% | 420,137 | 77,184 | 18.4% |
| 2014–15 | 44,535 | 12,887 | 28.9% | 33,325 | 38.7% | 489,518 | 90,153 | 18.4% | 444,983 | 77,266 | 17.4% |
| 2015–16 | 48,104 | 13,281 | 27.6% | 33,150 | 40.1% | 506,421 | 89,428 | 17.7% | 458,978 | 76,363 | 16.6% |
| 2016–17 | 51,466 | 14,003 | 27.2% | 33,546 | 41.7% | 527,239 | 88,129 | 16.7% | 476,490 | 74,373 | 15.6% |
| 2017–18 | 55,128 | 14,800 | 26.8% | 33,702 | 43.9% | 545,256 | 84,015 | 15.4% | 490,857 | 69,471 | 14.2% |
| 2018–19 | 62,598 | 16,328 | 26.1% | 33,843 | 48.2% | 595,711 | 77,476 | 13.0% | 533,482 | 61,287 | 11.5% |
| 2019–20 | 71,776 | 16,787 | 23.4% | 32,899 | 51.0% | 624,089 | 72,266 | 11.6% | 552,567 | 55,566 | 10.1% |
| 2020–21 | 72,108 | 17,681 | 24.5% | 33,495 | 52.8% | 608,127 | 81,025 | 13.3% | 536,019 | 63,344 | 11.8% |
| 2021–22 | 90,193 | 18,963 | 21.0% | 36,013 | 52.7% | 775,015 | 74,468 | 9.6% | 684,823 | 55,505 | 8.1% |
| 2022–23 | 96,382 | 18.640 | 19.3% | 34,197 | 54.5% | 799,027 | 69,704 | 8.7% | 702,645 | 51,064 | 7.3% |
| 2023–24 | 103,411 | 18.818 | 18.2% | 33,965 | 55.4% | 807,144 | 64,815 | 8.0% | 703,733 | 45,997 | 6.5% |
| 2024–25 est | 106,650 | 18.872 | 17.7% | 34,216 | 55.2% | 831,680 | 63,369 | 7.6% | 725,030 | 44,497 | 6.1% |
| +Admission statistics for early decision at US liberal arts colleges with admit rate averaging <25% in Fall 2019–2022 23 liberal arts colleges: Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Bates, Colby, Amherst, Williams, Barnard, Harvey Mudd, Colorado College, Middlebury, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Colgate, Vassar, Haverford, Carleton, Davidson, Wellesley, Washington & Lee, Grinnell
(data from Common Data Set or school publications)
!Freshman | |||||||||||
| 2012–13 | 13,018 | 4,988 | 38.3% | 11,275 | 44.2% | 137,864 | 29,517 | 21.4% | 124,846 | 24,529 | 19.6% |
| 2013–14 | 13,908 | 5,175 | 37.2% | 11,299 | 45.8% | 141,246 | 28,820 | 20.4% | 127,338 | 23,645 | 18.6% |
| 2014–15 | 14,214 | 5,117 | 36.0% | 11,387 | 44.9% | 143,625 | 29,346 | 20.4% | 129,411 | 24,229 | 18.7% |
| 2015–16 | 15,233 | 5,355 | 35.2% | 11,493 | 46.6% | 153,964 | 29,853 | 19.4% | 138,731 | 24,498 | 17.7% |
| 2016–17 | 15,100 | 5,622 | 37.2% | 11,467 | 49.0% | 157,988 | 29,188 | 18.5% | 142,888 | 23,566 | 16.5% |
| 2017–18 | 16,247 | 5,850 | 36.0% | 11,540 | 50.7% | 166,967 | 29,168 | 17.5% | 150,720 | 23,318 | 15.5% |
| 2018–19 | 17,496 | 5,972 | 34.1% | 11,808 | 50.6% | 184,066 | 29,585 | 16.1% | 166,570 | 23,613 | 14.2% |
| 2019–20 | 18,146 | 6,058 | 33.4% | 11,641 | 52.0% | 195,740 | 28,613 | 14.6% | 177,594 | 22,555 | 12.7% |
| 2020–21 | 17,983 | 6,217 | 34.6% | 11,006 | 56.5% | 188,271 | 30,660 | 16.3% | 170,288 | 24,443 | 14.4% |
| 2021–22 | 19,138 | 6,592 | 34.4% | 12,822 | 51.4% | 226,249 | 29,888 | 13.2% | 207,111 | 23,296 | 11.2% |
| 2022–23 | 21,014 | 6,647 | 31.6% | 11,976 | 55.5% | 239,926 | 28,039 | 11.7% | 218,912 | 21,392 | 9.8% |
| 2023–24 | 23,423 | 6,568 | 28.0% | 11,834 | 55.5% | 237,730 | 28,403 | 11.9% | 214,307 | 21,835 | 10.2% |
| 2024–25 est | 24,784 | 6,621 | 26.7% | 11,865 | 55.8% | 250,516 | 29,761 | 11.9% | 225,732 | 23,140 | 10.3% |
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