[Podcast] What is the difference between Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular Decision?

Sheila Akbar 0:00
But yeah, it is a single rose that you can’t forgive. Hey folks, we are back. I’ve missed you. I’ve heard from so many listeners over the last couple of months asking me when we’re gonna restart the podcast. And here we are at the beginning of a new school year, a new admissions season with a slightly new format. Each week, my colleague Mackenzie is gonna come to me with the burning question from the internet. And I’m gonna do my best to answer that question and all of her follow-ups. So take a listen.

McKenzie Carver 0:51
The burning question at this time of year is what is the difference between early action, early decision, and regular decision?

Sheila Akbar 1:01
Oh, how much time you got. This is really confusing, actually. And sometimes I guess I’ve been swimming in these acronyms for so long that I get surprised when somebody is like, wait, which one is that? And how do we do this? There are a couple that you didn’t even mention. I don’t know if we want to go there, but we have single choice early action, SCEA. We have restricted early action, REA. We have ED1, we also have ED2. We have so many permutations. So we’ll just start with the basics. Regular decision is the early January deadline. It’s what we all used to think about as a college deadline, right? And it used to be January 1st, but then colleges got hip to the fact that nobody wants to turn anything in on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, and schools are closed. So if someone needs help, there’s like no one to help them. So now it’s usually like January 5th or whatever the Monday is after we all come back from that winter break. That’s regular decision. Students file their applications by that date, and they’ll hear back from colleges usually by March, right? By the end of March, we have all our decisions back. There are no special preferences given to that pool of applicants. The responses that you could get are accepted, which we’re of course all hoping for, denied, or waitlisted. I’m sure we’ll have a separate conversation about the wait list at some point. So that’s regular decision. And then the majority of students are going to do regular decision, and that’s fine. Gives you a lot more time to kind of work on applications. A lot of students will do early decision or early action. Early decision is binding, which means if you get in, you have committed to go. And there are some loopholes to get out of this. The biggest one is financial. If you can show that your family can’t afford to send you to this school, even with whatever financial aid the school is offering you, they will let you out of that commitment. But the binding nature of it does scare a lot of people away. But with early decision, usually you will have to apply by November 1st. And they will tell you within the first two weeks of December if you’ve gotten it. So it’s early in two senses: earlier deadline, earlier notification. And the result you can get from early decision is accepted, which of course, again, we’re all hoping for. You could get denied, you could get deferred into the regular pool, which means they’re just gonna pretend you submitted with regular decision, they’re gonna look at your application all over again with everyone else who did regular decision, and then you get a decision back in March.

McKenzie Carver 3:59
In those cases, if you’re deferred early decision, is it still binding?

Sheila Akbar 4:04
It is not. You are then released from the binding agreement of that if you get deferred.

McKenzie Carver 4:10
Okay.

Sheila Akbar 4:11
Now, the thing to know about early decision is that it does in the vast majority of schools increase your chances of acceptance. And I mean you still have to put in a really good application that is competitive and you know, all of the things for that school. But a lot of schools are trying to fill their classes. Some schools, 50% of their class comes in through early decision. And that just helps the college kind of manage their expectations about how many more students do we need, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a real advantage to applying early decision. There are a few exceptions to that rule because early decision is often when recruited athletes apply and they have kind of an agreement with a coach that they’re definitely getting in. It’s when the children of big donors apply. It’s when the children of legacies, or the children are called legacies, the children of former alum apply. And those groups of people, again, depending on the school, tend to get special preference. So that boosts an acceptance rate that might disguise something that is actually quite a selective situation. So that’s early decision.

McKenzie Carver 5:27
One more question on early decision.

Sheila Akbar 5:29
Yes.

McKenzie Carver 5:30
Are you allowed to apply to other schools, regular decision or early action if you are submitting an early decision application?

