Harvard's Unofficial Early Admissions Process

JHS
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:28:14 +0000

It’s worth noting, too, that the Harvard academic likely letters, as far as I know, do not go out before the application deadlines in the fall. They are really nothing more than targeted marketing, and they don’t stop anyone – formally or informally – from applying to any other school. At most, an academic likely letter might convince someone to withdraw a pending ED2 application somewhere and convert it to RD, but somehow I doubt that the pool of Harvard academic likely letter recipients overlaps much with the pool of ED2 applicants.

As for athletic likely letters and ED, I always thought that one of the functions of the fall athletic likely letters at places like Dartmouth was to get athletes to submit ED applications and wait until December to hear back officially, when they might have firm offers from other schools that they would have to take or leave in September or October, or they might decide to apply ED to a different school where they had been assured of success. So it’s not ED acceptances PLUS likely letters, since lots of the early likely letters are also ED acceptances.