Research by Chris Avery, Andrew Fairbanks and Richard Zeckhauser showed that early admissions (EA) programs give applicants a boost in college admissions. Improved chances of admissions might reflect a better applicant pool and not an advantage built into the early admissions process. But Avery et al controlled for this and still found that EA gives applicants an advantage.
EA applicants are constrained in their choices should they actually be admitted. To attract them, colleges have to offer lower standards for acceptance for early admission than for regular applicants who have more freedom of choice. Done in isolation, EA might benefit a college, as it steals above average students from its competitors. But if one college is employing EA, so must others, to recapture some of those students they lost. When all colleges use EA, the average quality of the student pool in each college may actually decline, because slots are taken up by the lower quality early applicants who crowd out high quality regular applicants. A Prisoners’ Dilemma.
There are other effects. Early applicants get worse deals on financial aid as they cannot play off multiple offers. So, early admission will attract wealthy students. They will also be more clued into the system. There are impacts on diversity.
But one or two colleges cannot change the equilibrium on their own. All have to give it up. Harvard and Princeton tried to drop EA but most other colleges did not. After all, the quality of Yale etc EA applicants goes up as Harvard and Princeton drop their programs. So it all fell apart and now both Princeton and Harvard have reinstated EA. A Harvard Dean says:
“We looked carefully at trends in Harvard admissions these past years and saw that many highly talented students, including some of the best-prepared low-income and underrepresented minority students, were choosing programs with an early-action option, and therefore were missing out on the opportunity to consider Harvard.”
EA can impact all sorts of settings. A player can try to cream skim before competitors notice. And so NU student Kota Saito heads off to Caltech without even going on the job market. I know MEDS has dome something similar in the past. Will other universities start doing this sort of thing too?
Cheap Talk 
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February 24, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Lones Smith
If Harvard is doing the right thing, then Harvard is not the #1 school it claims to be. In an earlier version of our College Admissions paper,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1358343
Hector and Greg and I noted that early admissions converts a simultaneous portfolio choice into a sequential one. As Hector and I proved in our Simultaneous Search paper, this encourages students to make riskier portfolio choices. Namely, if Harvard is indeed #1, students who normally would not apply to Harvard will now do so for early admissions. In general, while lesser schools can indeed poach from the best one, the best one only worsens its applicant pool with an early admissions program.
So Harvard’s dean thinks it is not #1.
February 25, 2011 at 10:49 am
Sandeep Baliga
Thanks, Lones. I always thought Yale was number one for undergrads…so Harvard must be poaching from Yale? By your logic, Yale should drop EA…
February 24, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Bram
Do these 2 factors make a difference:
1) Students get a benefit from EA because it reduces the amount of time they spend waiting for admissions results. Shouldn’t that offset the cost of being constrained to that college if accepted?
2) EA can signal that a student is a good fit for the school, allowing schools to admit more students know exactly what they want out of a school?
February 25, 2011 at 10:52 am
Sandeep Baliga
There is no claim that EA id bad for everyone. Certainly students admitted through EA who cannot make it via a regular admission might prefer the EA system especially of they will not get aid via either application as their parents are too wealthy.
And sure people disagree about whether the game is really a prisoner’s dilemma or not perhaps partly for reason you say. I think Avery and Levin have a paper putting “fit” into matching model.
February 25, 2011 at 11:13 am
Brooks
I haven’t gotten around to reading the paper yet, but it would seem that there is a substantial difference between what Harvard had (Early Action) and what constrains the choice of applicants (Early Decision).
February 26, 2011 at 10:26 am
Sandeep Baliga
Hi: I conflated EA and ED for the purposes of a short blog post. There are differences. Avery and Levin have a paper in AER studying EA and ED using a model where a student signals interest by doing EA:
http://www.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/research.htm
It’s worth a blog post in itself.
February 25, 2011 at 12:30 pm
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February 25, 2011 at 9:54 pm
Random Student
“EA applicants are constrained in their choices should they actually be admitted.”
Programs of this kind — where students admitted early are obligated to attend — are usually called “Early Decision”. “Early Action”, on the other hand, doesn’t tie the hands of applicants at all; it’s literally a parallel admissions track.
Before it was eliminated, Harvard’s program was “Early Action”, albeit with a twist: you couldn’t apply to any other schools early if you applied to Harvard. But you could still apply during the regular admissions season, and you were under no obligation to attend Harvard if you were admitted. (In fact, I applied to Harvard early action, was admitted, and ultimately didn’t go — though this was mainly for financial reasons.)
I suppose the “early exclusivity” requirement here made some difference, but in general it’s hard to see what the underlying economic forces are when students’ decisions are either completely unconstrained (as in most EA programs) or only slightly constrained (as in Harvard’s old program). The analysis for “ED” programs doesn’t carry over.
February 25, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Random Student
By the way, one interesting fact about ED programs is that you can generally back out if you claim you’re financially unable to attend. Unless your claim is obviously false (you’re a millionaire, or received a full ride from the school), the admissions office is not inclined to argue with you. And in the worse case, you can always make noise and threaten a lawsuit, and they will instantly relent.
Thus the ED application process doesn’t *really* impose much of a constraint on students, except that they can only apply one place early. Yet it seems that people act as if the “commitment” is really a serious issue. Is this because they don’t know they can back out (after all, they only go through this process once), or because they’re too worried to go through with it? Or because they believe it would be dishonest to commit with the intent of possibly reneging? (I understand this point of view, but think it is silly; as you point out, Early Decision is an obvious Prisoner’s Dilemma, one that it is welfare-maximizing to subvert).
March 7, 2011 at 12:31 am
Danny
What binds the people who apply early decision? It seems like a contract that should be pretty easy to break. Can’t Harvard still try to poach the students that accepted early decision to Yale/Princeton/etc after they have committed? They can offer more scholarships to offset any deposits that students have made at the early decision schools.
March 23, 2021 at 5:30 am
Colver Long
Will definetely be telling my friends about this! Thanks for the tips
April 28, 2021 at 8:13 am
Text Creator
Great post! So happy I found this, thank you.