OLIVIER LAUDE FOR TIME Tom Mayer, left, got into Columbia early decision; his friend Anders Nelson settled for N.Y.U.

Last fall Tom Mayer, a senior at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, Calif., decided he wanted to attend Columbia University. His counselor told him he should apply early decision (ED), which meant getting his application in by Nov. 1 — including a binding contract signed by him, his parents and his counselor saying that if Columbia accepted him in mid-December, he would enroll the following fall. A lot of his classmates were doing the same thing. "Columbia has a rep for being an ED school, so no one wanted to risk it," he says. The strategy worked — he got in.

But he didn't realize just how valuable his counselor's advice was until April, when Columbia put his friend Anders Nelson on its wait list. "He's exactly the kind of person Columbia wanted," Mayer says, explaining that Nelson was in his jazz band and his Latin class, did better on the SATs and wrote essays that were "off the hook." Nelson had only one disadvantage: he applied regular decision. Why? Nelson needed financial aid and couldn't afford to commit to Columbia without knowing what kind of package it would provide.

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This story illustrates how ED programs, which have been proliferating in the past few years, are turning into a high-stakes gamble for high school seniors who want to attend an élite school. As the phenomenon grows, it underscores many social issues: the acceleration of adolescence, the pursuit of prestige, the increasing importance of strategy and the very real possibility that ED programs favor affluent students and penalize those who need financial aid.

Early decision used to be a little-used option for those rare students who by early fall of their senior year were 100% sure where they wanted to go. Now it seems designed to send lots of students into a tizzy. As the cost of an education at any private institution gets pricier — the bill for a year at Hobart ($32,000), for instance, tops Harvard's ($30,676) — parents and students want their big bucks to buy big names. Meanwhile, colleges, eager to get — and stay — on top, want to lock in the best and the brightest as soon as possible. What gets lost is that somewhere in all this frenzy, there is a student trying to decide what kind of school really suits his or her needs.

The most troubling development is the growth of ED plans, which require students like Mayer to apply in November instead of January. If accepted, they must enroll — even if their interests have taken a different turn during senior year. Currently, 277 schools have ED plans, including six of the eight Ivy League schools. A second admissions tactic is early action (EA), now offered by 235 schools, including Harvard and Brown. Under EA, students can apply to more than one school. Acceptances are not binding.

What's wrong with all this? you might ask. For starters, many highly selective schools are filling an increasingly large proportion of their incoming classes early (see chart). Three Ivy League schools — Columbia, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — filled about 40% of this year's freshman classes with ED applicants. Harvard and Brown accepted enough students under nonbinding EA to make up 69% and 73% of their classes, respectively. It doesn't take a math wizard to figure out that this leaves a lot fewer places for regular admissions. "You must apply early, or you have almost no chance," says a Harvard alumnus who has interviewed prospective students for a decade. "Just look at the numbers."

Those numbers have not been lost on students and parents, who have begun storming the ED gates. Statistics suggest that 75,000 (or 1 in 16) of the 1.2 million students who enrolled in a four-year institution in 1999 may have applied via a binding ED plan, up from 52,000 in 1997. While it isn't known how many applied early action, preliminary data indicate that last year some 20,000 students applied early to the Ivy League schools alone, which are just eight of the 460 schools offering early plans.

This admissions race is no longer confined to the Ivy League superpowers. Last year the University of Florida added an ED plan, and plenty of little-known schools offer them. (Salve Regina University, anyone? Converse College?) While exercising early options is far more popular at private prep schools on the East Coast — Horace Mann School in the Bronx, for instance, saw three-fourths of the senior class apply early last fall — students at large public high schools are also enlisting in record numbers. Some 14% of the seniors at George Walton High in Marietta, Ga., applied early last year.

The ED round is now a time for high-scoring, well-off students like Mayer to be whisked to safety, making the regular-admissions round a time for social engineering. Colleges used to employ their waiting list to round out the class by sex, region, socioeconomic status and so on. Now regular admissions seem to be filling that bill. Fortunately for Nelson, his second choice, New York University, tapped him in April.

The trend shows no sign of de-escalating, not when it serves the interests of colleges so well. ED plans have become a way to enhance reputations — and the bottom line. By holding students to their promise to enroll, ED plans help colleges inflate their "yield," or the proportion of students accepted by a school that actually enroll. The higher the yield, the better: U.S. News & World Report uses these figures to help determine how high a school should rank (which, in turn, influences how "good" people think the school is); bond-rating agencies, such as Moody's, consider yield when analyzing a school's creditworthiness, which affects the interest it has to pay on its debt. Plus, when much of the class is locked in by ED, the college need not accept so many regular applicants, which improves its "admit rate," the percentage of applicants who get in. This too gives rankings a boost.

Are colleges really making decisions on the basis of yield rates? Absolutely. As University of Pennsylvania dean of admissions Lee Stetson puts it: "We all want students who want to be at our institutions — and the more we can find those students, the better our yield will be." Many colleges take as many ED applicants as they can, says Jeffrey J. Papa, an educational consultant at Carnegie Communications, which performs market research for more than 100 colleges and universities.

Some colleges believe that they must add an ED plan as a defensive move. The University of Florida, says its admissions director, S. William Kolb, wanted to signal that it was "getting competitive enough" to offer ED, proof of some sort that the school is in "the same ballpark" as selective schools like Duke University. Kolb maintains that "as long as our competitors are using this as a tool, we feel we probably need to do so to protect our ground."

