<p>This does take a real stand. One reason that I describe Harvard’s, Princeton’s, and U of Virginia’s new system as a “single deadline” system is that that is what seems most salient to me about the system. In rolling admission, applicants roll in, and they can roll out with decisions throughout the admission process. For example, at the University of Minnesota there is an “on the spot” admission process in the first week of October to which any currently enrolled dual enrollment student or any alumnus of the accelerated secondary math program can submit a completed application form. Such an applicant can know an admission result the same evening, although notification of University Honors Program admission and notification of financial aid offers will still follow weeks later. There is a several month span of dates during which applications come in, a few at a time, and during which admission offers are sent out. Any application for on-campus housing submitted up to May 1st of the application year is timely for guaranteed housing during the first year of attendance. A single-deadline system, by contrast with a rolling admission system, really puts all the applications in the same pile in front of the same committee at the same time. This implicit comparison of every applicant on an equal footing with every other applicant seems to me to be the feature of the single-deadline system, but apparently seems to be a bug to other readers of this thread.</p>
<p>Why? Heck, Marite, NSM and a several dozen cc’ers could easily do an excellent job recruiting for H and would be highly effective communicators. 90% of the questions that arise in the road shows could easily be answered, and the other 10% could be learned. Even out-of-the-way GCs would be happy to see any recruiter from H, regardless of whether that person was a admissions reader or not.</p>
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<p>IMO, this is illusory, and a marketing ploy. There is absolutely no way, nada, that an applicant from Choate, Andover, Exeter, TJ, Stuyvesant Sci (and the rest of the nationally known high schools) are on a “equal footing” with an applicant from Podunk High.</p>
<p>^^ @ bluebayou: I’ll agree with your praise for marite and Northstarmom, but I still think the audience expectation around the country, both from high school counselors and from families of prospective students, is that a college representative talking about college admission will be someone who has worked in the admission office, actually reviewing admission files.</p>
<p>Besides the road shows, I think the admission office has students who call on individual students urging them to apply. I read that they target certain zip codes as most likely to have a high proportion of low income students (which means that some students thus reached may not meet the minimal criteria for admission–it is a rather crude way of proceeding).</p>
<p>I have no idea whether the new road shows are conducted the same ways as the regular ones, often in a large hotel (not a place that a low income student would feel very comfortable entering) or if they try to visit schools. In the latter case, the beneficiaries would be not only potential students, but the GCs as well (who, as we know, can be misinformed or may not consider colleges other than their state uni). </p>
<p>I agree that the jury is still out on the benefits of the current strategy; after all the elimination of EA is only one year old, and I doubt that the Admissions Office has had a chance to analyze the data yet. The increased in financial aid, which is great for middle class-families, also complicates research. </p>
<p>Finally, if families attend Ivy road shows and find out that there are no sports scholarships then the road shows prove their usefulness. One should not expect that every attendee is a likely applicant.</p>
<p>In addition, many times, an applicant who was deferred from an ED, will get in RD. I’m not sure why people continue to think that it is easier to be admitted ED than RD. The facts don’t support that. </p>
<p>I think ED is better for the admissions counselors, not to have squeeze all of their work into one round. And therefore better for the applicant.</p>
<p>Yes, this year’s experiment will be subjected to quite a bit of analysis, not just by Harvard but by its peer institutions. I do NOT hazard a guess about what other colleges will be doing by the high school class of 2010 admission cycle, which is when all these issues get real for my family. Anyone who tries to improve the overall admission process has my blessing to go looking for verifiable information and to subject that information to thoughtful analysis.</p>
<p>TokenAdult, if you’re going to perform the wrap up for this discussion, please get the argument of those who oppose discontinuation of EA correct. We think it has caused a glut of top applicants at virtually all the most selective schools. This has inflated wait lists and caused terrible upset for many, many high school seniors and their families. Removing EA might not have mattered that much prior to the common app. With the internet engine to power dozens of applications from a single applicant, it has created mayhem.</p>
<p>My D did just fine without EA at Harvard. My objections to the new policy are about the broader community of students. I think others on here would agree.</p>
<p>So is the argument here that what MIT (and Caltech and Chicago and other fine colleges) do by offering nonrestrictive early action is a bad idea? If every college did that, there might be still be a HUGE glut of applications, but those applications would be due at the beginning of November rather than at the turn of the year. But please explain, perhaps I’m not following the steps in your argument.</p>
<p>Would it be better to put all top colleges into a mutually agreed pool (perhaps protected by enabling legislation from Congress) that use a match algorithm to match students with their genuine top choices? </p>
<p>Okay - the typical highly motivated top applicant (or at least many of them) will want H as their top choice. If they cannot apply their early and find out the outcome early, then they apply everywhere. These same kids are usually accepted virtually everywhere. Of course, they can’t go everywhere - thus, the painful process of wait listing.</p>
