Record Number Applies for Class of 2018

Cue7
Tue, 14 Jan 2014 10:07:33 +0000

45percenter,

I completely agree that this issue is systemic, and certainly not Penn-specific. What’s disappointing is that, over the past decade, many schools have grown even MORE reliant on ED, while I imagine the scholarship would show that the inequities inherent in this process have not decreased (and have probably only increased). Moreover, the very top schools (Harvard et al.) use restrictive Early Action, which is basically like ED at this point.

Broadly speaking, there are only about a dozen universities that are extremely selective (with an acceptance rate of ~10%) that tend to compete a lot with each other for students. These are: the 8 Ivy League colleges, Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT, and Duke. I imagine if these 12 schools eliminated any early programs, the practice would soon end. For the short term, I don’t think schools very close to these 12 in selectivity (e.g. Northwestern, Wash U, Vandy) would benefit enough to threaten anything, and there’d be enough pressure on them (given the unfair nature of ED) to stop the practice as well.

A key step (and something I’ve been proclaiming on many threads) is to acknowledge the negative impact of ED, as has been shown by many studies, articles, etc. Some people tend to pooh-pooh it, and they shouldn’t.