Early Admission for College

Early admission to colleges is often used by those colleges to establish an initial enrollment pool that is determined before the normal admissions process. The benefit to students of early admission for college is that not all college applications have to be completed at the same time, thus spreading the workload of applying to college. Also, not knowing if you are accepted earlier will allow you to either focus your attention in other directions or begin celebrating. There are benefits of early admission for colleges as well. First, the college can spread out their own workload of reviewing applications and relieve some of the pressure on their staff. Second, it allows them to lock down some of the top applicants through the process of early decision (discussed below). Finally, it allows colleges and universities to get an advanced look at what the application profile and accepted student pool will be.

Early admission usually means that you will need to submit your application before November, and you will receive your results sometime in December. The timelines vary from university to university, but these dates are roughly accurate.

The two types of early admission for college are early action and early decision. Early decision is the more restrictive of the two processes and means that if you are accepted to the college via early admission, you are then bound to enroll at that college and you must remove all other applications from the process. This means that you will not be able to apply to multiple schools if you are admitted to your first choice.

Early action is the other type of early admission for college, and it differs from early decision in that it does not bind the student to enroll at the school if they are accepted. Restrictive Early Action is a process that only allows the student to apply to one early action college (their first choice). Non-restrictive Early Action is a process that allows the student to apply to multiple institutions. Both of these processes allow the student to reject the offer if it is extended.