INTERESTING FACTS
from The Early Admissions Game
by Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser

• Almost all of the most selective colleges, and a great percentage of selective ones, offer an early application program. Most offer Early Decision, which requires students to commit to enroll if admitted.
  
  
• More than half of current Harvard students are admitted early.
  
  
• A broad geographic survey of 3000 of the most talented high school students in the U.S. found that 81% of the students who enrolled at an Ivy League college, MIT, or Stanford had applied early to some college.
  
  
• Many colleges, including Brown and Harvard, state flatly that applying early provides no advantage in admissions chances. Yet, an analysis of two extensive data sets indicates evidence that applying early to a highly selective college improves an applicant's chance of admission by an amount equal to a 100 point increase in SAT score.
  
  
• Early applicants receive a statistically significant gain in admissions chances at every Ivy League college. The effect is most pronounced at Princeton, where applying early has approximately the same effect as an increase of 200 points in SAT. This effect holds true at even the most selective colleges, including Brown and Harvard.
  
  
• Early Decision is designed for students who are certain of a most-preferred college. Yet, given the advantage it confers, strategic students may apply Early Decision without a clear first choice, or to other than their first choice.
  
  
• More than half the students interviewed recommended that a student who is not certain of a first-choice college should still apply Early Decision to enhance their chance of admission.
  
  
• Interviews with students at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Yale indicate that 37% of Early Decision applicants did not have a strong first-choice college when they applied.
  
  
• The early application system has evolved in recent years as colleges seek to secure a competitive advantage. For example, Stanford adopted Early Decision in 1995-1996, and Princeton and Yale switched from Early Action to Early Decision that same year. Yale has now announced it will move back to nonbonding Early Action for 2003-04. Most recently, Harvard has announced a return to its original early admissions policy, requiring that early action applicants not apply early elsewhere.
  
  
• However early applications systems change, colleges will have an incentive to lock in students early by giving them an admissions advantage.