Sheila Akbar 5:38
This is a great question. This is where it gets complicated because it is a little bit like a puzzle you got to put together. You can only do early decision at one school at a time. And I did mention there’s early decision two. So that early decision one happens in November, early decision two happens alongside the regular deadlines, like in January. But you’d only be doing one school at a time, right? So like your favorite school that you are the best fit for and that is the best fit for you, that’s your early decision school. They give you a notification. If you get deferred or rejected, you can do an ED two to some other school, not the same one, right? And not every school offers ED2. But yeah, it is a single rose that you get to give. And you can’t do it at multiple schools. There is an agreement that the student, the parent, the college counselor at the high school will have to sign, acknowledging the binding nature and the exclusive nature of early decision. And you really do not want to go back on that unless you absolutely have to. We talked about some of those loopholes. Anything else on early decision before I move on? That answered the question. Right. I mean, it is super nuanced. I’m sure there are like 50 million more questions we could talk about with that. But I want to get to early action, which is similarly early. Usually the deadlines are November 1st, sometimes November 15th. But it’s not binding. And early action is really common at like big public schools. And you do get a little bit of a benefit, like the acceptance rates are higher, not quite as much of a boost as an early decision. But some schools only have early decision or early actions. Very rare that you’re gonna find both options at one school. So usually what happens is students will choose their favorite ED school, and then they’ll apply to a number of EAs as well. And they are just getting a whole bunch of applications done by November 1st. Now, with early action, usually you hear back. It used to be you hear back in December. A lot of schools now have moved their notification dates. And this is, I feel like, puts kids in a not great situation. But they’ve moved their notification dates to late January, early February. So it’s still earlier than regular decision, but it’s not so early that you can’t file your regular decision applications because you’ll have right. So you’ll know if you got an early decision or not by the regular decision deadline, but you won’t know if you got an early action or not anywhere in most cases nowadays, until after the deadline. So you’ll still have to write all of those regular decision applications. And I talk to families all the time who are like, well, we’ll wait to decide where we’re gonna apply once we hear back from the ED school. And I’m like, that you might not hear back till December 17th. And then you’re gonna choose your school list and then you’re gonna write all those essays. Like, I don’t think that’s a great idea. You know, that’s to do all of that work nursing the heartbreak of not getting into your ED school. That’s not good, right? So prior planning is the key, and that’s why you kind of need to know all of these different applications. I’ll just say a little bit about restricted or single choice early action. This is early action in the sense that it’s early, you hear back early, it’s not binding, but it’s an early action you can only do at one school. And some schools have this, like Harvard has a restricted early action. Stanford also has it. There are going to be restrictions around it. So, for example, Harvard has restricted early action, and they’ve said you can’t do ED anywhere if you’re gonna do restricted early action at Harvard, but you can do EA only at public institutions. Interesting. So you kind of have to know the details of the policy to understand where else you can apply early if you wanted to take advantage of that.

McKenzie Carver 9:55
Right.

Sheila Akbar 9:56
And there are like other restrictions. Stanford is like you can EA to public universities, unless it’s a private university that you have to apply early action in order to be considered for scholarships. Yeah. So it gets really in the weeds, right? And so you kind of have to know you have to dig into those policies and then like Tetris this whole thing together.

McKenzie Carver 10:22
Yeah. Just from my own curiosity, what is the benefit to Harvard for putting in those restrictions?

