[cperciva]

Things are different where I'm from (Canada) so please forgive me if this is a dumb question, but... in what way is early college admission binding on students? Even if a student accepts an offer, can't they just not turn up?

[sethhochberg]

Its binding in the sense that the university and the high school generally agree that, in exchange for the preferential treatment that often comes with early decision (first dibs on financial aid, etc), the student's high school will only send final transcripts to the early-decision university as long as the student is accepted there and will not honor official transcript requests from other institutions.

Its not as though the college will sue you or anything like that for backing out of an early-decision agreement, but, the student will have a difficult time applying to other schools for the upcoming academic year.

(If the student isn't accepted into the early-decision school, the high school will supply transcripts to whatever other regular-decision institutions the student applied for... but the idea is that if a student wants to apply early-decision, they either attend the early-decision school for the upcoming year or none of its competitors. If you want to take multiple offers from multiple competing schools and compare them, you need to apply regular-decision or early-action)

[pkaye]

Early admissions are not binding (compared to early action which is less common.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_admission Many colleges also have a waitlist for admissions to backfill from.

[klinskyc]

Early Decision !== Early Action. Early action is non-binding and is less popular in top-tier colleges. Early action is generally binding - https://professionals.collegeboard.org/guidance/applications...

There's also restricted early action, which restricts what schools you can apply to along side the REA school, but is non-binding