Harvard University announced last week that it would discontinue its early-admission program, immediately rekindling a national discussion of the controversial policies that allow some students to receive admissions decisions months before regular applicants.
Harvard — the first of the nation’s most-selective colleges to drop early admissions altogether — will move to a single application deadline of January 1 beginning in the fall of 2007. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, hopes the change will encourage more low-income and minority students to apply to the university.
“The underlying piece here is access and the perception of access,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “Early applicants tended to be disproportionately white and affluent, and there was a growing perception that early admissions was becoming an exclusive club, to which somehow only a few were invited. That worked against the whole idea of access.”
In recent years, critics of early- admission plans have complained that some highly competitive colleges now admit at least two-fifths of their applicants through early programs, which generally attract the savviest — and wealthiest — students.
Yet even as praise for Harvard’s unexpected decision rang throughout the nation last week, some college administrators said they doubted the announcement would revolutionize the admissions field so much as bring the nation’s oldest university some good publicity.
Because of Harvard’s stature, the announcement carried symbolic
weight, if nothing else: That the nation’s oldest and most famous university had washed its hands of a popular admissions practice was a strong suggestion that a major component of the nation’s admissions system was broken. And so Harvard officials had reason to hope that their announcement would prompt other elite colleges to re-evaluate their early-admission policies — and to discuss ways of easing the competitiveness of college admissions.
“It’s a chance for higher education itself to take a huge collective breath,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said, “not just with early admissions, but also the whole college-admissions frenzy, such as all the time and resources spent on test prep, application prep, and expensive college consultants.”
Mixed Reviews
The decision elicited praise from many high-school counselors, who stand on the front lines of the frenzy Mr. Fitzsimmons described. Willard M. Dix, a college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, said Harvard’s announcement had given him chills, and that he hoped the move would help ease the “arms race” among elite institutions.
Joanna Schultz, director of college counseling at the Ellis School, in Pittsburgh, said colleges’ growing reliance on early admission during the last decade had increased anxiety among students and parents, causing them to think more about admissions strategies and less about finding good fits.
“I’m so excited,” Ms. Schultz said. “We teach high-school seniors to be examples for other students, and what Harvard has done is to set an example. It’s very possible that, starting from the top down, other colleges will have to reconsider their own policies.”
Admissions deans at several top colleges also applauded Harvard’s stated reasons for making the change, yet some questioned the notion that the university had knocked down the first domino in a process that would drastically redefine admissions.
“I don’t think it’s going to mean the end of early admission,” said Peter E. Caruso, associate director of admission at Boston College and chairman of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s Admission Practices Committee. “Other colleges and universities are not going to follow through right away. They’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute, how does this apply to us?’”
Any college that considered eliminating early admission would have to weigh practical concerns, Mr. Caruso said, including how such a move might affect the delicate logistics of the evaluation process.
Officials at Yale University, one of Harvard’s fiercest competitors, said they had no immediate plans to dismantle their own early-admission program. “Harvard has taken a strong action here, and we certainly share their concerns about access for low-income students,” said Jeff Brenzel, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, “but it would be premature to anticipate what we might do.”
In 2001 none other than Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, urged elite colleges to abolish early-admission programs, saying the policies were increasing the anxiety many high-school students experienced during the application process. At the time, however, Mr. Levin said that because of the intense competition among elite colleges for top students, Yale could not abandon its policy unless rival institutions did the same.
“No one [college] alone can tip the system back to what it used to be,” Mr. Levin told The Chronicle. “It will take a critical number of colleges.”
In response to Harvard’s announcement last week, Mr. Levin suggested that he had reconsidered his stance on early-application policies. “It is not clear that eliminating early admission will result in the admission of more students from low-income families,” he said in a written statement. “What is really needed is what Harvard, Yale, and others have been doing in recent years: That is making efforts to increase the pool of low-income students who apply and strengthening the financial-aid packages available to them.”
Mr. Levin also said that recent changes in Yale’s early-admission program had benefited students. In 2002, Yale abandoned its “early decision” program, a type of early admission under which students apply early to only one college and agree to attend if admitted. The university replaced that plan with what the admissions association defines as a “restrictive early action” program, in which students may apply early to a single institution without committing to enroll and have until the spring to decide.
Harvard’s current early-admission policy also gives students until the spring to decide, as long as they do not apply early to another college.
“The move to early action had the effect that we desired, and significantly increased the proportion of low-income students in our early-applicant pool,” said Mr. Brenzel, of Yale. “We were disappointed that more schools didn’t move to an early-action program.”
‘The Right Thing To Do’
Officials at several other colleges with early-action programs, including Georgetown University, said they were happy with their policies and had no intention of changing them.
“On the one hand, I understand Harvard’s motivation, and the argument for equality is an outstanding argument,” said Charles A. Deacon, Georgetown’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “But a less-drastic measure could be taken without much disruption to the whole admissions process.”
Georgetown allows students to submit early-action applications to other colleges, though not to institutions with early-decision plans.
The process gives students more freedom than restrictive plans while preserving the benefits of early admission for colleges, according to Mr. Deacon. And some colleges that do not operate in Harvard’s rarefied air may determine that those benefits are too important to relinquish.
“It’s a lot easier for Harvard to do what they’re doing because they get such a high yield,” Mr. Deacon said, referring to the proportion of admitted students who enroll. “If other institutions were forced to eliminate early programs, they would be facing a much lower yield and find it harder to predict enrollment.”
Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment management and college relations at Dickinson College, agreed that a wholesale abandonment of early-admission plans could have unintended consequences.
“Some might say it would increase the college-admissions frenzy,” Mr. Massa said. “Down the line, in March, more students will not know where they’re going. More of them will be on wait lists.”
A common criticism of early-decision programs is that they hurt students from low-income families, who often decide to forgo early applications so they can compare financial-aid offers from multiple institutions during the regular admissions process.
Yet at Dickinson, which uses early decision, the percentage of financial-aid recipients in the early-admission pool is the same as in the regular pool, says Mr. Massa.
“It’s all about how a college goes about recruiting its students and talking to them about financial aid,” Mr. Massa said.
“To assume that the elimination of early-decision programs will fix what’s wrong with admissions in general is naïve at best,” he said. “It’s far easier to eliminate a symptom than it is to correct the problem. Harvard’s intention is pure, but it’s not the answer for many institutions.”
Other prominent admissions officials were more optimistic about the possibilities.
Jerome A. Lucido, vice provost for enrollment policy and management at the University of Southern California, hailed Harvard’s announcement, describing it as the latest in a gradual shift in admissions policies nationally.
“This is part of a movement in which more people are considering how social class affects where you end up in higher education, or whether you end up in higher education,” said Mr. Lucido, who was dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when that institution replaced its early-decision program with an early-action plan, in 2002.
Mr. Lucido said the key in changing Chapel Hill’s policy was institutional data revealing that early decision was not serving low-income and minority students. “Part of the ability for a college to make this move is to have folks in high leadership positions know that this is the right thing to do,” Mr. Lucido said, “to move away from chasing a ranking to a position that is clearly more equitable.”
Mr. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, said that dropping early admission would allow him and his staff to travel more widely and recruit a more diverse pool of applicants, particularly those from parts of the country that lacked “a Harvard tradition.”
Harvard stopped short of making a permanent commitment to its new admissions policy, however. In a written statement announcing the change, Harvard officials said they planned to monitor the effect of dropping early decision over the next two or three years, “to make sure that it does not have a negative impact on student quality.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 53, Issue 5, Page A1