Sheila Akbar 10:34
Yeah, and it’s not just Harvard, it’s for any school that would use any of these plans. They’re trying to manage their yield. And since COVID, let me define yield for you. Yield is, let’s say they accept 100 people, only maybe 70 people are gonna say, yes, I’m coming to your school. Their yield is 70%, right? Now, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, they have very high yields. These are the schools everybody wants to go to, right? But if you start thinking about schools that maybe not everybody is banging down the door to get into, but are still really good schools, their yield numbers are lower. And just a percentage point in yield changes significantly how the university has to respond, right? If more people accept their offer of acceptance, all of a sudden they have maybe too many students. Maybe they don’t have enough room in their dorms, maybe they don’t have enough instructors to teach the freshman writing seminar, maybe they don’t have enough food in the dining hall. I don’t know, right? Like it really has an impact, right? And then on the flip side, if they don’t get the right number of acceptances, they’re gonna start pulling from their wait list to make sure they have a full class to support the faculty load that they have to make sure that they have, you know, the operating budget that they need from tuition from these incoming students, right? And they don’t have to cut classes or sell a building or whatever they might need to do to raise money, right? So yield is really important and it used to be pretty predictable. I mean, they have statisticians who are calculating this all the time and using all sorts of data to figure this out, but since COVID, and test optional, like a wrench has just been thrown in all of these previously pretty stable assumptions. And so colleges are trying to manage their yield by just getting the students in earlier and snapping them up, you know, and then early decision obviously is a way to do that because then the student is pretty much guaranteed to come. But even early action students are more likely, you would think, to come. So they’re trying to manage their yield by doing this. The other thing they’re trying to do is manage the application reading load. Right when test optional became widely applicable, and still over 90% of schools are test optional, lots of students were like, yeah, I’ll throw an application into Harvard, I’ll throw an application into wherever. And the numbers of applications going to these, like, let’s say top hundred colleges on the US news list have just skyrocketed, you know, three, four times as many applications as they used to get. You’re seeing schools that are getting over 60,000, 70,000 applications for 1600 spots. Yeah. Right. And that changes how an admissions office has to work and the number of readers they need and how are they being selective and you know, all of these things. So these early plans, especially early decision, are really getting students to be judicious about where they’re putting in an application, right? And controlling application numbers. And that’s where some of these restrictions come in as well. You really need to be thoughtful. This is part of building a college list, but it’s also part of your strategy. Yeah. Right. Like which are the schools that you’re gonna apply to early? And part of this also for me is like what essays lend themselves to each other? Right. And also manage the workload. Can we do this in August? Or do we wanna like try to slog through this in November and December when school is really in full swing and it’s winter and everybody’s sad, you know, all that stuff, right? And like we’re so busy. So you know, those are the other things that I’m thinking about too for a student. Like, you gotta choose when you want to do this kind of work. And like, you know, do you need the bump of EA at this school? Or is it a school that because of whatever your profile is, is a target or a likely school for you? And maybe you leave it for regular decision just to manage your workload a little bit better. Or is this essay almost exactly the same essay that this other school is asking for? Well, let’s just get it done. Because it’s not gonna take you too much effort to re-rearrange or tailor this essay for that other school, right? So there are a lot of variables and a lot of inputs to making that decision. I tend to call it positioning. How are we gonna position you? Right. And that’s not just what are you saying about yourself. It’s what are the schools that are gonna take priority? Because that’s the audience that you’re training your whole application towards. And that has to do with are you doing early decision, are you doing early action? Like when are you, you know?

McKenzie Carver 15:50
This is really why families should hire an expert.

Sheila Akbar 15:52
I mean, yes.

Sheila Akbar 15:55
And I think, yeah, it’s definitely why people benefit from working with somebody who knows these things. You don’t have to learn them from scratch or be surprised by some restriction you didn’t know was there. I think a lot about families who don’t have access to somebody who either has the time to tell them. I mean, most schools have a college counselor, but some of them are more counselors than college counselors, and they might not know all the details or be familiar with some of these things because maybe most of the students in that school don’t apply to colleges early action, early decision. Or they just don’t have time because they’ve got 800 kids that they got to get through this process. And so, like talking through the nuance of this is very difficult. I think really, yes, people should lean on experts in the field. You know, we’ve got this channel, we’ve got the podcast, we’ve got blogs, we’ve got free webinars around this, and lots of other places offer that kind of free advice. So I really think people should take advantage of that. I do think AI is playing a role in how people are figuring this out too, but AI can be wrong and doesn’t necessarily know the ins and outs of your student. So a real human, I think, is always going to be better, but it can get you part of the way there. But I think at the end of the day, what it shows me is that the system was not built to take care of students, no, it was built to take care of the colleges and their needs, right? And that can be a very disheartening perspective for a parent or a student to hear, but I think it can also be very empowering, yeah, right? Because it’s like, oh, if this is not about me, this is not about me at all. I should be myself and do what’s right for me because they’re not looking out for me. No, someone’s got it, yeah. I’ve got to look out for myself, right?