As the stress of college acceptance droops over the heads of seniors aspiring to apply to out of state colleges, early action can have a significant impact, determining a student’s future pathway, although many colleges are tending to favor in-state applicants.
Public universities tend to defer or reject students of high quality, due to the assumption they will commit to a private school instead, as stated by ESM prep. Mackenzie Simon ’26 states that if a student has a deep commitment to a school, early action is a fair process for those confident in their top choice, and financially able to commit.
“From my experience, I have noticed that Early Action at public in-state universities tend to favor students who are well prepared early, especially in-state applicants with strong junior year grades,” Simon said. “Advantages include a slightly higher acceptance rate and the fallback to regular decision if your application gets deferred, but a downside is that you have less time to improve your application.”
Schools like University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill and University of Michigan are admitting close to the single digits of out of state applicants, despite high academic credentials, according to College Matchpoint. As this prominence of favoring in-state students applications continues, Morgan Mannino ’26 found many students with lower SAT scores in-state are being chosen over applicants with higher SAT scores out of state, knowing that 80 percent of UNC Chapel Hill acceptance is allocated to in-state students.
“I think that it is important for big state colleges to prioritize local residents, like UNC-Chappell Hill has much lower out of state acceptance versus in state making it nearly impossible for out of state applicants to go there,” Mannino said.
While applying in-state for terms of a greater acceptance, it’s always worth the challenge to apply out of state and discover places that could be a great fit. According to Andia Nazarko ’26, early decision means binding goals to a dream school correlating to one’s future career, but early action still shows the desire and strong commitment to a university.
“I feel like the public in state colleges favor more students that have stronger academics and extracurriculars that match with their future paths because it shows to the school that they are very focused and committed to what they want to do when they are older,” Nazarko said. “If the student applies early action it increases their chance of getting in earlier because they are showing more interest applying early to the school.”
College matchpoint stated that University of Michigan (U of M) is estimated to have accepted around 15 percent out of state of early action applicants only, however the university has not published any official data relating to acceptance. Many South students experienced deferral when applying early decision at U of M, including Simon who then found the round of early action essential for her acceptance.
“I was one of the applicants who applied Early Decision to U of M and was a part of the majority who got deferred at first,” Simon said. “However, a little bit over three weeks later, I was admitted to the second wave of decisions, and this makes me believe that applying Early Decision was worth it because it showed my commitment and interest to the school which could have been a deciding factor for my admission.”
