The University of Chicago was where fun went to die. Tulane University was where you could die from too much fun.
Neither place liked its reputation, but in 2016, both felt confident enough in changes on their campuses that they started offering an early decision option for student applicants. Apply by November (or January for the “Early Decision II” option) and get an answer weeks later. You just had to agree to attend if you got in.
Within a handful of years, two-thirds of Tulane’s first-year class had taken the deal. The University of Chicago found so much success that it recently added an opportunity to apply even earlier, in some cases before the senior year of high school has even begun.
The enrollment chiefs who made this all happen also found success.
According to federal filings from 2023, Chicago’s vice president for enrollment and student advancement, James G. Nondorf, received $967,000 over a year from the university and “related” organizations. At Northeastern University, the executive vice chancellor and chief enrollment officer, Satyajit Dattagupta, got $1.079 million in compensation after decamping in 2022 from Tulane, where he had a strong run in a similar role.
If you’re the gatekeeper at schools like these, where over a third of the students will pay full price — $400,000 or so over four years — you earn your keep by landing just a few more of them each year.
Miss your number, however, and the shortfall can cascade through four years of revenue shortages. You could also be out of a job.
Vice presidents of sales at high-performing organizations make the big bucks, and thousands of teenagers now sign up each year to say Chicago, Northeastern or Tulane is their true love always.
Shouldn’t that count for an awful lot?
Tulane: A Statement About Who We Are
Tulane has spent decades trying to shed a variety of outdated reputations, and its enrollment took a hit after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as well.
Many applicants treated it as a safety school. Tulane knew and didn’t like it, and its leaders knew that early decision could attract teenage true believers.
Then there was this: If you accept enough people early decision, you’ve created a risk-management tool by locking in a big chunk of revenue.
To do it well, you need a leader fluent with data, and Tulane found one in Mr. Dattagupta, who was in his mid-30s when he started working there in 2016. He had worked as a web developer before climbing the admissions career ladder at the University of Rochester and Washington College in Maryland.
At Tulane, he set about determining what type of student might apply early decision, how many to accept and how best to deploy discounts.
When I sat down with Mr. Dattagupta and Tulane’s president, Michael Fitts, for a 2019 interview, Mr. Fitts was quite proud of the results.
“Coming out of Katrina, there was insecurity,” he said. “The move to early decision was a statement about who we are, and it’s been a spectacular success.”
At that point, the percentage of first-year students whom Mr. Dattagupta had admitted early decision was nearly 40 percent. By the time his last Tulane recruits arrived in 2022, it was 68 percent, and his compensation had reached $656,000. That raised eyebrows among the many lesser-earning people at competing universities who spotted the figure in a federal filing.
That same year, based on his track record, he was able to move to Northeastern. It took 54 percent of its entering class via early decision in the 2024-25 academic year.
At many schools that offer early decision, the odds of getting in are best during that round.
James Murphy, who works with Class Action, an advocacy organization, recently ranked schools on this early decision advantage — the difference in admissions rates between early decision and the “regular” round, when applicants get an answer later. Northeastern ranked first, with an early decision advantage that was over 11 times as large. Tulane was second, and its figure was over five times.
Just how important is it for a school to make it so much easier to get in early? Quite a lot at Northeastern, if you use Mr. Dattagupta’s compensation as evidence.
“Executive compensation at Northeastern is rigorously developed in cooperation with a third-party consultant, who ensures that compensation is in line with our peer institutions and the overall market for talent,” according to a Northeastern spokesperson, who sent an email reply when I requested an interview. “For this role in particular, I think it’s important to know that the university’s revenue from student enrollment exceeds $2 billion annually.”
College is a lot of things, including a very big business.
University of Chicago: Thank You for Walking Across Lake Michigan
When the University of Chicago introduced early decision in 2016, it was still fighting off a lingering reputational challenge.
“The school’s done such a wonderful job talking about the intellectual environment that high school college counselors start to believe that’s all that goes on,” Mr. Nondorf said just after his 2009 arrival. “We’ll be a little aggressive in meeting with them.”
By 2013, he had refined his description of the university’s population. “The fun dying has died, which is great,” he told the student newspaper.
However true this may have been, parents’ semi-ancient perceptions die hard, and their teenagers are impressionable. So just how many of them was Chicago able to entice in the early days of early decision?
