It's refreshing when two of the supposed most intelligent institutions in the world make a LOUD but intelligent decision. This week, Harvard (followed an hour later by Princeton) announced that it would re-institute the single action early action policy it abandoned four years ago.
Across the country, students, parents and high school counselors are heaving an enormous collective sigh of relief. In 2006, Harvard and Princeton stated that by eliminating their early programs (Harvard had early action, Princeton early decision), they would reduce the overall stress of the admissions process and make it a more level playing field for minority applicants. But that's not what happened.
In fact, the past two years have seen not only prodigious upticks in freshmen applications at top tier schools, but also the consequent (and predictable) trickledown effect throughout the top 50 colleges. These schools have been overwhelmed with applications: Harvard up 15 percent, Columbia up 32 percent, Princeton up 98 percent over the past seven years, and as a result they have had to hire part time readers to wade through the huge volume of applications. Why is there a huge rise in applicants in the regular round? In brief, because in order to "save" themselves for a shot at Harvard and Princeton in the regular round, students were reluctant to apply to the five Ivies (Dartmouth, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell) that offer only binding early decision policies, flocking instead to non-binding colleges like Yale, UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and University of Chicago, all of which have some form of early action.
Those schools bore the brunt of these "extra" applicants. Chicago, Stanford, and Yale experienced a 40 percent rise in applicants two seasons in a row. Naturally, these schools couldn't simply accept a higher percentage of students, so they ended up deferring or rejecting many talented students who in any other year would have fared much better. As a result, many of these extraordinary students, facing an early round rejection, panicked and applied to 20-30 colleges, clogging the system and driving up the regular admissions numbers at schools from the Ivies and little Ivies to schools like Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Emory and Northeastern.
As applications went up in the regular round, admissions odds went down with colleges around the country experiencing record low admit rates. Where did admissions odds diminish the most?
At Harvard. Historically Harvard's early action acceptance rate (in the chart below) was 20%-25% and they filled almost half of the class through Early Action Applicants. Without it, the acceptance rate plummeted to 7 percent.
We know the Ivies have raised there standards across the board this year. The only one who did not was Dartmouth, but they may have to conform down the road.
