We are kind of numbers nerds. Seriously, we love pouring over data, especially the type of data that helps us prepare for next year’s college application season. By now, colleges have chosen their early decision admissions and many have shared that data online. We love to track this data and look for trends that might help our students make decisions in the future. This year was a bit of a mixed bag. So let’s look at the number for this year’s ED admissions.
Why do we care so much about ED?
First, some background. We are big believers in early decision applications. The majority of our clients apply ED and the vast majority of them get into their ED school. It’s technically easier to get into a school ED and if you are looking at schools with regular decision acceptance rates that are under 10-15% you should care about ED as much as we do. We know it can be scary going all-in on a school, but it also means if you do get in, your college admissions process just got a whole lot less stressful.
Now that we both care about ED, let’s talk numbers.
Early Decisions trends by the numbers:
When we talk about incoming classes, we are almost always looking at two data points: how many people applied and the acceptance rate. The amount of students accepted to a college rarely goes through big changes. They fluctuate a little and especially at some state schools they can increase over the years, but overall, they stay pretty similar, especially at top private colleges.
Two numbers influence the acceptance rate. We find it by taking the number of people who get in and dividing by the number who applied. We know you probably already knew that, but it's good to break it down sometimes before looking at the data. Since the number of people who get in is fairly static, the number who applied is usually the statistic that changes the acceptance rate year to year.
The Ivy League:
Let’s start with the Ivy League. Many of our students go to Ivy League schools every year. If you are dreaming of going to an Ivy, we really think ED is your best option. They are always impacted. Their acceptance rates are always low and ED is your best chance.
This year we saw slightly higher acceptance rates for ED versus last year for most schools in the league. Last year saw a record number of ED applicants and a slight dip this year. Let’s start with Harvard which historically has one of, if not, the lowest acceptance rate of the league (both for ED and non-ED).
Harvard’s ED acceptance rate this year was 7.9% after taking 740 out of 9,406 applicants. This is a slight rise from last year. Last year had a record-low ED acceptance rate with an ED acceptance rate of 7.4%. The change is stubble and comes from an overall trend of high applicant numbers last year; for Harvard 10,086 applicants and 747 admitted applicants. While 7.4% is still a super low acceptance rate, it is a lot higher than their regular decision rate which was 4% last year.
UPenn takes about 50% of their class every year early and this year 1218 students were offered admission from 7,795 applications i.e. an ED acceptance rate of 15.6%. Much like Harvard, this is a slightly higher rate than last year when their 14.9% ED acceptance rate came from 1,194 accepted from a pool of 7,962 students.
Similarly, Yale’s ED acceptance rate climbed slightly since the class of 2025. This year they took 10.9% of applicants with 800 acceptances from a pool of 7,288 applicants. Last year, they had 7,939 and accepted 837 for a rate of 10.5%. These acceptance rates aren’t much different, however, Yale published a stat that is far more interesting. This year 31% of students who applied early were deferred. This is a lot less than last year when 50% of students were deferred for reconsideration. Not a ton of colleges publish this information and we wish more did so we could look and see if this was a trend or something Yale specific, but this is a big drop off.
While Harvard, UPenn, Yale saw slightly higher early acceptance rates, Dartmouth stayed the same. They have been recently seeing historically high numbers of applicants. This year they had 2,633 applicants and took 560 giving them an acceptance rate of 21.2%. This is the exact same number as last year with 566 acceptances from a pool of 2,664. While the rate didn’t change, they did see a slight dip in applicant numbers the same as the others.
Princeton purposely did not release data and Cornell and Columbia haven’t released numbers at least yet. They might when regular decisions come out. We will keep an eye out for it. We hate when colleges don’t publish their data because it doesn’t help students who are thinking of applying, but sometimes the Ivy League likes to keep their stats close to their chests.
