Inside the Millionaire Whiz Kids of College Early Decision

The Million-Dollar Gatekeepers Behind Early Decision

Two enrollment chiefs helped transform Tulane University and the University of Chicago from stereotype-plagued campuses into early-decision power players. In the process, they turned their posts into some of the best-compensated jobs in higher education.

Early decision — the system where applicants agree to enroll if admitted — has become one of the most powerful levers in selective college admissions. At places like Chicago, Tulane and Northeastern, it now shapes not just who gets in, but who profits.

From “No Fun” and “Too Much Fun” to ED Powerhouses

For years, the University of Chicago was branded as the place “where fun goes to die,” while Tulane had a reputation as the school where you might have a little too much of it. Neither characterization helped when they were trying to compete for serious, full-pay applicants.

By 2016, both institutions felt confident enough in their academic upgrades and campus changes to launch early decision. Students could apply by November — or later in an “Early Decision II” round in January — and receive an answer within weeks. The trade-off was clear: if accepted, they were expected to enroll.

The payoff came quickly. Within a few years, roughly two-thirds of Tulane’s first-year class was made up of students admitted through early decision. At Chicago, the program proved so effective that the university later added an even earlier pathway, allowing some applicants to submit binding applications before their senior year of high school even begins.

The architects of these strategies prospered right along with the numbers.

According to 2023 federal filings, James G. Nondorf, the University of Chicago’s vice president for enrollment and student advancement, received $967,000 in compensation from the university and related entities. At Northeastern University, executive vice chancellor and chief enrollment officer Satyajit Dattagupta earned $1.079 million after leaving Tulane in 2022, where he had built its early-decision system.

At schools where more than a third of undergraduates pay full price — often around $400,000 over four years — enrolling just a few more of those students each year can mean millions in additional revenue. Miss the enrollment targets, however, and the resulting shortfalls can ripple through four class years and put leaders’ jobs at risk.

In many ways, these enrollment officers function like high-powered vice presidents of sales. And every year, thousands of teenagers now sign binding commitments declaring Chicago, Northeastern or Tulane to be their one true first choice.

Tulane: Using Early Decision to Rewrite Its Story

Tulane has spent decades trying to escape its old image, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 further complicated its enrollment picture. For many applicants, Tulane became a “safety school” — a place you applied to as a backup. University leaders knew it, and they didn’t like it.

Early decision offered a way to change that narrative while also stabilizing finances. If enough students pledged themselves early, the institution could lock in a large portion of tuition revenue months in advance.

To pull this off, Tulane needed someone who could marry data analytics with admissions strategy. In 2016, that person was Satyajit Dattagupta, then in his mid-30s. He had started his working life as a web developer before moving into admissions roles at the University of Rochester and Washington College in Maryland.

At Tulane, he focused on figuring out which types of students were most likely to apply early decision, how many early admits the university could safely take, and how to allocate discounts and aid in order to hit both enrollment and revenue goals.

In a 2019 conversation, Tulane president Michael Fitts expressed clear satisfaction with the results. Coming out of the Katrina years, he said, the university had faced serious uncertainty. Leaning into early decision, he argued, was a statement of confidence about what Tulane had become, and he described the strategy as a “spectacular” success.

By that point, nearly 40 percent of Tulane’s incoming class was being admitted through early decision. By the time the last cohort Dattagupta helped recruit arrived in 2022, that share had climbed to 68 percent. His pay rose in tandem, reaching $656,000 — a figure that drew attention at other institutions when it showed up in public filings.

On the strength of that record, Dattagupta moved to Northeastern in 2022. For the 2024–25 academic year, Northeastern enrolled 54 percent of its entering class through early decision.

The ED Advantage — and the Price Tag

At many colleges that offer it, early decision is the round with the best odds of admission.

James Murphy, of the advocacy group Class Action, recently compared the early-decision advantage — the gap between the early-decision admit rate and the regular decision admit rate — at different schools. Northeastern ranked first, with an early-decision edge more than 11 times higher than its regular admission rate. Tulane came in second, with an edge over five times higher.

Those numbers show how powerful early decision can be in shaping a class. They also help explain why institutions are willing to pay so much for the people running these systems.

Northeastern officials have emphasized the scale of the operation. Executive pay, including Dattagupta’s, is developed with the help of an outside consultant to ensure it aligns with peer institutions and the broader talent market, a university spokesperson said. And in this particular role, they note, revenue from student enrollment alone exceeds $2 billion a year.

Whatever else college may be, it is undeniably a very big business.

Chicago: Managing Perception and Guarding the Data

When the University of Chicago launched early decision in 2016, it was still wrestling with its “no fun” reputation.

Soon after he arrived in 2009, Nondorf acknowledged that the university’s messaging about intellectual intensity had gone so far that some high school counselors believed that was all Chicago had to offer. Administrators, he suggested, needed to push back against that one-dimensional image.

