The Early Decision Option in College Admission and Its Impact on Student Diversity

Abstract

Colleges and universities that adopt early decision (ED) as an admission practice can generate additional resources by attracting wealthier students who make binding commitments to attend and forgo shopping for competing aid offers. An unanswered question is whether the resources generated from price discrimination are used by schools during the regular admission process to attract more diverse students. Using a sample of private national universities and liberal arts colleges, we model the choice to adopt an ED program and its impact on students' racial and geographic diversity. We find that schools facing more competition for students are more likely to adopt an ED program. The overall heterogeneity of students is lower for schools that adopt ED, and heterogeneity decreases as schools enroll larger percentages of students through ED. Higher ED enrollment percentages appear to strongly and negatively affect Asian American and Hispanic students and positively affect white students.

Do college admissions criteria matter? Evidence from discretionary vs. grade-based admission policies

“…Existing studies on college admissions criteria have focused on evaluating the impact of affirmative action practices on the composition of the entering class (Hinrichs 2012;Blume and Long 2014), student outcomes (Cortes 2010;Alon and Malamud 2014), and student behavior (Grau 2018), the impact of early decision programs on the composition of the entering class (Antecol and Smith 2012), likelihood of being admitted (Avery and Levin 2010), and college performance (Jensen and Wu 2010), the role of admissions guarantees in influencing academic fit (academic "undermatching" or "overmatching") (Black et al 2015;Cortes and Lincove 2018) and the composition of applicants and enrollees (Long and Tienda 2010;Niu and Tienda 2010), as well as the impact of gaining or losing access to a selective college induced by changes in admissions rules on students' graduation and subsequent labor market outcomes (Black et al forthcoming). Only a handful of studies have attempted to evaluate the impact of holistic college admissions practices.…”