It’s a big choice. Students can only do so at one college and must promise to attend if accepted, before learning what the school’s financial aid offer will be. That means there’s at least a chance an applicant will pay the full cost, which at Duke is $86,886 for the 2024-25 year. Students couldn’t be legally obligated to attend if they couldn’t afford it, but by the time they heard the news, they would have already had to withdraw their other applications.
While full tuition isn’t a foregone conclusion, as it wouldn’t be for Ivy’s family, the rewards are considerable. This year, just over 54,000 high school students competed to be one of 1,750 members of Duke’s new class. The 6,000 applicants who applied in the first decision round were three times more likely to be admitted than the 48,000 subsequent applicants.
Until recently, early decision was a narrow path — an exception governed, like the rest of this annual academic dating season, by a set of mandatory practices outlined by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which is made up of agents college admissions and high school counselors. These rules stipulated, for example, that colleges could not recruit a student already committed to another school or actively encourage someone to transfer. Basically, the rules said colleges had to give students until May 1 to decide between offers (noting early decision, which begins and ends in the fall, as a “recognized exception”).
The Justice Department believed these rules ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits powerful industries from colluding to restrict competition. CNAC agreed to a regulation requiring the organization to “promptly abolish” several of the rules and downgrade the rest to voluntary guidelines. Now, if they chose, universities were allowed to lure students with special offers or perks, aggressively poach students from other schools, and upend the traditional admissions calendar.
At this point, there was nothing stopping colleges from early decision, a strategy that allows them to admit students earlier without making a specific financial aid commitment. Of the 735 first-year students who Middlebury College registered last year, for example, 516 were admitted by binding advance decision. Some schools have a second round of early decision, and even what amounts to an unofficial third round, as well as an array of other application pathways, each with their own terms and conditions.
