I’m a little confused on how early decision works. If I want to apply to a prestigious school but let’s say my GPA and SAT scores aren’t up to the school’s standards, could I still have a good chance if I apply to early decision? Do a lot of students apply using Early decision? What’s schools have a high early decision acceptance rate? Thanks
If you’re not “up to the school’s standards” then ED probably won’t help much. If you’re in their range but not at the top of the range, then ED probably increases your chances slightly (depending on the school).
A lot of students use ED.
Early decision signals a high level of applicant’s interest at schools where that is a consideration. However, that may be more of a consideration if you are “overqualified” for the school.
Generally, early decision admission rates are higher, but that is at least partially due to the nature of the applicant pool, in that it often includes the recruited athletes and others with preferred characteristics (e.g. legacy applicants). Even if those can be separated out, the strength of the early decision and regular decision applicant pools may differ.
Obviously, colleges want you to think that there is an advantage to apply early decision (because you are committing to attend and giving up the ability to compare financial aid offers), but they do not make it easy to tell how much of an advantage there actually is.
Coming from someone who is currently attending a school that she applied to and got accepted from ED:
- If your scores aren't up to standard, then applying ED is not going to boost your chances. At my school, the rate of ED acceptances was significantly higher, but when I asked an admissions director about that when he gave an info session at my high school, he explained that it was because the students who applied ED were self-selected--that is, they already knew they had the stats to get in. So the answer to your first question is, no.
- Also be aware that it's harder to get financial aid if you apply ED, so you should only do that for a school you know that you can pay for in full.
- The most important thing to keep in mind about ED is that if you get accepted to the school, then you're committed to attending it. Enough so that you have to remove all other applications you may have sent in. That's why not many people apply, because it's a really big decision.
- One of the main benefits of applying ED is that you get notified of the school's decision earlier. If you still want to get it slightly earlier, you could always apply Early Action instead. (For comparison, ED decisions usually get released in December, while EA is in January/February and everything else is in April.) These are not binding, but there is still the drawback of having to turn in your application a little earlier. Also, you have to be careful because while lots of schools allow you to simply apply EA, there are other schools that will only allow you to apply EA for them; if you find out that you've selected one of these schools, you'll have to turn all your other EA apps into regular decision.
I hope all that was clear and helped you understand the process better!
If you are very interested, I might recommend a book called “The Early Admissions Game”. Written by two Harvard Professors and one Wesleyan Admissions Dean, it is very well researched and data-driven and they had access to data that was not publicly available.
I found it among the most useful books of the many I (continue to) read on the subject of admissions, and it covers the entire process to some degree.
If you want "Postmodern’s Summary of the Book’s Conclusions"™:
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In most cases, applying Early Decision provides a significant benefit to aspiring applicants to highly competitive schools.
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However, overall the process benefits the schools more than the student, particularly WRT financial aid
Hope this helps.
Thank you! I’ll have to check that book out!