A while back, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Virginia caused a considerable stir in the college admissions world when they announced that they would be dropping their early admission policies.  Many hailed the announcements as a harbinger of things to come.  A desperately needed sense of sanity might be (re-)introduced into the frenzied world of college admissions.  Yale would soon join Harvard and Princeton and, once ‘The Big Three’ had led the way, the rest of the Ivy League would fall in line.  And, as the Ivy League goes, so goes the rest of higher ed.

The silence, as they say, has been deafening.

So why hasn’t the rest of the higher ed taken the plunge?

First, let’s examine some very telling admissions statistics from the three schools which made the announcements.  Last year, Harvard received 22,796 application for 1640 spots in its freshman class (that’s nearly fourteen applicants for every spot).  Harvard admitted just over nine percent of its applicants.  (If you’re wondering why the numbers don’t add up, some kids actually turn Harvard down.)  Princeton’s numbers were similar.  UVA, often called the nations’ best public university, received five applications for every spot in its freshman class.

The seemingly high-minded rationale behind the switch is that ED polices are essentially discriminatory.  That is, more well-to-do applicants, who usually have access to better college counseling, are significantly more likely to apply early than their low-income counterparts.  Moreover, since many of the most competitive colleges and universities admit a significant portion of their incoming classes by ED, there are precious few spots remaining once the regular decision pool is considered (see the example of Middlebury College below).  But Harvard, Princeton, and UVA have such cachet as institutions of higher education that they have little fear of seeing a significant drop in the application numbers.  In fact, their noblesse oblige may be viewed in such a favorable light by students that the decision could be an actual boon for the schools and result in an increase in applications.  In short, the decision will not hurt the three schools.

So, again, why haven’t other schools taken the same tack?

Well, the direct competitors of Harvard, Princeton, and UVA – the rest of the Ivy League (which, by the way, is just an athletic conference), and ‘Ivy-equivalents’, schools such as Duke, Washington University in St. Louis, or University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which,  by virtue of their selectivity, are often grouped with the Ivies – stand to benefit from maintaining their binding ED policies and not joining the other three schools.  That is, in the frenzy to be admitted to an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent (gotta keep up with the Joneses, right?), kids will be more likely to apply to, say, Cornell (traditionally the least selective Ivy League school) in a desire to secure that coveted Ivy or Ivy-equivalent acceptance.  (Yale is excepted, and Caltech, Georgetown, MIT, Rice, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, and Michigan are not mentioned because they all have non-binding admissions policies, although Yale’s is ‘restricted.’)

Another culprit is, in a word, rankings.  Or more specifically, the US News and World Report rankings.  (I will be writing ad nauseam about what a bane rankings, and especially US News and World Report’s, are to not just college admissions, but to higher ed in general, but not today.)

The fact is, selectivity (the percentage of applicants admitted) and, in turn, ‘reputation’ figure considerably in the rankings.  A college or university must be great if everyone wants to get in, right?  And even greater if the school ranks among the most selective, that is, if it says ‘No’ a lot.  As Groucho Marx once quipped, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.’

In general, selectivity is artificially increased (that, is, admit rates are artificially lowered) because so many of the most selective schools admit the lion’s share of their class by binding early decision agreements.  So, students who, oftentimes for good reason, have chosen not to apply ED to one of the most selective colleges or universities, must then take a scattershot approach and apply to many, many more schools than they might otherwise, for fear of being caught in the crossfire, thereby driving up the total number of applications at each school.

Take the example of Middlebury College (incidentally, a school near and dear to my heart; in the interest of full disclosure, I earned my graduate degree there).  Last year, Midd received 754 ED apps and admitted 261 students – a still-very-selective 35 percent.  But Midd then received 4,500 apps for the approximately 300 remaining spots – or fifteen apps for each spot.  The college had to admit about three times that number in order to yield a large enough freshman class, but still the odds were a mere one-in-five that a student would be admitted in the regular decision pool.

In and of itself, Middlebury is not the root of the problem.  But Midd is one of a huge number of ‘most selective’ and ‘highly selective’ schools that admits a considerable number of its freshman ED.  So, given these odds, regular decision students who have set their sights on the nation’s ‘best’ schools must apply to lots more schools that they otherwise might.  The overall effect is artificially low admit rates.  And the ripple effect (read, desired effect) is a higher spot in the rankings – and presumably greater prestige.

Finally, the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.  That is, while colleges and universities exist as institutions of higher learning operating in the public trust, they are also businesses acting in their own best interest.  And if maintaining ED policies serves their best interest, then they will not be going the way of the dodo after all.

An ironic footnote: An unintended effect of the announcements by Harvard, Princeton, and UVA was a considerable surge in ED applications at nearly every college and university in the nation that has such a policy – as high as 25 percent at some schools.  The logic – or illogic – on the part of applicants was something akin to, ‘I’d better apply ED now because there won’t be ED next year.”  Of course, they were applying this year, not next year, competing against this year’s applicants, not next year’s.  Students often apply ED for the very real statistical advantage it affords them at many schools; the irony is that the rush to exercise the option before it disappeared actually made it harder than ever to be admitted ED, decreasing, or even negating, the statistical advantage.

Posted by Frank Betkowski at January 30, 2007 6:55 AM

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