<p>Restrictive or non-restirictive is immaterial when it comes to Harvard, which wins the cross-admits. What counts with Harvard, is getting an aswer early to the top applicants so that a large portion of them don’t apply elsewhere.</p>
<p>Actually, of all colleges, it’s probably most morally incumbant on Harvard to offer an early action option.</p>
<p>That might suggest a legislative mandate or something that would require the most desired college, or the most desired few colleges, to have a process in which RESULTS are announced before other colleges even have their submission deadlines. I agree with the proposition that this would perhaps reduce the total number of applications, although I’m sure it would still pit Harvard applicants against a great number of other Harvard applicants, whether Harvard had one admission round or a dozen before that early date of announcing results. </p>
<p>In the earlier thread on the medical residency match program, </p>
<p>bluebayou kindly shared a link about the history of that program, which suggests that similar situations of uncertainty and earlier and earlier attempts to grab up top medical residents led to the establishment of the national match. Maybe that will happen to undergraduate college application too, if reducing the total number of applications and signaling who is most interested in what college are the more important policy goals.</p>
<p>Give me a break. Many “typical highly motivated top applicants” have schools other than H as their top choices. Many students accepted to H are denied at other top schools. Many students accepted to H choose to go to other schools. </p>
<p>Beyond that, I think your argument is unsound. Yes, I agree that an SCEA admit to H will cause many students to shorten their lists. Based on my son’s experience as an SCEA admit to Yale this year, though, an SCEA admit to a top school (if we can assume, for the sake of this argument, that Yale is also a top school) will cause only a few students to withdraw ALL other applications. (Yale had a Facebook page for early admits, and they did plenty of communicating.) Kids who needed to compare financial aid packages left many applications alive. Of those for whom financial aid was not a concern, most kept alive at least a few apps, generally to other super-selective schools, including Harvard. But a surprising (and disappointingly high) number of students who were not eligible for financial aid withdrew no applications after receiving a SCEA admit, “just because.” These are the kids who are needlessly choking up the system. Only binding ED, however, could eliminate the glut. </p>
<p>In this respect, I don’t think H is all that different from Y or P or M or S. With an EA acceptance to H, many top kids are still going to want to apply to at least a few more schools. And many others are still going to be in the system, collecting trophies at full throttle.</p>
<p>Mammall, out of concern for the “broader community of students,” I am assuming your D withdraw some of her other applications after she was accepted early by Yale?</p>
<p>I disagree. Admissions folks are top-notch professionals with plenty of resources, and could easily slog thru the financial aid of ~1500 matriculants. Pell Grant data is already known to FinAid. The number of scholarships given to families with less than $60k in income is already known to FinAid. This would be really easy to add up, at least as a first cut (no doubt, that some finaid appeals are ongoing). Even the new finaid package is not that hard to adjust for…just compare the full-pay income cutoff for last year, add ~4% inflation, and count the matriculants over that income cutoff this year.</p>
<p>Any of our cc students could crank in out in Excel in a few hours time to find out just how many non-advantaged kids were now advantaged in the RD pool.</p>
<p>Just for the record, at least one student admitted to Harvard during the last EA round, refrained from submitting any other applications anywhere. (My D.)</p>
<p>No. The more relevant data is the applicants. Harvard has had one month to slog through data. In my opinion, not enough time to handle all that needs to be done, including the waitlist.</p>
<p>I respectfully disagree that the applicants matter at all, or H&P were on a road show for purely public relations and ranking purposes (which I do not believe). What good is it to increase the apps by ~thousands of kids, many of them un-advantaged, if there was no intent of admitting them? That (cough, cough, WashU approach) would be a PR disaster. Or, what good is it to admit un-advantaged students only to have them decline the offer? If the make-up of the class does not change…what’s the point?</p>
<p>If EA really does ‘advantages the advantaged’ and yet the advantaged are still admitted and matriculate thru a RD-only process, then the admission change had no benefit to the college, at least in this first year. Or, while not likely, what if the colleges end up with more full payors (prior to the new finaid initiatives) under an RD-only process? IMO, the only way to assess this change is by looking at the un-advantaged acceptees/matriculants, or H&P’s motives were something else.</p>
<p>Of course there is intent to admit disadvantaged students. But the intent of the road show is not to increase the pool but to change its composition.<br>
By the way, this is not the only road show. All colleges have been doing road shows for years. When S was applying to schools, he received invitations to attend a Princeton show that was going to be held in some posh suburb. He would have needed to be driven there. For someone from an inner-city school, it would have been mighty intimidating, highly inconvenient to try to attend. But I’ve read that some of the targeted road shows by HPUVA this year were held in sites that were also fairly intimidating to a low-income student (think of Hilton or Westin hotels).
So not only do I think that the data for this year has not yet been sifted through, I also think the effectiveness of this experiment will take several iterations and refinements to be properly evaluated. It may be that having a handful more qualified but low income students applying is considered not worth the expenditure of time and money. But I think HPUVA need more than one admission cycle to decide one way or another.</p>