In 2018, a college counselor at a high school in Minnesota, Phil Trout, organized a panel on early decision at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference. Mr. Nondorf, who is known to be generous with a bar tab at such events, agreed to appear at the daytime skull session. According to Mr. Trout, all panelists had agreed to share early decision data.
An underling showed up in Mr. Nondorf’s stead at the last minute, and she did not have the data. The slides Mr. Trout had prepared for Chicago ended up with blank spots, and they went up in front of hundreds of people who had been hoping for a peek.
To this day, the university won’t release a full set of early decision data, and Mr. Nondorf, 58, did not respond to my messages about it.
“I lived as a college counselor at two prep schools,” said Mark Hatch, who was the enrollment vice president at Colorado College at the time of the panel and disclosed his data while appearing on it. “So I always felt like you have to tell the truth and be a bit more transparent, even if it hurts you in some ways.”
Chicago has frequently deployed an early decision move that makes some high school counselors uncomfortable.
After early application deferrals into the “regular decision” pool go out at other schools in the middle of the admissions season, Chicago sends a note to many of its own applicants. Should your feeling about us have changed, the message goes, consider moving your application into our binding early decision second round.
It’s a soft squeeze. Not quite Al Capone if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you material but maybe something his grandson’s cousin might try.
Students would be wise to consider the invitation. At Chicago, a deferral from its own early action pool can be problematic. At a 2018 event for admitted students, Mr. Nondorf said such applicants that year had stood a 0.5 percent chance of eventually getting in, according to a recording of his remarks.
“Thank you for walking across Lake Michigan,” he said to the shocked crowd. “Which was the test.”
Last year, Mr. Nondorf set tongues wagging when the university announced that students who completed certain summer programs at the school could apply early decision on Sept. 1.
According to two people who listened in on calls for students who were accepted under this “ED 0” plan this fall, 1,000 applicants tried to get in this way. And if you want in on Chicago’s summer programs, well, there’s a “priority” round for that as well that has an early “decision release.”
The university sent me a long list of Mr. Nondorf’s accomplishments. They include work on many programs that help lower-income applicants, veterans and rural students.
“Over the past two decades, the University of Chicago has made historic progress on numerous measures regarding college admissions, enrollment and student advancement,” according to a spokesperson.
Mr. Nondorf is more than just his early decision numbers, whatever they are.
The Early Decision Marketplace
Does any harm come to the obedient teenagers lining up early to perform for the Dattaguptas and the Nondorfs?
If you’re a high school senior from an affluent family and are certain a school is right for you, you can get the whole application thing over with quickly. After all, you need not worry about financial aid.
The better early decision admissions odds matter, too, but there are caveats. That pool can include recruited athletes, who are already more or less guaranteed admission; people whose parents attended; and teenagers from wealthy families of interest to the development office. All of their odds are better than yours.
For people who need or want financial aid, the situation is murkier. Early decision is supposed to be binding, though it isn’t if you can’t afford the price a school quotes you.
If you feel you must shop around — and can’t apply early decision because of that — is early decision classist? And if so, does that matter? I’ll address some of this in another column soon.
Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the success of early decision aggressors like Mr. Dattagupta and Mr. Nondorf has had an outsize impact. Colleges copy their competitors, after all.
According to Mr. Murphy of Class Action, the number of schools that admit, via early decision, more than 40 percent of the first-year students who enroll has grown nearly 50 percent since 2015. There are 73 now.
Davidson leads the pack, filling 69 percent of its class in early decision rounds, followed by Middlebury, Emory, Bucknell, Claremont McKenna, Lehigh and Washington University in St. Louis.
Under Tulane’s current vice president for enrollment management, Shawn Abbott, the university has reduced the percentage of its first-year students who were admitted via early decision to 63 percent.
Early decision ensures that more students attend their first-choice school, a Tulane spokesperson said via email. “This builds true school spirit around a cohort of like-minded students.”
It also puts pressure on teenagers to make up their minds. And changing the perceptions of early decision in the marketplace may prove to be just as hard as ditching outdated notions about the sorts of students who attend any given school.
After Mr. Trout and I reminisced about his strange day trying to cover for the University of Chicago’s reticence at the conference, he went for a run. Upon returning, he wrote me an email.
“I kept hearing the words of advice I/we would give our students who had Tulane and/or the University of Chicago on their list,” he said. “Go early, or go someplace else!”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.”
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