I once imagined elite universities as places where the pursuit of knowledge reigned above all else  — institutions beyond reproach that existed to bring together the brightest minds from around the world using meritocratic admissions processes. It didn’t matter where you came from or how much money your family had, all that mattered was your potential. 

I now know much of this to be a farce. Many of America’s top universities have become involved in a twisted game. It’s a game played against each other, with students and families as the pawns. The goal is to extract as much tuition money as possible while pushing acceptance rates to the floor — this self-serving game is what the universities like to call “early decision.” 

Yale does not participate in early decision, and neither does Harvard or Princeton. However, many of our peers do. Early decision is the practice of allowing students to sign binding contracts when they apply; if they get in, they must immediately withdraw all other applications and enroll. If they don’t, the universities will conspire together to destroy their collegiate future. Really, they’ve admitted to sharing lists. 

Early decision allows colleges to create gilded prestige by artificially lowering their acceptance rates. But it’s inherently discriminatory, and comes at a cost to applicants who are robbed of an informed college choice, or denied fair consideration altogether. 

Students apply ED to increase their chances, but it actually makes universities more exclusive — not less. By using contracts to force more admitted students to attend, universities can admit fewer students overall while still filling their classes, lowering acceptance rates in the process. But these low acceptance rates put more pressure on nervous students to sign ED contracts in the first place, fueling a cycle of anxiety.

Early decision capitalizes on the anxiety it creates. It takes away a student’s choice, locking them down before they have a chance to compare options. On its website, the University of Chicago says that ED “is best for students who have identified UChicago as their absolute first choice,” but they know this isn’t how it works in the real world. They release ED results early and require that accepted students withdraw their other applications immediately. This ensures they cannot know their full set of options, because the universities recognize that many students would choose to go elsewhere if they could. 

In addition to lowering acceptance rates, early decision facilitates the careful distillation of a wealthy incoming class while maintaining a mirage of egalitarianism. 

Under early decision, students must sign contracts before receiving their financial aid award, filtering out those concerned about finances. It’s no surprise, then, that students from the wealthiest zip codes are more than twice as likely to apply with an early decision contract than other applicants. Students from private high schools are 3.5 times more likely to apply ED than their public school peers. Early decision effectively sorts students based on their ability to pay and hands the advantage to the wealthy.

This advantage is massive. In 2020, Cornell gave ED applicants an advantage of 155 percent, which means that ED applicants were more than 2.5 times more likely to be admitted. At the University of Pennsylvania, ED applicants had a 170 percent advantage. 240 percent at Columbia. 270 percent at Dartmouth. Brown conferred a whopping 350 percent advantage to its early decision applicants. 

Defenders of ED will remind us that it’s an applicant’s final choice to sign an ED contract, but the bottom line is that the universities that practice ED have made it almost impossible to get in otherwise. You either give up your rights or they stack the deck against you. 

It’s blatantly uncompetitive, and it isn’t fair to applicants. Every student deserves the excitement of opening their acceptances, going to campus preview weekends, meeting other admitted students and comparing costs. They deserve to have all of the information available to make a final, satisfying, decision. A virtuous university would not deprive them of that. These universities, and individuals within them responsible for this process, should be ashamed.

A university primarily concerned with generating and sharing knowledge would create a fair and meritocratic admissions process. They would not rig their process to give a 350 percent advantage to a self-selecting group of rich, private school kids. When they do this they reveal their true priority: peddling prestige and status to the wealthy on the backs of wide-eyed applicants to whom they never gave a fair chance. 

Ideally, lawmakers would ban ED as they’ve done with other anti-competitive and discriminatory practices. However, it’s the students, faculty and alumni of these universities who should be fighting the hardest against early decision. ED is embarrassing and desperate. It is a public declaration by the admissions office that, “We know we would hemorrhage accepted students to other universities, so we’re just going to accept students who are already contractually bound to come here.” If I were an alumnus or faculty member of one of these universities, I would want my alma mater to project strength, fairness and focus, not coercion and insecurity.

If legislators, alumni, and faculty won’t end early decision, then Yale should. Would-be Yalies are falling prey to early decision every year. Talented students who would’ve brought so much to the Yale community are forced to withdraw their application before acceptance or are prevented from ever applying by an ED contract. Yale should refuse to respect other universities’ ED contracts, remove the option to withdraw applications after ED decisions are released and never rescind acceptances at the request of other universities.

I call on Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Penn to stop playing games with admissions. You decide who gets in. You decide how much that person has to pay. That’s enough power; stop capitalizing on students’ anxiety for your own benefit. Prioritize education and equality over artificial status and exclusivity.  

WILLIAM FLANIGAN is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College, majoring in Electrical Engineering. He can be reached at william.flanigan@yale.edu.