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[Abe Kohen]

The Results Are In On Early Admission

As Top Colleges Change Policies, Acceptance Rates Shift; More Openings at
Harvard
By ANNE MARIE CHAKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


A year after several top colleges revamped their rules on early admissions,
that change is already having an impact on who gets in where.

A number of colleges let students who apply before the rest of the pack find
out sooner whether they've been accepted. But a version of that policy known
as "early decision" has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.
Students who apply early-decision are required to attend if accepted, a rule
that critics argue puts too much pressure on applicants and favors more
privileged students who can afford not to wait to compare financial-aid
offers.

Amid this controversy, Yale and Stanford decided to relax the rules, giving
students who applied early for the incoming freshman class the option of
attending other universities. Harvard went in the opposite direction,
adopting stricter rules for applying early. It now requires students to
submit only one early application rather than letting them apply early to
other schools as well.

The ramifications of all this are now playing out in the mailboxes of this
year's crop of early-decision applicants, the first to apply since the
recent round of rule changes. Harvard saw its pool of early applicants for
the fall shrink by 49%. As a result, there was a statistically greater
chance for any one of those students to get in: 23% compared with 14% last
year.

Yale and Stanford, on the other hand, received many more early applications
this year than last -- 55% and 66% more, respectively. That made it somewhat
harder for those students to get in: Yale admitted only 17% of its early
applicants this year, compared with 21% last year. Stanford took 20% versus
24% last year.

The heightened appeal of Stanford and Yale's new policies resulted in fewer
early applications to some schools that didn't change their policies at all.
Early applications to Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and the University of Chicago fell by 26%, 21% and 17%, respectively. All
three schools have a nonrestrictive early-application policy. Princeton,
which has a binding early-decision policy and takes about half of its class
from that pool of applicants, had 25% fewer early applications than last
year.

"The best applicants have been taken out of the pool by Yale and Stanford,"
says University of Chicago Admissions Dean Theodore O'Neill.

Some other top schools, however, including the University of Pennsylvania
and Brown University, say they saw virtually no change in the number of
applications and admits in this year's early cycle.

Early-application students apply in the fall, and generally get letters back
by mid-December. The rest of the applicant pool usually has to have their
applications in by January, and gets a response sometime in the spring.

Under the new early-application policy at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, called
"Single-Choice Early Action," students are allowed to apply to only one
school early. But they aren't required to attend if accepted. That means
they can send out applications to other colleges later in the year and then
compare financial-aid offers in the spring.

As competition to get into top schools intensifies, anxious high-school
students are sending out more applications than ever and have become more
strategic in deciding where, and how early, to apply. "Everybody's trying to
guess where everybody else will go," says Richard Zeckhauser, a Harvard
professor and co-author of a book on early admissions.

Mr. Zeckhauser suspects that Yale, Stanford and Harvard will be slightly
more generous with the number of acceptance letters this spring compared
with last year. For Yale and Stanford, he says, that's because they no
longer know exactly how many applicants are certain to come. For Harvard,
there are now more spots open than at this point last year, so it can afford
to be "a little more generous in the next round," says Mr. Zeckhauser.

"We've had a big jolt in the system," he adds.

Typically, many top colleges have sought to get about a third to a half of
their classes decided in the early-decision process. One reason is that it
boosts a college's "yield," or the percentage of accepted applicants who
decide to attend, a figure that has been a factor in some college rankings.
Last summer, U.S. News & World Report, which publishes a widely followed
college guide, said it would no longer include "yield" in its calculations.
Still, some college officials say that move does little to deter many
colleges from policies that lock students in early.

As for students, many who would never have considered applying to Yale under
the old system did so this year. "I thought there's nothing to lose," says
Chris Barth, a senior at Cherry Hill High School West in Cherry Hill, N.J.,
who had nearly perfect SAT scores. His application was deferred, meaning it
will be considered along with the applications in the normal pool. His
counselor, Cigus Vanni, says he had four students who applied to Yale early
compared with none last year. "A lot of these kids believe having an
acceptance by Stanford or Yale in their back pocket will give them a very
positive cachet" with other schools they are applying to, Mr. Vanni says.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling, an organization
of some 8,000 counselors based in Alexandria, Va., has appointed a committee
to investigate whether the new "single choice" policies violate the
organization's principle that early-action rules not limit the number of
applications students can submit.

Some schools say they intend to stick with traditional early-decision
policies, despite the criticism that it favors students from wealthier
families. "We're frankly not seeing that," says Karl Furstenberg, admissions
dean at Dartmouth College, which saw a 5% increase in early applications
from last year and a more diverse pool of applicants. "Our experience with
it was very good."

Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

[octo]

Abe,

You probably know that Harvard and MIT (may be Caltech) also had
non-binding early admissions for a long long time. However, it is odd
that Harvard restricts earlyers apply no other major privates.

On the other hand, Harvard can afford to do so while no other can.

"Abe Kohen" <akohen@xenon.stanford.edu> wrote in message news:<bulqbr$jj4m5$1@ID-102750.news.uni-berlin.de>...