The only Ivy that got more competitive for ED admission for the class of 2026 was Brown. They had more applicants this cycle than last year. And honestly, we probably could have called that. We had a lot of students apply to Brown this year, and most got in ED. This year they took 896 students from a pool of 6,146. This year was their lowest ever acceptance rate for ED at 14.6%, but this has been a trend for Brown. This is their lowest rate for the fourth year in a row. Last year, they had 5,540 applicants and took 885 for an acceptance rate of 15.9% which at the time was also a historic low.
The TLDR, while the Ivies ED acceptance rates got generally higher, this has to do with slightly lower application numbers than a historically high last year. We would still consider ED the best way to get into an Ivy League school. And if you want to go to Brown, definitely consider ED, because we have a feeling that their RD rate is going to go down just as their ED is.
The Ivies aren’t everything:
Not everyone’s dream school is an Ivy. So let’s look at some other top schools.
Take MIT, they got 14,781 applicants and took 697 for a 4.7% ED acceptance rate. While they had slightly fewer applicants than last year, they took less of those applicants pushing last year’s historically low 4.8% acceptance rate even lower. Honestly, these rates are wildly low and part of that has to do with how many deferrals they do. For example, they deferred 64.2% of applicants this year.
Notre Dame saw a lot more early applications than they have in the past. They accepted 1,675 out of a pool of 9,687 applicants making their acceptance rate 17.3%. Notre Dame has been on the rise. Before the class of 2026, the class of 2025 had a historically high number of applications with 7,744 and an acceptance rate of 21.6%. Much like Brown, Notre Dame is getting more competitive and they will be one that we are watching.
Now, let’s talk about some schools whose ED acceptance rate went up. Duke’s early acceptance for the class of 2026 was 21% with 855 accepted out of 4,015 applicants. For the class of 2025, their ED acceptance was 17% with 5,040 applications.
Rice accepted 440 students this year. For whatever reason, they didn’t say how many applications they got or what their acceptance rate was which left us having to do some math. They did say that “Six percent more students were admitted through Early Decision” than last year. And we do have last year’s ED numbers. Last year they had 2,635 applicants and let in 478 meaning they had an acceptance rate of 18% for ED. This suggests their rate this year is around 24 and they most likely got around 1,833 applications. We assume they made us do an SAT math question to find out their stats this year because they didn’t want to say that their application numbers went down. To which we have to say, don’t feel bad Rice, even Harvard’s went down.
But say what you will about Rice testing our math skills, it’s still better than Johns Hopkins who confusingly just said they let in 520 applicants with no other data. John, come on, don’t do this to us! We are just hoping they give us some context after RD.
Another school we will be watching is Vanderbilt, not because they do anything annoying with their data, but rather because they have EDII. So while we have EDI numbers from them, it’s not the full picture. They accepted 650 out of 2,700 applicants for an acceptance rate of 24.1%. Their own student newspaper thinks they will accept less than 300 out of 2,349 applicants for EDII if they want to stay close to last year's numbers, but we aren’t sure if they will.
Much like Princeton and Columbia, some top schools have also not published their numbers. Schools like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, UChicago, CalTech, Northwestern, and Washington University in St. Louis are still mysteries for now, but we hope to see some numbers from them after RD.
We know we just threw a ton of info at you. Schools had historically high ED application numbers last year and often record low ED acceptance rates and that might be the reason that we see more fluctuation this year. If students don’t think applying ED will help them, they might not apply and that might be the reason for the pretty tiny dip we see this year. We believe that ED is a really powerful thing and if you want to go to a top school it’s worth it. Trust us, it’s why so many of our students go the ED track and get into their ED school. Right now there is plenty of time to look carefully at your top schools and chose an ED school from that list.
If you don’t have a list already, totally fine, it’s early, but as you make one, see if there is a school that makes sense to ED to on that list. We promise it's a good idea for the vast majority of students especially as we see ED acceptance rates generally rise.
Need help choosing an ED school? Contact us here.