<p>Here is what I have concluded regarding whether applying early decision to a school increases an applicant’s chances of being admitted or not. It varies between schools, I guess that is sort of obvious. What isn’t obvious is how to determine what the statistics are at the particular school you are interested in. In my opinion, the schools don’t make this information readily available.</p>
<p>Go to the Princetion Guide for Colleges, we were able to determine from there that my daughter could have significantly increased her chances for being accepted to her first choice school if she had applied early decision instead of regular decision. (Ultimately it didn’t matter because since we needed financial aid, early decision was not an option anywhere.) Like I said, the information was not available on the school’s website but we did feret it out from the Princeton Guide.</p>