College admissions are often described as a meritocratic process, but the structure of Early Decision (ED) exposes how deeply money shapes access to higher education. As a result, ED has become one of the clearest examples of how higher education policies can appear neutral while systematically advantaging the wealthy.

ED promises applicants a better chance of admission in exchange for a binding commitment. While colleges defend ED as a tool for identifying committed applicants, its real function is to secure full-paying students and to increase their yield rate, or the rate at which admitted students enroll in the college. Students ED primarily to more rigorous schools that are their number one choice.

ED inherently privileges students who can afford to blindly commit without knowing the extent of their financial aid package and deters many lower-income students from considering this option. For more affluent students, this does not pose a problem as they are flexible to larger price ranges in tuition. Without this problem to worry about, wealthier students are more apt to apply ED and benefit from the higher acceptance rate, deeming the ED application route the more desirable yet harder to access aspect of a two-tiered admissions system in which the division between tiers maps with socioeconomic status.

Thirty-two highly selective American colleges are facing legal action for taking these wealth disparities to the next level. The lawsuit claims that these colleges conspired to share their ED applicant list amongst each other in order to gauge which applicants had commitments to other schools. Colleges used this information to disproportionately disperse financial aid. Those with ED applications to a school would, in turn, receive a smaller aid package from the other schools they applied to, regardless of the status of their ED application. This further adds to the broader criticism that ED is less accessible for lower-income students because it creates more financial risks that only wealthy families are able to overcome.

Colleges are also accused of using ED to increase financial security and ultimately raise their tuition for all applicants over time. The guaranteed revenue from ED applicants gives colleges less incentive to offer competitive financial aid packages to all other applicants, which helps them to justify raising the price of tuition each year.

ED survives largely because it serves institutional interests, not student interests. The ongoing lawsuit against top colleges and the long-term tuition inflation linked to ED only underscores how deeply this system prioritizes revenue over fairness. If higher education is to take equity seriously, colleges cannot continue defending a policy that magnifies inequality at every stage. ED’s structure is not merely flawed; it is fundamentally incompatible with a fair admissions process. The simplest and most ethical solution is to end it.