The University of Virginia has become the third elite college in a month to announce that it plans to eliminate its early-admissions program.
The policy change, announced last week, will go into effect in the next admissions cycle, beginning with students who apply to enroll in the fall of 2008.
Virginia’s early-decision policy now gives students the option of receiving an admissions decision by early December if they file an application by November 1. Under the new policy, there will be one admissions deadline, in January.
John A. Blackburn, dean of undergraduate admission at Virginia, said his office had made its decision for the same reasons as those cited by Harvard and Princeton Universities, which recently announced plans to drop early-application programs.
Officials at those institutions said they hoped the switch would stop putting students from low-income families at a disadvantage and reduce the stress associated with the college-application process.
“Early decision has not been designed to keep out low-income students,” Mr. Blackburn said in an interview last week, “but what we’ve seen is that the population that were admitted under this program are very homogenous.”
Last year Virginia admitted 172 students whose family income was at 200 percent of the poverty level or below, but only one of those students had applied through the early-decision process. And of 948 students who applied for financial aid last year, only 20 were early-decision candidates.
About 30 percent of the 6,000 new freshmen accepted at Virginia last year were admitted through early decision.
In the past, some admissions officials have said they were reluctant to discontinue early-decision policies because the colleges they compete with for top students also offer the option.
According to Mr. Blackburn, Virginia had been considering moving away from early-decision admissions for some time, and the unexpected steps taken by the two Ivy League institutions prompted Virginia to act.
“Two weeks ago, I never would have imagined that colleges would do this,” said Mr. Blackburn. “I didn’t think anyone would break ranks, for reasons of their own self-protection.”
Despite the trio of announcements in September, some admissions experts doubted that many other colleges would soon abandon early admission.
“UVa’s decision is guaranteed to extend the conversation about early decision,” said David A. Hawkins, director of public policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, in an e-mail message. “We will still have to wait to see whether such decisions reach beyond the top 25 most selective institutions, though, to truly assess the depth of the trend.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 53, Issue 7, Page A33