Harvard will end Early Action admissions
Harvard University, breaking with a major trend in college admissions, says it will eliminate its early admissions program next year, with university officials arguing that such programs put low-income and minority applicants at a distinct disadvantage in the competition to get into selective universities.I fear this is one of those ill-advised decisions Harvard sometimes makes out of its desire to be the first-mover and pace-setter in higher education. (In a sidenote deep in the article, we learn that "[t]he University of Delaware announced a similar move last May." You go, Fightin' Blue Hens!)
Harvard will be the first of the nation's prestigious universities to do away completely with early admissions, in which high school seniors try to bolster their chances at competitive schools by applying in the fall and learning whether they have been admitted in December, months before other students.
Some universities now admit as much as half of their freshman class this way, and many, though not Harvard, require an ironclad commitment from students that they will attend in return for the early acceptance. - New York Times, September 12, 2006
Harvard's non-binding Early Action program has long been a mechanism for building goodwill with a group of students who have had higher education at a top college on their radar for a long time. When Harvard admits some of these early, they tend to show up in the fall. I believe I once heard that the yield rate among accepted Early Action applicants is around 95%. By ending Early Action, Harvard all but ensures it will attract fewer of its admits from this important cohort.
Having once been the sort attracted by the Early Action option (full disclosure: I was an Early Action admit at Harvard and ended up going there), I can say with certainty that all of the students who would have applied early to Harvard will still be applying to one of the remaining handful of competing schools offering non-binding early admission. Early Action applicants have historically made up a disproportionate number of those that Harvard College admits, as evidenced by the fact that last year the Early Action acceptance rate was 21% and the overall acceptance rate was a little over nine percent. It follows from this that the regular-admission admit rate is a lot lower than nine percent. According a Newsweek statistic cited here, for the Harvard class entering in 1999, 26% of the Early Action applicants were admitted (presumably this figure includes those who were initially deferred and then admitted on the Regular Action schedule) and six percent of the Regular Action applicants were admitted. Remarkably, 72% of the entering class was made up of Early Action applicants.
So, by eliminating Early Action, Harvard almost ensures that candidates from the applicant sub-pool accounting for nearly three-fourths of a typical entering class will apply early somewhere else. Harvard is effectively encouraging students it would have admitted early to instead be admitted early to some other great school, spend a relaxing holiday season reading glossy publications from the other great school, and then spend much of the spring semester being wooed by that school, wearing its sweatshirt, etc. Some of these potential applicants will not even bother finishing their applications to Harvard. Most of them will, but will spend three months happily thinking of Yale or wherever as their new home (hard as that may be to imagine for normal people who have spent much time in New Haven) before finally getting Harvard's fat envelope (or online equivalent) in early April. There sure won't be a 95% yield rate for these students anymore.
Harvard appears to have two main reasons for the change. Its leaders feel that the college admissions process would be better and better for the psyches of overachieving high schoolers if there weren't any early decision programs, and that Harvard should exert moral leadership and can afford to do so. And it can certainly afford to do so—I'm sure Harvard could fill two different and practically indistinguishable freshman classes out of each year's applicant pool, although the second such class might not have Harvard's usual share of the truly small handful of future Nobelists, concert soloists and the like entering college in any given year. But there are some significant game-theory hurdles to this kind of moral leadership being successful. It is akin to saying it's unfair that different people pay different prices for identically-equipped cars, so you're going to insist on paying sticker. Some colleges with a less noble sense of their own self interest are surely going to say to Harvard, in effect, "thanks for the moral leadership in subsidizing the great deal I just got on my car."
Harvard's second rationale is that Early Action, and early decision programs hurt "low-income and working-class students":
[A]t Harvard and many other universities officials have grown concerned that early admissions present a major obstacle to low-income and working-class students. Such students have also been hurt by steep tuition increases and competition with students from wealthy families who pour thousands of dollars into college consultants and tutoring.I think the quote here from Fitzsimmons is silly, and sells short the very same talented students he wants to attract by supposing that, in this era of the Internet and common applications, students from "poor or moderate-income" backgrounds are just not going to be clever enough to figure out the process and get through it all. I don't mean to appear flippant, but if you can't figure out the admissions process, when you have to apply, when you need to have taken which tests, whether early admission to a particular school will be binding or not, etc.—well, how do you suppose it's going to be any easier at Harvard? As a general matter, anyone smart enough not to flunk out of Harvard should be smart enough to navigate an admissions process. Has Fitzsimmons forgotten the amount of "hocus-pocus" that used to be involved, before a lot of schools started accepting a common application? Good lord. Different schools called for entirely different essays. Brown, bless them, insisted that the essays be handwritten, and I'm pretty sure gave an explanation for this requirement that implied some amateur graphology (redundant, sorry) would be going on in Providence. More to the point, perhaps, it seems that a better way to help those who come late to the admissions process or are helpless before its mysteries would be to keep Early Action in place but extend the final deadline for applications beyond January 1 (more all-nighters for the admissions staff that way, though), or even adopt a system of rolling admissions.
