Early Decision: when the binding bet is worth it.

What you're actually signing

Strip away the strategy talk and Early Decision is three rules. The College Board states them plainly: "Early decision plans are binding: A student who is accepted as an ED applicant must attend the college." "Apply to only one college early decision." "Withdraw all other applications if accepted by ED."

One school, one shot, and if the answer comes back yes in December, the rest of the list closes — including the schools that hadn't sent their offers yet. That last part is the one families underweight, and the College Board is direct about it: students who apply ED "receive offers of admission and financial aid simultaneously and will not be able to compare financial aid offers from other colleges."

That sentence is the whole financial argument. What it's missing is a number.

The number you accept sight unseen

Here is the price of one year at 81 selective private colleges — private nonprofits admitting under 35% of applicants, the pool where Early Decision actually lives — broken out by what a family earns. "Middle half" means the range the middle 50% of those schools fall into: a quarter charge less, a quarter charge more.

Your income	Cheapest	Middle half runs	Priciest
Under $30k	$41	$5,827 – $17,633	$33,835
$30–48k	$352	$6,140 – $16,942	$40,899
$48–75k	$1,217	$9,680 – $19,156	$51,847
$75–110k	$4,478	$16,241 – $26,459	$55,470
$110k+	$10,426	$42,346 – $52,295	$80,192

Average net price reported to the U.S. Department of Education for aided families in each band — planning data, not an offer. Individual awards vary within every band.

Read the $75–110k row as a bet. Even ignoring the extremes, the middle half of these schools spans $10,218 a year — $40,872 across four years. That is the money on the table when a family agrees in November to accept whatever arrives in December. Not the difference between a good school and a bad one: the difference between two schools that both looked reasonable in August.

The six you can look up here

Six of those 81 are large enough to have a cost page on this site. All six are schools families routinely consider applying to early.

School	Sticker	Under $30k	$75–110k
Cornell University	$88,140	$1,776	$14,311
Northeastern University	$84,641	$2,264	$16,241
Boston University	$86,285	$9,500	$22,517
Univ. of Southern California	$90,300	$13,516	$24,976
University of Miami	$86,078	$15,978	$27,982
New York University	$84,374	$16,977	$32,766

Their sticker prices sit within $5,926 of each other. For a $75–110k family the real prices spread $18,455 a year — $73,820 over four years, between two schools whose brochures are nearly indistinguishable. A student who binds to the bottom of that list has done well. A student who binds to the top has paid a house down payment for the privilege of finding out in December instead of April.

Want your own band instead of an example? Nine questions, five minutes — your real price at 3,188 colleges. Start free →

The bet gets worse the less you earn

This is the part that runs against intuition. You'd expect wealthy families to face the widest spread, since they pay closest to sticker. The opposite is true — proportionally, by a lot.

Among these 81 schools, a family earning over $110,000 sees a middle half running from $42,346 to $52,295: the pricier half costs about 1.23× the cheaper half. For a family under $30,000, the middle half runs $5,827 to $17,633 — 3.03×. Choosing wrong at the bottom of the income scale means paying three times as much, at incomes where the absolute gap of $11,806 a year is not absorbable.

The College Board reaches the same conclusion from the other direction, calling ED "unfair to students from families with low incomes, since they do not have the opportunity to compare financial aid offers," and warning that for students who "absolutely need financial aid, applying early may be a risky option." The federal data says how risky, in dollars.

One more thing the data makes visible: a single school's price is not one number, it's a curve. Dartmouth charges an average of $41 a year to families under $30,000 and $52,036 to families above $110,000. Boston College runs $4,284 to $60,308; Georgetown, $5,064 to $57,403. Across all 81, the median school's price climbs $36,987 from the bottom band to the top. Whether ED is a bargain or a disaster at the exact same school depends on which row of that curve you're standing in — which is knowable in August, before anything is binding.

About the odds — honestly

The case for ED is that it improves your chances. It often does. But we are not going to hand you a number, for two reasons.

The first is that we don't have one we trust. Federal reporting — the source for every other figure on this page — does not break out Early Decision admit rates. Schools publish them individually, in their own Common Data Sets, on their own schedules, and a national comparison assembled from them is a different kind of claim than anything else we publish.

The second is that the raw comparison misleads even when the arithmetic is right. The early pool is not a random sample of applicants: it is weighted toward recruited athletes, legacies, and students whose families were organized enough to finish testing and essays by November. A school admitting a much larger share of that pool is partly reporting who applied early, not what applying early did for a typical student. The College Board's own guidance says it plainly — "Many students believe applying early means competing with fewer applicants and increasing their chances for acceptance. This is not always true."

Treat the edge as real but smaller than the headline ratio, and unknowable in advance for your particular student. That is genuinely the state of the evidence, and anyone quoting you a precise multiplier is quoting a number that doesn't mean what it appears to.

When the bet is worth taking

ED is a good trade when you are giving up leverage you were never going to use. Concretely, when all of these hold:

You have looked up the school's number for your band — not its sticker, not its average, the figure for your income — and the family can pay it without a plan that depends on a better offer arriving from somewhere else.

The school is a clear first choice, by enough of a margin that your student would take it over the alternatives even if the alternatives came in cheaper. If ranking the list requires seeing the prices first, the list isn't ranked yet.

Your income sits high enough that the spread is narrow, or the school is generous enough at your band that there isn't much room below it. A family above $110,000 looking at a school already near the bottom of its band is risking far less than a family under $48,000 choosing between schools that differ threefold.

And it's a bad trade in the mirror image: when the number for your band is unknown, when two or three schools are genuinely tied, or when the plan quietly assumes the aid will be better than the published figure. It won't be, on average — that's what an average means.

The honest caveats

Three, and they matter.

These are averages, not quotes. Every figure here is the average for aided families in a band at that school. Real families landed above and below all of them, and a band is wide — a household at $76,000 and one at $109,000 are in the same bucket and will not get the same award.

Our set is a slice, not the universe. The 81 schools are the private nonprofits under 35% admit that report all five income bands plus a published cost. Different filters produce different spreads. We chose that definition because it's where ED concentrates, and we're stating it so you can disagree with it.

Most ED schools aren't on this site. Our cost pages cover the 200 largest schools by enrollment, which is why only six of the 81 are linked above — Dartmouth, Georgetown, Wellesley and most other ED-heavy names don't have a page here. For those, run the school's own net price calculator, which every college is required to post and the Department of Education indexes at collegecost.ed.gov/net-price. Do it before the ED deadline, not after.

None of this argues against Early Decision. It argues that the binding part is a financial decision wearing an admissions costume, and that the number you need in order to make it is public, free, and available in August.