Early Decision · Class of 2031
Two things sit on this page. What is actually happening in this cycle, reported as it happens. And an audit of the numbers everyone quotes at you, several of which cannot be traced to a source at all.
Counts of individual anonymous reports, not institutional disclosures. We publish share of reported outcomes, never an admit rate, because self-selected reporters are not a denominator. That distinction is the reason this data is worth anything.
We went looking for the primary source behind each of these. Here is what we found.
This is repeated everywhere and attributed to the foundational study on early admissions. We read that study's own abstract. It says early applicants are significantly more likely to be admitted with similar qualifications, across fourteen colleges. It contains no SAT-point equivalent and no multiplier. The 100-point framing appears to have been added by a later paraphrase and then repeated until it sounded like a finding.
Avery, Fairbanks & Zeckhauser, "What Worms the Early Bird", Harvard Kennedy School, 2001; book edition 2003.
Per-school multiplier tables circulate widely. The ones we could find trace back to a single admissions-consulting content site. Several of the underlying admit rates cannot be verified at all, because the schools stopped publishing them. Penn has withheld its exact ED acceptance rate since 2022. Harvard released no rate or applicant count for its most recent early round. Stanford and Northwestern likewise do not publish exact figures.
Verified against The Daily Pennsylvanian, The Harvard Crimson, and school admissions releases, Dec 2025.
The reasoning sounds fine: a smaller, weaker leftover pool. But no school publishes ED I and ED II admit rates separately, so there is no public data to test it against. Vanderbilt, one of the more transparent schools on early admissions, reports the two rounds combined and nothing else: 7,727 applications and an 11.9 percent admit rate for the Class of 2030.
Vanderbilt Office of Undergraduate Admissions, Feb 2026.
This is the claim people treat as soft, and it is the best-evidenced one in the whole space. Private-school students apply ED at roughly three and a half times the rate of public-school students. Among students scoring at the ninetieth percentile, 29 percent from families above $250,000 applied early, against 16 percent from families below $50,000. Two named studies, not vibes.
Education Reform Now (Murphy), 2022; Bussey et al., 2021.
Nobody can tell you, because the number does not exist. We could not find a published figure, for any school, in any recent cycle, for what share of deferred applicants are later admitted in the regular round. What is published is how often schools defer rather than deny, and it varies enormously: Harvard defers about 83 percent of its non-admits and MIT about 64, while Yale is down to 19 and Brown to 17. Georgetown and USC defer everyone they do not admit. Duke, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Middlebury and Stanford mostly deny outright.
Deferral rates compiled from Common Data Set filings, Class of 2028.
The strongest argument for applying early has nothing to do with a boost multiplier. It is that at many selective colleges the majority of seats are committed before the regular round opens.
| College | Share of class filled early | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Middlebury | 69% | |
| Tulane | 68% | Up from 26% when its ED plan launched in 2017 |
| Bates | 67% | |
| Grinnell | 67% | |
| Emory | 66% | |
| WashU | 62% | Up from 35% in 2016 |
| Northwestern | >50% | School's own published figure |
| Vanderbilt | ~50% | |
| Duke | 40% | Down from 54% the previous year |
Compiled from school disclosures and reporting, 2022 to 2026. Where a school publishes its own figure we use that.
If you applied early this cycle, report your result. It takes under a minute, it is anonymous, and it is what makes the December page on this site exist at all.
If you were deferred, come back and say so again in February when nothing has happened. The waiting is the part nobody records.