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If full tuition isn’t a deal killer, as it wouldn’t be for Ivy’s family, the rewards are considerable. This year, just over 54,000 high school seniors vied to be one of only 1,750 members of Duke’s incoming class. The 6,000 who applied in the early decision round were three times more likely to get in as the 48,000 who applied later.

Until recently, early decision was a narrow pathway — an outlier governed, like the rest of this annual academic mating season, by a set of mandatory practices laid out by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which is made up of college admissions officers and high school counselors. Those rules said, for example, that colleges couldn’t recruit a student who was already committed to another school or actively encourage someone to transfer. Crucially, the rules said that colleges needed to give students until May 1 to decide among offers (noting early decision, which begins and ends in the fall, as a “recognized exception”).

The Justice Department thought those rules ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which bars powerful industries from colluding to restrain competition. At the end of 2019, NACAC agreed to a settlement mandating that the organization “promptly abolish” several of the rules and downgrade the rest to voluntary guidelines. Now if they chose to, colleges had license to lure students with special offers or benefits, to aggressively poach students at other schools and to tear up the traditional admissions calendar.

At that point, nothing restrained colleges from going all in on early decision, a strategy that allows them to lock in students early without making any particular commitments about financial aid. Of the 735 first-year students that Middlebury College enrolled last year, for example, 516 were admitted via binding early decision. Some schools have a second round of early decision, and even what amounts to an unofficial third round — along with an array of other application pathways, each with its own terms and conditions.

 

With the rules now abandoned, colleges got a whole new bag of tricks. For example, a school might call — at any time in the process — with a one-time offer of admission if you can commit on the spot to attend and let go of all other prospects. Hesitate and it’s gone, along with your chances in subsequent rounds. “We hear about colleges that are putting pressure on high school seniors to send in a deposit sooner to get better courses or housing options,” says Sara Harberson, the founder of Application Nation, a college advising service.

To inform these maneuvers, colleges lean on consultants who analyze applicant demographics, qualifications, financial status and more using econometric models. High school seniors think this is checkers, but the schools know it’s chess. This has all become frankly terrifying for students, who are first-time players in a game their opponents invented.

 

Application season can be particularly intimidating for students who, unlike Ivy, did not grow up on the elite college conveyor belt. When Rania Khan, a senior in Gorton High School in Yonkers, was in middle school, she and her mother spent two years in a shelter near Times Square. Since then she and her younger brother have been in the foster system. Despite these challenges, she has been a superb student. In ninth grade, Rania got an internship at Google and joined a research team at Regeneron, a biotechnology company. She won a national award for her study of how sewage treatment chemicals affect river ecosystems. Looking at colleges, she saw that her scores and credentials matched with those of students at the very top schools in the country.

One of the schools she was most drawn to was Barnard. “I like that it’s both a small college and” — because it’s part of Columbia — “a big university. There are a lot of resources, and it’s a positive environment for women,” she said. And it would keep her close to her little brother.

Barnard now fills around 60 percent of its incoming class in the early decision round, giving those students a massive admissions advantage. It would have been an obvious option for Rania, but she can’t take any chances financially. She applied via the general decision pool, when instead of having a one in three chance, her odds were one in 20.