coureur

An interesting Crimson article:

The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Harvard's New Delayed Opening

Excerpt:

"According to Fitzsimmons, the admissions office had been uneasy about the early admissions program since it began 30 years ago.

Fitzsimmons said that his office viewed early admissions as a means to “advantage the advantaged and disadvantage the disadvantaged.”

Most often, early applicants are students from affluent families, while students from lower-income families often wait until the regular decision round sot that they can compare financial aid offers. By creating a single deadline, admissions officers hoped to make the process more equitable.

This year, without the burden of convening for admission decisions in November, Harvard’s admissions office was able to join forces with the admissions offices of Princeton and Virginia to continue recruiting into November. Previously, recruiting trips had to finish by October so that early applications could be evaluated.

Harvard, Princeton, and Virginia went on four major joint-travel trips in November. On a stop in Washington D.C. this fall, over 1,300 students, parents and guidance counselors attended an information session. Fitzsimmons said that in the almost 20 years of recruiting travel leading up to this year, the largest turnout Harvard had ever seen was 1,000."

mammall

Well, that's all very nice but my D's super smart and hard working friends who were rejected by all the top Ivies say doing away with EA really hurt them badly. These aren't rich kids, either - just middle class. They have all been spending spring of their graduation year in wait list purgatory. I think in terms of giving the most high potential applicants a realistic shot at their reach school - EA is a very good thing. What we have now is a few top schools and a few top students monopolizing each other, while schools a bit down the food chain and students not at super star level wait it all out, because of course in the end there are about 10,000 slots at the top 5 or so schools. The wait lists must indeed be employed to fill them up - but the cost in emotional upset to the students is very great.

I say put back EA and educate these poor hapless kids who somehow can't go to a college web site and read the EA deadline instructions. Come on now, it's not brain surgery to put out an application in November. Also, the claim that it hurts those needing FA is also bogus - EA is non-binding. These are really not difficult concepts to grasp if you're truly qualified to attend a top school.

And finally, had EA been offered this year by H my daughter would have used it and if her acceptance had come by 12/15 she would never have even submitted her other 11 applications. What the lack of EA did was lead kids like my D to apply to a zillion top schools because they knew they wouldn't know on their ultimate dream school until April 1.

Sorry - I think EA is the most human, most sane approach to this mess.

rodney

mammall: not to mention the fact that the "food chain" trickles down alot further than the top kids......totally agree with your assessment....non-binding EA is definitely the "most sane approach"......

Bay

Agree with #2 and #3. Rather than eliminating EA, instituting non-binding EA at every u in the country makes a lot of sense to me. Both parties' chances to get what they want would be increased, while uncertainty and wasteful paperwork would be reduced.

Momba

I agree with as well, but deferral from EA is just as bad. It usually ends in rejection from the top schools, and the school does not know whether the student is serious about the school if they can apply to others ea as well. ED is a better signal to the school of the student's intent, and would guarantee their yield, if they care.

JHS

It's unrealistic to think that nonbinding EA will replace ED universally, because most colleges really want that you're-my-first-choice commitment, and they also really want those ED demographics, too. There's a relatively small group of colleges that are strong enough and well-endowed enough to accept the dynamics of EA vs. ED. Now, that includes a number of colleges that still use ED -- like, the entire Ivy League other than HYP, Duke, Northwestern, all the top LACs. I'd like to see them migrate to EA. They really don't have a good excuse not to.

I also wonder how, when the dust clears, the dynamics of EA where it exists now will be seen to have changed this year. In the past, applying EA to MIT, Chicago, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Cal Tech didn't give a definite first-choice signal, but it did mean one thing: the student wasn't applying early to HYPS or Brown (and in Georgetown's case it meant the student wasn't applying ED anywhere). I think those colleges felt OK about their ability to compete against the world for students who didn't have their hearts set already. But this year, most of those colleges saw a huge increase in EA applications, and one has to assume that the extra apps came from students who really were frustrated early applicants to Harvard or Princeton. I'm sure the EA colleges were very uneasy about whether their EA acceptees would wind up converting to enrolled students at historical rates because of that. I think at Chicago they were pleasantly surprised; I don't know what happened elsewhere.

We should also recognize that at Harvard, at least, they were a little unpleasantly surprised, and that's not a bad thing. Given the significant expansion of financial aid this year, one would really have expected Harvard's already-high yield to increase, maybe substantially. Harvard planned for that in its admissions numbers. Instead, yield went down slightly pre-waitlist. The gap between the yield they got (76%) and the yield everyone expected them to have (84%+) probably measures the effect of dropping EA. (That's not a whole lot of actual kids, of course: approximately 120-140.) Anyway, it's not the worst thing in the world for Harvard not to have a 100% yield on students it accepts.

mammall

^ yes, my general impression is that dropping EA has not helped Harvard or the students it supposedly was trying to help.

tokenadult

I'd like to see more analysis of the income distribution in the enrolled classes of the Ivy Plus colleges when all the dust has settled in the fall. If Harvard expands the number of applicants eligible for financial aid, it's not clear that an increase in the number of students granted financial aid really means anything about the overall income distribution in the class.

