Early decision acceptance rates: methods note Story: https://shortlist.college/data/early-decision-acceptance-rates Data: https://shortlist.college/data/ed-acceptance-rates.csv (97 rows, one per college) What it is Early decision (ED) and overall first-year admit rates at 97 U.S. colleges, each from the college's own Common Data Set (CDS). Median ratio of the ED rate to the overall rate: 1.5. 31 colleges admitted ED applicants at double their overall rate or more; 17 admitted them at a lower rate. Source and year CDS section C1 (first-year applicants and admits) and section C21 (ED applications received and admitted), from each college's latest CDS: 87 from 2025-26 (students entering in fall 2025), 9 from 2024-25 (students entering in fall 2024), 1 from 2023-24 (students entering in fall 2023). Each row names its CDS year. No college has published fall 2026 ED results in a CDS yet. How the numbers are computed ED rate = ED admits / ED applications received. Overall rate = total first-year admits / total first-year applicants. Times higher = ED rate / overall rate. Rates are rounded to one decimal, the ratio to two. The counts of colleges at double or more and below 1 use the unrounded rates. University of Rochester's ratio rounds to 1.00 (ED 41.8% vs 41.9% overall), but its ED rate is lower, so it counts as lower. We drop any row where the ED rate is over 100% or ED counts exceed the totals. None did. Known corrections and caveats Tufts and Northwestern: our parser missed a small "unknown sex" applicant line in CDS C1, so we use the totals printed in each CDS (Tufts 33,395 applicants, Northwestern 52,676). Neither overall rate moved more than 0.1 point. We checked the ED counts of the ten largest gaps and the two smallest (Whitman and Bennington) against each college's CDS file on 6 November 2026. All matched. The overall rate includes ED admits, so a college's regular-round rate is lower than the overall rate shown. A college reports one ED figure, which can include ED I and ED II. ED pools include recruited athletes and legacies, so the gap overstates the edge for a typical applicant. The CDS doesn't break this out. 7 rows had fewer than 100 ED applicants (small_ed_pool = yes); treat those rates as rough. Columbia reports Columbia College and Columbia Engineering together. Columns Rates are percents from 0 to 100. Every count is as printed in the college's CDS. college, cds_year (the CDS edition, e.g. 2025-26), entering_class (the fall those students entered). ed_applicants, ed_admitted: CDS C21, early decision applications received and applicants admitted. total_applicants, total_admitted: CDS C1, all first-year applicants and admits. ed_rate, overall_rate: percent, one decimal. times_higher: ed_rate / overall_rate from the unrounded rates, two decimals. small_ed_pool: yes when fewer than 100 applied ED; blank otherwise. source_url: the best public link to the CDS the row came from: the college's own file or CDS page where we've linked one, else the College Transitions copy. source_type: college_file (the college's own CDS file), college_page (the college's own CDS page, which links each year's file) or repository_copy (the copy in College Transitions' public CDS collection). cds_source: the exact file we read the counts from. It can be a repository copy even when source_url points at the college's own site. shortlist_page: the college's admissions page on Shortlist. planner_id: the college's federal IPEDS unit ID. No count is blank in this file. Source links Of the 97 rows, 39 link to the college's own CDS file, 2 to the college's own CDS page, which links the file, and 56 to the copy in College Transitions' public CDS collection, where we haven't linked the college's own copy. The largest multiple (Northeastern University) uses the copy of its 2025-26 CDS in College Transitions' collection. Northeastern's own site posts its CDS only through 2024-25 (checked 9 November 2026). Charts in this folder (1200 px wide at 2x, PNG) - ed-vs-overall-largest-gaps.png: ED admit rate as a multiple of the overall rate: top 15 - ed-advantage-distribution.png: How much higher the ED admit rate is, at 97 colleges - ed-lower-than-overall.png: 17 colleges where ED applicants got in at a lower rate Charts mark colleges with fewer than 100 ED applicants with *. Embed a chart Dot chart of the 15 colleges whose early decision admit rate is the largest multiple of their overall rate. Northeastern University admitted 35.3% of early decision applicants against 5.6% overall, 6.3 times as high. Free to reuse with credit to Shortlist (shortlist.college), under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Questions or corrections: https://shortlist.college/press