<p>I love low-income students, honestly I don’t think anyone has anything remotely against them. Now that thats out of the way. </p>
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<p>Weasell…you need to stop with this stuff. Who honestly knows if they are HYP material and why would a private/advantaged kid neccessarily have an advantage in this department. If a poor kid from a bad school is number 1 in his class…I am sure he can guess he has a shot at these schools. I am not saying certain kids don’t have more of an advantage over others, but simply that eliminating EA/ED doesn’t solve this problem. If a kid doesn’t know that he is HYP material then, who is to say he knows by the RD deadline. You are making generalizations with no basis in fact. Finally as everyone has stated EA confers no admissions bonus and thus it really is a WIN WIN for colleges and students.
student’ get to get in somewhere earlier in the year
Schools get to have a good basis for their class earlier on</p>
<p>Everyones happy…and if a few poor kids don’t realize how this works they can apply RD or go to another school—its not the end of the world. Getting rid of EA was a political stunt–it doesn’t fix the problem it just avoids it. Giving financial aid to everyone though does.</p>
<p>Being at the top of your class tells you very little if your school does not have a history of sending grads to HYP. The student would only know that he is number 1 in a pool of low achievers. Well, students who are number 1 in a pool of high achievers get rejected all the time. So I reject the notion that class rank is a useful indicator. You are correct that there is no guarantee that the student will figure things out by the RD deadline, but if he does, eliminating EA minimizes any disadvantage.</p>
<p>As fabrizio has pointed out, I am repeating myself. This will be my last post on this thread unless anyone has a specific point they want to challenge me on. Thanks for the discussion everyone.</p>
<p>but there are still students (as I know from listening to questions at that road show every time I attend it) who probably are smart and otherwise ready for Harvard, but who are just CLUELESS about the world of college because they are busy taking care of being good students in the world of high school. </p>
<p>I’ll note for discussion here that William Fitzsimmons, Harvard Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, is older than I am and perhaps older than most participants in this thread. He remembers a time before early action programs, and he has seen a lot of approaches to recruiting students come and go. I think his reasons for going to a single-deadline system </p>
<p>are based on a good experience base. They may or may not persuade other colleges to go to a single-deadline system, but, hey, isn’t choice great? If you like early action or early decision programs, there are still plenty of those around to apply to.</p>
<p>^ “Getting rid of EA was a political stunt”
Totally agree. If they really want to help, why not delay regular admission a month so everyone would be more familar with the process. Or offer open course ware as MIT does which help kids from all over of the world who can not come the campus for what every unfortunate reason. Or at least making admission process more tranparent as MIT does instead keeping everybody in the dark.</p>
<p>all of my kids are indeed disadvantaged bcos they got me as a parent. :)</p>
<p>weasel: sry, I mis-interpreted your point. Ok, then, assuming the spin (EA ‘advantages the advantaged’) to be true, when do you think H&P will release the data that shows that their matriculating classes of 2012 are economically different than the classes that preceded? How many of those “low income” applicants" found H&P “late in the process” and were admitted? </p>
<p>IMO, the fact that H&P have failed to publicly state the results speaks volumes about the ‘success’ of their outreach programs.</p>
<p>D signed up online for two Exploring College Options (each about an hour’s drive away), but was not able to attend either one because of academic commitments. She’s very well organized with her time, but was just too busy (tests, papers, etc.) to go. The best laid plans …</p>
<p>I believe that colleges should “target” the lower socioeconomic areas offering assistance in the local high schools to better equip those students with information on applying EA or ED. But, I don not agree that we should cater to ALL schools and all students. I still believe that if a student wants to succeed they will contact the school or the school district for information on how to apply etc. Growing up, I was one of those who came from a lower income school and believe me, there were the students who made it their goal to find out how to apply and where to get info. They even had the help of teachers who saw potential in these students and they gave them information. </p>
<p>We need to get away with trying to make everyone happy and even out the playing field for every single person. This is impossible to do anyway. You can’t please everyone and every single situation. When our kids get into the real world they will not know how to deal with disappointment because the rules kept being adjusted for them.</p>
<p>I think a student has to have an inkling that there is something out there that is attainable before he or she will even know to seek it. As I mentioned earlier, students at our school are not only not exposed to basic information that might inspire them to seek further information, they’re being handed misinformation. </p>
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In my kids’ experience, teachers who saw potential in super bright but socioeconomically disadvantaged students would not give them information about applying to out of state schools. They would give them information about scholarships to our state schools, but they really didn’t know much about any other schools. They tend to dismiss out of state schools as being only for the very wealthy.</p>
<p>If a student is disadvantaged from a socio-economic standpoint but attends a school that sends lots of kids to top schools, that student will be more likely to be aware of the possibilities out there. At schools like ours, where those disadvantaged kids are in a h.s. class of 500, with only about 10 of those kids even aspiring to a competitive out of state school, it is likely that the information would not reach the student in time to apply anywhere early. </p>
<p>Regardless of whether ED or EA is reinstituted at H, P or UVA, it would benefit students if more accurate information were shared earlier. I also think that educating guidance counselors may help reach the most students, rather relying on info sessions and road shows two hours away from most rural communities.</p>
<p>yes, I agree that the local school (high schools) need to be educated. Maybe the universities and colleges should focus on educating at the high school level instead of the “road shows”.</p>