I will give Harvard credit for sending out to my town, last month, an admission officer who was VERY CREDIBLE on the issue of Harvard desiring more applicants from the income range subject to its original Financial Aid Initiative (less than $60,000 per year). My wife and son enjoyed listening to him talk to students while I shadowed the Stanford admission officer at this year's Exploring College Options program in my town. I think this admission officer helped convince a few families in the Twin Cities and beyond in Minnesota and Wisconsin that Harvard is in earnest about desiring to enroll students of all economic levels. The competition is brutally tough for any applicant to Harvard, so everyone applying has to have a plan B, but my advice to the low-income students I know would be not to take themselves out of the running by not even applying. Apply and see what happens if you are really interested in attending Harvard.

mammall

Actually, TokenAdult, in my acquaintance it is the kids with family income < 60K who are most likely to apply to Harvard and its peers, at least if we're talking about highly academic kids. The families certainly know that their kids will attend these schools essentially free. It is the kids who are just across the income line for FA that are most likely not to bother applying to these schools. They are the ones who must watch their parents literally sacrifice every bit of accumulated wealth for their college education. Some of us are willing, most are not.

whatever4

Just before the start of his senior year our child decided to apply to Harvard. We live in an area where the SAT is not the norm. You have to drive a ways to take a SAT II test, and all the dates are not offered at that site. Working around his XC schedule to get the required SAT II tests in, then retaking a test because of a lower-than-desired score meant our kid took his last SAT II test in December. This would have prevented him from applying EA if the option had been available, or would have meant submitting a weaker application. Our kid will be attending Harvard in the fall.

bandit_TX

Considering Harvard's total take in EA last year was about 850, I doubt whether removing it has had any significant impact on the number of applications filed at other top schools, or the waitlist. Harvard routinely placed almost all of the EA rejects on the deferred list with no intention of admitting most of them during the regular round. If a student ended up on the waitlist this year in the regular round, there is no reason to believe they would have been admitted outright in the EA round if it had been offered. In fact, with the new FA initiatives directed at the middle class (10% of adjusted gross income), the EA round likely would have been inundated with applications.

mammall

^ bandit_TX, the issue is that top students admitted EA at Harvard would mostly have withdrawn or not submitted applications elsewhere. If those 850 also had applications in at YPS, MIT, Duke, etc. then I would expect the majority would have committed early and freed up spots at the other schools. I think the largest incoming class at these top schools is about ~ 2,000 with some as low as 1200. If the largely identical group of high octane 850 applicants applies to most of them, they are likely tying up a great many slots until after April 1, thus pushing many kids onto wait lists. You have to realize that 850 multiplied by say eight or ten common applications amounts to quite a bit of room among the most coveted admissions.

Bay

Well, EA likely reduced the number of documents produced, printed, mailed, reviewed and paid for (via app. fee) by about 25,500. (10 apps RD times 850 students, including GC and teacher recs.) That is not insignificant.

Also, according to H, the elimination of EA allowed them to extend their recruiting trips by just one month. Doesn't seem like such a big deal. Why don't they just start earlier?

Weasel8488

I think that the debate we should be having is why the admissions process should favor kids who apply early. mammall pointed out that reading a college website, looking at admissions statistics, application dates, etc. is not rocket science, and indeed it's not. The point though is that it turns college admissions into a game, not just for the low income but for everyone. Consider two students who are equal in every way except that the first one knows he wants to go to Yale, while the other can't decide which of HYP he likes best. The first applies SCEA at Yale, and the second applies RD. Does it really make sense to say that the first student would somehow make a better member of Yale's freshman class? And even if he was somehow a marginally better fit, does that justify the dramatically higher admit rate for early applicants? I understand that colleges want to be able to accurately predict their yield and that screening mechanisms such as EA and ED are effective tools of doing so. I'm not saying colleges shouldn't be able to use them. They are private institutions and can do what they want. But if we are interested in the welfare of applicants, I think it's pretty clear that early admissions programs have a negative effect. They pressure students to make decisions they are not ready to make and thus make the hypercompetitive admissions atmosphere even more stressful.

guitars101

I completely agree with weasel. My only concern with the entire application process is why EA or ED has a higher acceptance rate? Those students are not any more qualified than an RD student. Perhaps they consider that the student who had his application done early without waiting for any other test to come in more qualified. I'm not sure the reason