By 2013, he was telling the student newspaper that “the fun dying has died.” But parents’ impressions tend to linger, and teenagers often inherit them. Early decision became one more tool to nudge students toward a different understanding of the school — and to secure committed enrollees.

Unlike some peer institutions, however, Chicago has been reluctant to share detailed early-decision statistics.

In 2018, Minnesota-based college counselor Phil Trout organized a panel on early decision at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference. Panelists, including Chicago, agreed in advance to provide data. At the last minute, Trout says, Nondorf sent a subordinate who did not have the promised numbers. The slide for Chicago went up in front of hundreds of counselors full of blank spaces.

To this day, the university has not released a comprehensive set of early-decision data, and according to people who have reached out, Nondorf has not responded to questions about it.

Mark Hatch, then vice president for enrollment at Colorado College, did share his data at that panel. Drawing on his previous experience as a high school college counselor, he said he believed in being candid, even when it might not make the institution look perfect.

Chicago has also embraced an early-decision tactic that makes some counselors uneasy. After other schools send out deferrals to early applicants — moving them into the regular round — Chicago often emails its own early applicants. If their feelings about the university have changed, the message suggests, they might want to switch into Chicago’s binding Early Decision II pool.

It’s a gentle but persistent form of pressure. And there is another harsh reality: at a 2018 event for admitted students, Nondorf told attendees, according to a recording, that applicants deferred from Chicago’s early-action pool that year had just a 0.5 percent chance of eventually being admitted.

“Thank you for walking across Lake Michigan,” he told them. “Which was the test.”

In recent years, Chicago has pushed even further into ultra-early territory. In 2023, it announced that students who complete certain summer programs at the university could apply in a special “ED 0” round, with applications opening on Sept. 1. According to people who listened to calls for admitted students this fall, about 1,000 applicants tried to gain admission through that path. Even those summer programs have a “priority” round, with their own early decision release.

The university emphasizes that Nondorf’s role is broader than just early decision. It points to efforts to expand access for lower-income students, veterans and applicants from rural communities, and says the institution has made “historic” progress on multiple enrollment and student advancement measures over the past two decades.

Still, however you slice it, early decision has become a central part of Chicago’s admissions story.

Who Benefits — and Who Gets Squeezed?

So what does this early-decision arms race mean for the teenagers caught in it?

For students from wealthy families who are absolutely certain about their first-choice school, early decision can feel like a gift. They can wrap up the stressful application process quickly, and the odds of admission in the early round are often much better than in regular decision. But they are competing in a pool that also includes recruited athletes, legacy applicants and teenagers from affluent families who are of special interest to development offices — all groups that already have higher odds of admission.

For students who need to compare financial aid offers, the picture looks very different. Early decision is described as binding, though students are supposed to be able to walk away if a financial aid package is not affordable. In reality, many families are hesitant to commit to a school before seeing what other institutions might offer.

If you know you’ll need to shop around, you may feel locked out of early decision entirely. That raises an uncomfortable and persistent question: is early decision inherently tilted in favor of the affluent? And if so, how much does that matter to colleges intent on hitting their revenue targets?

Advocates and policy experts continue to debate these issues, and as long as schools keep using early decision as a financial and strategic tool, those debates are unlikely to fade.

A Model the Rest of Higher Ed Is Copying

What is clear is that the success of aggressive early-decision operators like Dattagupta and Nondorf has had a broad influence across higher education. Colleges track one another closely and are quick to copy tactics that appear to work.

Murphy’s analysis for Class Action found that since 2015, the number of colleges that enroll more than 40 percent of their first-year class through early decision has climbed by nearly 50 percent. There are now 73 such institutions. Davidson College leads the list, filling 69 percent of its class in early-decision rounds, followed by Middlebury, Emory, Bucknell, Claremont McKenna, Lehigh and Washington University in St. Louis.

At Tulane, where early decision was aggressively scaled, the current vice president for enrollment management, Shawn Abbott, earned $451,000 in compensation according to a 2023 federal filing. Under his watch, the percentage of first-year students admitted via early decision has dipped slightly to 63 percent, and the school has leaned more on early action, a nonbinding alternative.

Tulane insists that early decision is not primarily about revenue. A university spokesperson said it helps ensure that more students end up at their true first-choice institution, building “real school spirit” among a group of like-minded classmates.

Whatever the stated rationale, the pressure on high schoolers is unmistakable. They are being asked to make a high-cost, life-shaping decision earlier and earlier. And it may be just as hard to shift public perceptions of early decision as it is to shake old stereotypes about which kinds of students belong at which types of colleges.

College counselor Phil Trout still remembers that 2018 conference session where Chicago’s data never materialized. After we spoke, he went for a run, then came back and sent a line that has stuck with him — and with many of the students he advises who are considering Tulane or the University of Chicago.

The advice, he said, often ends up sounding like this:

“Go early, or go someplace else.”