accept you, you are done.
Unsurprisingly, early decision application processes have become widespread across top universities because they enable the university to guarantee a pool of applicants who will definitely attend their school. Admitting a student from the early decision pool gives a university a close-to 100% yield rate over this pool of applicants.
Now—guess which Ivy League universities don't offer early decision processes? Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They will say all kinds of things—like they want to give talented students options—but in reality, they don't offer the early decision process because they don't need to. They know that generally speaking, when they admit a student, the student will be so over the moon they've been admitted that they will usually accept with a very high probability. Princeton may lose some students to Harvard, but generally speaking, at this highest of tiers, these universities back themselves as the premium choice for most people applying. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton offer early action instead, which is a way for candidates to apply earlier than the regular round (similarly about November 1 of your last high school year) but you are not forced to go to the school and you can apply to other universities in the regular round.
This is the option I chose back in November 2012. I applied and was accepted early to Harvard, then applied in the regular round to many more schools such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and others. Ultimately, after doing the work to apply to many other universities and getting in, I still chose Harvard. They were right in offering early action, because in the end, it was hard to say no to Harvard.
The other Ivy League schools—the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth—all offer early decision processes. These are great schools, of course, but given it's highly likely the students applying to their school are also applying to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton (HYP), they want to know that in choosing to applying to them early, you are committed—just like that lover I spoke about earlier—and that they won't lose you to HYP or Stanford or MIT later down the regular decision line.
Some schools have become even more sophisticated in their early application process. My favorite example is the University of Chicago. Beyond their hilarious and complicated essays (in my application year, one question was “So where is Waldo, really?” requiring a 500-word response), they have optimized their early application process and in doing so helped boost their ranking significantly. As I write this, University of Chicago is ranked sixth in North America for best undergraduate universities, ahead of many Ivy League schools.
University of Chicago2 offers several admissions rounds:
1 Early action (due November 2)
2 Early decision I (due November 2)
3 Early decision II (due January 4)
4 Regular decision (due January 4)
As of October 2020, UChicago has won 100 Nobel Prizes.3 A full 33 of these are Nobel Prizes for economics. Even my favorite Nobel Laureate, Gary Becker, who invented signaling, went there. It is no surprise that they have perfected the game theory and signaling of college admissions.
Both early decision rounds I and II are binding so if you apply in these rounds you are committing to go. Can you guess why UChicago does this? UChicago offers a binding and a nonbinding admissions option at each stage so they can filter you by level of seriousness. Twice!
If you are applying early action to UChicago, they know you are pretty organized and relatively interested in UChicago, but they also know that you're not interested enough to commit. This almost certainly means you like another early round university better or have higher hopes in the regular round. As a result, applying early action to UChicago is a death sentence. The admissions rate applying early action to UChicago is substantially lower than the early decision I rate.
The fun continues in the regular round. Most schools offer a purely regular admissions round where you can apply, get an offer, and then choose whether you want to go. But not the smart economists at UChicago. They want information from you—how much do you really like them? In the regular round, if you apply early decision II you have a dramatically higher admissions shot than applying regular decision. I recently saw a student with 15+ AP 5s get declined from UChicago regular decision. He was incredibly qualified, a very strong applicant, and UChicago knows that. But why is he not applying early decision II? Because he thinks he can do better and doesn't want to commit to UChicago. UChicago, by designing this system, knows this as well and denies that highly qualified applicant, keeping their high yield rate intact.
UChicago uses their complicated admissions options to filter the surges of qualified applicants into two buckets: qualified applicants who are prepared to declare their love to UChicago and want to commit, and qualified applicants who are not ready to sign on the dotted line. They decline the flighty prospective lovers in droves and focus on those who are ready to show their commitment.
Talk is cheap and action means everything, but UChicago hasn't finished having fun with you just yet. They even want to see whether you will profess your love for them in writing and test just how cheap your talk is. UChicago has one of the most complicated admissions essays of any of the major US universities. They ask two questions:
1 How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.They then require you to answer a second question. In the 2020–2021 admissions cycle, they ask you to choose at least one from the following essay choices:
2 Who does Sally sell her seashells to? How much wood can a woodchuck really chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Pick a favorite tongue twister (either originally in English or translated from another language) and consider a resolution to its conundrum using the method of your choice: math, philosophy, linguistics … it's all up to you (or your woodchuck).What can actually be divided by zero?The seven liberal arts in antiquity consisted of the Quadrivium—astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music—and the Trivium—rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Describe your own take on the Quadrivium or the Trivium. What do you think is essential for everyone to know?Subway maps, evolutionary trees, Lewis diagrams. Each of these schematics tells the relationships and stories of their component parts. Reimagine a map, diagram, or chart. If your work is largely or exclusively visual, please include a cartographer's key of at least 300 words to help us best understand your creation.“Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”—Eleanor Roosevelt. Misattribute a famous quote and explore the implications of doing so.Engineer George de Mestral got frustrated with burrs stuck to his dog's fur and applied the same mechanic to create Velcro. Scientist Percy Lebaron Spencer found a melted chocolate bar in his magnetron lab and discovered microwave cooking. Dye-works owner Jean Baptiste Jolly found his tablecloth clean after a kerosene lamp was knocked over on it, consequently shaping the future of dry cleaning. Describe a creative or interesting solution, and then find the problem that it solves.In the spirit of adventurous inquiry (and with the encouragement of one of our current students!) choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). Be original, creative, thought provoking. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun!
Many US universities offer supplementary essays as a way of enabling applicants to express why they like the university. The real reason they want to give you extra essay questions relates to the concept of the early decision round. They want you to “reveal your preferences” and show how seriously committed you are to the school.
If you write an essay to a college like Columbia about why you want to go to that school and you offer generic diatribes about New York, their core curriculum and the need for broad exploration, diverse classmates and other generic answers, they know you really haven't researched the school in detail. The really winning supplementary essays (which take a long time to write!) have to be so specific that what you can say