<p>My guess is that Princeton and Harvard will eventually abandon their current policy and re-institute some form of SCEA. The current stance was very strongly tied to the personal feelings of William Bowen and Derek Bok, neither of whom is getting any more relevant as time moves on. There was never anything inherently wrong with Harvard’s SCEA program, and it does have the advantage of spreading their applications over a longer period (something I know Harvard has struggled with a bit the past few years). The current system is something of a sham anyway because of the heavy use – heavier at Harvard than at Princeton, I think – of “likely letters”.</p>
<p>I think if other institutions were going to follow their lead, besides Virginia, it would have happened already. Instead, the momentum is in the other direction. Other schools’ EA programs are getting more and more popular, and more and more representative of their overall applicant pools in terms of race, ethnicity, and income. And they work, both for students, who like them, and for admissions staff.</p>