"I think there are lots of very talented students out there from poor and moderate-income backgrounds who have been discouraged by this whole hocus-pocus of early admissions by many of the nation'’s top colleges,"’ said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard College'’s dean of admissions and financial aid.
Speaking of all-nighters for the admissions staff, getting rid of Early Action will require the staff to evaluate all applicants during a scant few months after January 1. To meet a compressed timetable, the admissions committee will either have to spend less time on each candidate's file, or add additional inexperienced staff. Either way, the thoughtfulness and overall quality of the committee's decisions is likely to suffer. The alternative would be to evaluate files as they become complete in the fall, making decisions on them but holding back on communicating those until April 1. However, this could recreate two of the problems Harvard is trying to address. If highly competitive students began to think there was an advantage to their applications being "first through the gate," they might clamor to submit them even earlier than they do now, suffering stress and psychological damage later evident in their plagiarized first novels. And there would still be the lifeboat problem I identify below.
I think the biggest reasons for eliminating Early Action are those that Harvard doesn't mention at all, and because of them the change will likely democratize admissions a little bit.
First, there is good reason to think that Harvard is not actually applying the same standard to Early Action and Regular Action candidates, even though it claims to. When do you suppose they were most magnanimous when filling lifeboats on the Titanic, at the beginning or after they started to run short of lifeboats? Same principle.
Second, eliminating Early Action helps level the playing field between ordinary public and private schools and those that send dozens of students to Harvard each year. Schools in the latter group, of course, produce a ton of very smart, well-qualified and well-advised applicants each year. The last thing the college advisers at such schools want is for their kids to be competing against each other for the same spots in freshman classes. Harvard, Yale and Princeton may each be willing to admit 50 students from a top feeder school, but the feeder school doesn't want it to be the same 50. And the colleges aren't each going to be admitting 150 kids from the feeder school. So the college advisers strongly encourage their applicants to pick one top college to apply to and forgo applying to the others. That way, the adviser can credibly assure a college that it's Bobby's top choice and he will surely matriculate there if admitted. This helps Bobby, who becomes a bird in the hand for that college. Viewed on a micro level, if Bobby picks Yale and Sally picks Harvard, they are not competing against each other for the same spot and might both get in to their chosen schools. If they each apply to both places, however, maybe Sally, the stronger candidate, will get into both and Bobby will be shut out. Early decision programs make this kind of divide-and-conquer strategy risk free. Try the same strategy in a system with a single application date and Sally is out of luck if Harvard rejects her—it will be too late for her to shoot off applications to Yale, Princeton, etc. Sally may be unwilling to take the risk of applying to only one top school. So eliminating early decision programs will force more of the privileged students at top prep schools and public high schools into direct competition with their classmates for the same spots in freshman classes. This might have more of an impact on the relative representation of different socioeconomic groups in freshman classes than will the elimination of the "hocus-pocus" Fitzsimmons imagines so confuses some non-affluent high schoolers.
I'm really not sure there needs to be this kind of reform to the admissions process, or, if there does, that Harvard should throw itself into the breach. It will lose some top students as a result of this policy change. Not being able to apply early to Harvard will not change the outlook or approach of competitive, overachieving students one bit. If they can make a non-binding early application somewhere else, they'll do that. If they can't, they'll just stew in their own competitive juice for two more months in the fall and then be stressed out for the first three months of the last semester of high school, wondering where they will get in. Early Action gave a nice little break to those admitted early. They didn't have to finish up all of the other applications they were getting ready to submit. They could relax a little at the end of a long, competitive run through high school.
If reform is needed, perhaps a body like the College Board could provide it simply by embargoing SAT scores until January 1 each year. The Board would only send scores out then, and would find ways to ensure that students would not even send out informal score reports to colleges before then. No application would be complete before January 1. Problem solved.
Labels: Harvard
posted at 6:30 PM
2 Comments:
By the way, did you see the August 2006 Time magazine cover story, "Who Needs Harvard?" -- I think it was August 21st or something like that. Anyway, my esteemed alma mater, Pomona College (which, by the way, is one of the new "Ivies"), provides a link to the article on its website (www.pomona.edu) for your reading pleasure. ;)
It is indeed kind of your alma mater to provide this service. I'm sure Harvard will return the favor by linking to the first Time cover story about Pomona, if one should happen to appear before the magazine ceases publication sometime in the indefinite future, and assuming Pomona should happen to make the cover before bio-hardwired neural networks or some other now-imaginary technology has rendered hotlinking obsolete ;)
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