For the freshman class of 2012, Harvard University will no longer offer the option of early action, which Harvard officials say tends to favor affluent applicants.
Although the new policy will go into effect Jan. 1, 2007, it will not affect the next freshman class and will begin for the next applicant cycle.
“The college admissions process has become too pressured, too complex, and too vulnerable to public cynicism,” Harvard President ad interim Derek Bok said in a Sept. 12 press release. “We hope that doing away with early admission will improve the process and make it simpler and fairer.”
Lloyd Thacker, director of the Education Conservancy — a non-profit organization working to improve college admissions processes — and author of the book College Unranked, said the early acceptance programs favored an elite group of super-athletes, prodigies and geniuses — leaving fewer slots for other applicants.
“Early admission was designed primarily as a marketing tool for colleges,” he said.
“Colleges are going to re-examine how far out-of-line practices have become from values.”
Thacker added that Harvard is demonstrating educational leadership by eliminating its program and promotes change in colleges across the country.
“There is too much waste in the college admissions circus,” Thacker said. “I think colleges are saying, ‘Maybe we can do well by doing good.’ This decision will definitely affect the Ivy League — the little ivies and will have at least a small trickledown to the rest of the country.
“It is not the only school concerned with the widening gap between admissions practices and educational values,” he added.
John Longbrake, senior director of communications for Harvard, said most of the response to the announcement has been positive.
According to Longbrake, in order to evaluate what affect the decision has on admissions — and to ensure it doesn’t hurt the quality of accepted students — Harvard will adhere to its unitary application date, Jan. 1, for the next three years.
Interim Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy Knowles said the pressure of the college application process has started to threaten educational values and he hopes this decision will alleviate some of that pressure.
“I hope that our decision to eliminate early action will help to turn down the heat on admissions, allowing students, parents, and teachers to continue to focus their energies on the joys and rigors of education itself,” Knowles said in the press release. “The impact will obviously be greater if other institutions join us in moving to a single, later, admissions cycle. I hope they will.”
Though it may have garnered the most attention for its decision, Harvard is not the first prestigious higher education institution to address early admission problems.
Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions for Yale University, said Yale ended its binding early decision admission program in 2003 — opting instead for a non-binding form of early program.
“We made this move because we were concerned about the two things that Harvard has mentioned in its public comments,” Brenzel said in an email. “First, low-income students do not like Early Decision programs because, if a school admits them, they must go [to] that school and therefore cannot compare different financial aid offers that they might have received from other schools.”
Brenzel said students do not always like being locked into one specific university, especially during the time they are exploring all their options.
“Students often change their minds about which college they prefer, and Early Decision put too much pressure on students to make that choice in the fall of their senior years,” he added.
Yet, Brenzel said the move to a non-binding form resulted in a more diverse applicant pool.
“For Yale at least, Early Action has worked to address these problems,” he said. “We now have many more low-income students and minorities applying to us early, and all of the students who are admitted early are free to apply anywhere else they like in the spring.”
Jamie Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, said that while early decision programs can give students peace of mind and allow colleges to pick high-quality students early in the process, the decision to end early admission programs is a good one.
“Early decisions have been over-utilized by too many schools,” Merisotis said in an email. “And there is evidence that early admission creates additional barriers for underrepresented populations.”
In Harvard’s Sept. 12 press release, Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons said the college hopes the application process will be level after this step is taken.
“Under the leadership of Larry Summers, we have worked aggressively over the past several years to expand financial aid, and families with incomes under $60,000 are no longer required to contribute to the cost of a Harvard education,” Fitzsimmons said in the release.
“An early admission program that is less accessible to students from modest economic backgrounds operates at cross-purposes with our goal of finding and admitting the most talented students from across the economic spectrum,” the release continued.
According to the release, Harvard officials said their decision to eliminate early admissions will free the university’s admissions personnel to extend their outreach and recruiting programs, which would help the quality of the applicant pool as well as reaching some students in underrepresented school districts that might not otherwise apply.