<p>Of for goodness sakes - my hesitance over the check is about my questioning the judgement and truthfulness of H admissions. I think getting rid of EA has been ridiculous and highly touted to maximize public relations. As for who is getting in or not - I do find myself troubled that top students who have paid careful attention to admissions, met deadlines, signed up for tests migh loose spots to kids who lack this sort of proactive maturity. Yes. I am troubled by that notion. And guess what else? I’m very uncomfortable with the notion that eleventh hour SAT scores unquestionably indicate a student worthy of HYP. I’m all for testing, but why is a single high testing performance enough to outweigh consistent mature performance throughout high school?</p>
<p>I just think the whole thing is stupid. And we actually attended one of the road shows with our D last fall. About half the audience left at intermission because they were disappointed to hear there were no sports scholarships.</p>
<p>What a hoot! Kids who didn’t take SAT tests on the same schedule as your daughter have questionable scores.</p>
<p>If you attended the “road show” last fall, you should know that ALL the students admitted to Harvard’s Class of 2012 met the deadlines as set by Harvard for the Class of 2012.</p>
<p>Wow, you guys are so many levels of sophistication above me. Let me offer a bit of “hearsay” (i.e. not heard directly from the source, but from one who claims to have heard it from an admissions officer): the apparent statistical advantage of the former HP ED was illusory- once you stripped out of the ED acceptances the development legacies, special athletes, celebrities,etc the admission rate was exactly the same as RD. As the “special categories” could be taken care of by “likely letters”, it made little difference in yield and promoted apparent equality(a big PR benefit) to eliminate ED. The “leveling of the playing field” was illusory at best.</p>
<p>Yes. One advantage a single-deadline admission system has, besides putting all applicants into one pool for comparing them to one another, is freeing up somewhat more time for the college admission office to go on more road shows to reduce the amount of misinformation out there. </p>
<p>Caleno - it sounds dubious to me that the admissions rate was essentially the same ED as RD. The methods used to make the two equivalent would seem to imply that there are no legacies or celebrities that apply RD, which is certainly untrue. As far as recruited athletes go, they aren’t even compared to the regular pool so moot point.</p>
<p>tk: While that may be true, both Harvard and Princeton could afford to hire (literally) hundreds of full-time recruiters and staff them anywhere in the world (but Cambridge). Thus, methinks that point is a rather weak justification. :)</p>
<p>I think the recruiters they send out to represent the admission office have to be persons who really work on admission cases (to be credible and effective communicators), and that means whenever the admission cases are in committee is a time when very few recruiters can travel. They could, of course, achieve much the same effect simply by being very cursory in their review of admission files (perhaps deciding everything in the third week of January for regular round applications, and the second week of November for early round applications), but that would probably be regarded as a bug rather than a feature.</p>
<p>Okay, I’ll take off the devil’s advocate facade and finally take a real stance on this. Sorry if I’ve riled anyone up in the process.</p>
<p>I was actually disappointed when Harvard did away with EA. I was planning on using EA at Harvard and Harvard only, so that sort of messed up my calendar. But on a grander scale, I couldn’t understand a significant reason for the change. So someone misses the EA deadline. They apply RD, right? This time around, we all just missed the EA deadline since it didn’t exist.</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, but the EA/RD system seems to me like rolling admissions that occurs in two waves. Do we say that rolling admissions are bad for disadvantaged students? I have yet to hear that one. I can’t find a real difference between rolling admissions and EA/RD besides the fact that in EA/RD, you don’t run the risk of missing institutional scholarship deadlines (and the obvious fundamental difference, but you know what I mean).</p>
<p>And one last thing. My school didn’t really prep me much for reaching out. The only “roadshows” that reach this area are for Rocky Mountain Region schools, which tend to be rather mediocre. (I think the closest Ivy roadshow was a good day’s drive away, so to anyone advocating roadshows, realize that there is a very heavy regional bias in these things. No one ever visits Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, etc.) Maybe it’s because I’ve dreamed of going to Harvard since I was about three (without parental pressure, or even much acknowledgment), so I did everything that I could to make sure that I knew what the process entailed. Albeit, my school is a mid- to high-achieving school that sends about one kid to an Ivy every couple of years, but that one kid is usually someone who has the ambition to look beyond regional borders. The case of a severely disadvantaged student with no computer, bookstore, or library access who goes to a low-achieving school has been made many times to prove the point that some kids don’t know they’re HYP material until late in the process, but I have to ask: How many HYP applicants really didn’t consider these schools until the day before the deadline? I would wager a guess at maybe a handful. If someone wants to prove me wrong, go right ahead. But I’ve always had the impression that most students who would end up applying to Harvard have been planning on it for at least a little while. And how does EA disadvantage them? Or, a better question, how does RD disadvantage them?</p>
<p>So, that’s it from me. Flame, spam, do what you will, but that’s where I stand right now.</p>
<p>Talked to DH and DD last night about the road show we attended last fall, just to refresh my memory. There were some chuckles in our house as we recalled that yes, it was packed to the rafters at the start. Then several admissions folks showed some pretty slides and started in on admission requirements and FA until repeatedly interrupted by parents asking about the sports scholarships. Once it was established that there aren’t any of those at these schools, they started getting up and leaving. That left half an audience that stuck around to hear stuff we already knew. My own DD slipped out unobtrusively to go do homework. DH and I stayed to the end and guess who was still there, shmoozing with the admissions folks? The very wealthy, very ambituous kids from both the local publics and privates, dressed to the hilt, resumes in hand. This was clearly a red letter day on their calendars.</p>