Colleges obviously have a lot to gain by offering EA plans. What students get out of it, however, is less clear.

When ED is used the way it's supposed to be — on the rare occasion of love at first sight — it does make for a happy ending. "I never knew it could happen, but Susan fell head-over-heels," says Sally Ansell of Fairhope, Ala., whose daughter had eyes only for Swarthmore (where she has spent two happy years).

For other students, ED is a calculated bid to find a place among the chosen. Back in the fall of 1987, this writer was the Darva Conger of college admissions — willing to marry an élite college I'd never met if it would have me. I applied ED to the University of Pennsylvania despite the fact that I'd never been farther north than Oklahoma and was unaware that I was signing myself up for four years of work/study and a $19,000 debt. I thought it was my best shot at the Ivy League. In retrospect, it would have been nice to see how much financial aid I might have been granted elsewhere.

But would my SAT scores have been high enough during the regular round? Therein lies the catch-22. Students believe that ED gives them an edge. Last year, for instance, Stanford accepted 23% of those who applied ED but only 12% of those who applied regular — a number that on the surface, at least, suggests you double your chances by applying early.

The stakes get even higher when you consider that most colleges advise those seeking aid to apply regular decision. Students with relatively high SAT scores and low family incomes are forced to play Russian roulette. Should they gamble with their chances of getting in by applying regular? Or will the school offer an acceptable financial-aid package if they apply early?

Devising a strategy to get the best shot at acceptance and aid is nearly impossible, since students don't have access to either set of odds. While most high school counselors say there is almost always an advantage with ED, most colleges deny it, insisting that early applicants are just stronger. But Judith N. Williams, director of college counseling at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa., recalls, "I have had years when schools said to me, 'We were wait-listing kids who were stronger than some we accepted early. We just didn't know what the pool was." Papa admits that the "mid-range" private colleges he advises will allow a slightly less-than-spectacular early candidate to "sneak in."

Can a middle-class kid who needs aid take the chance of applying early? "If you apply early decision, you're throwing yourself at the mercy of a college," says Bruce Hammond, a high school counselor in Albuquerque, N.M., and author of Discounts and Deals at the Nation's 360 Best Colleges (St. Martin's Press). He points out that even if a school assures students that the amount of aid will be identical regardless of when they apply, there's no guarantee that the combination of grants and loans will be identical. "Need can be met in a variety of ways. Will the loans be greater?" he asks.

ED applicants also miss out on the chance to see what merit scholarships come along, to compare aid packages and even to play one school against another. "The best check to make sure people are honest is competition. That's the American way," Hammond says. Of course, students can always use a financial-aid loophole to break their ED commitment, but they rarely do. From a practical standpoint, students often don't get the final word on aid until it's too late to apply elsewhere.

In some ways, though, ED is an equal-opportunity affliction. Douglas Bennet, president of Wesleyan University, which offers EA, goes so far as to say, "There's really no benefit to the student. Early decision is an expression of anxiety." Many educators believe students are being drafted far too early into the admissions game — being encouraged to turn in college applications that aren't ready or to make hasty college decisions at a time when real maturation is taking place.

Many high school teachers are fed up, as the fallout from ED makes a mockery of senior year. "The kids apply in October and more or less quit on us," Hammond says. While a number of students say getting in early allows them to relax and refocus during their second semester, there are plenty of others, like Sasha Mazza, who considered Massachusetts' Dartmouth High School "a joke" after getting in early to Barnard. She spent the last months of high school, she says, "going through the motions, daydreaming about college life."

Where is this all going to end? Some believe it will fizzle on its own. "As more students apply ED, it blows all the logic away because it just becomes more and more competitive — and no one is benefiting," says Jerry Pope, associate dean of admissions at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Some experts, though, believe EA will end up in court. "There is a notion that this may constitute an antitrust kind of violation," says Joseph Allen, dean of admissions at the University of Southern California, since ED schools prevent other colleges from competing for students. What upholds it now is ethics — and students' fear that if they break the contract to go somewhere else, both colleges will rescind their admissions. U.S.C., however, does not believe in the binding contract and has accepted ED students from other schools.

Allen is among those who are calling for a halt to ED. In his view, ED plans "are really destructive to American higher education. You can't say it's good for the nation." More than two years ago, at the Western regional meeting of the College Board, he proposed a three-year moratorium during which ED issues could be studied. When he called for a show of hands, he says, all but two of the 900 counselors and college representatives in the room were in favor. "Virtually all" the Ivy League deans have told him they would give up their program if everyone else would.

Well, that's disarmament for you. Good idea, no takers. A U.N. committee of sorts has been assembled in the form of a joint task force appointed over a year ago by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the College Board. The group put together a pilot survey on ED, but Illinois Wesleyan's Pope, who is a co-chair, says "very few" colleges responded.

For now, it certainly seems as if colleges are winning the battle, but they may be losing the war. "All this fuss about early decision, coming at a time when institutions are trying to be more diverse — the two movements seem to be working at odds with each other," says Maureen Welsh of the College Board. In the current climate, the families with the most resources — and best advisers — win the admissions game, a situation that is disturbing to many people. As Welsh puts it, "Access should depend on students' ability to succeed academically — not their ability to jump through hoops."

Source: TIME/The Princeton Review's The Best College For You 2001