Yale Early Action here to stay, questionable justification

09 Jan

Posted by Sam Jackson as Admissions, Exeter

As covered by the Yale Daily News, Yale University has elected to continue its Early Action program.I’m not sure I like their reasoning.

The decision was made by weighing the benefits of joining Harvard, Princeton, UVA etc. vs. sticking it out with MIT and Stanford (who both vowed to keep Early). Opinions of those watching the decision were rather mixed (Decision to keep early action earns mixed response, YDN).

The University made the right strategic decision to maintain its early option after Harvard and Princeton discontinued theirs, said Chuck Hughes, president of the college admissions counseling firm Road to College and a senior admissions officer at Harvard from 1995 to 2000. Many of the students who would have applied early to Harvard or Princeton will likely apply to Yale, said Hughes, who predicted that Yale will see a 25 to 50 percent increase in early applications next year.

Hmm, Chuck makes it sound like Yale was just looking out for #1. What about all those poor students who didn’t have the resources or know-how to apply early, the ones that Harvard and Princeton claim to be helping?

“This provision provides students the option of expressing a preference for Yale, while freeing them from the pressures associated with binding early decision programs,” he [Brenzel] said.

Because students admitted under early action are not required to accept the school’s offer until May, Brenzel said, applicants from low-income families are able to compare financial aid offers before making a decision about where to go to school. Since switching from early decision to early action in 2002, Yale has seen an increase in the number of financial aid students who apply early, Levin said. [YDN]

On the first point, couldn’t there just be some sort of standardized “first preference” checkbox on the common application? A standardized agreement which says: this school is my first choice school. Legally the signer would be obliged to send this form to only one school, but it would be completely nonbinding (assuming this is a new fantasy world where early programs do not exist). On the second point, might it not see a greater still increase if it dropped its EA entirely? I’m not really feeling convinced that Yale has the high ground when talking about whats best for applicants, particularly lower-income applicants.

An interesting problem that is on many people’s minds here at Exeter: the very best applicants poaching spots from multiple schools if they apply regular everywhere and thereby creating admissions chaos. I’ve had more than a few people, after congratulating me, express their happiness that I won’t be competing with them for slots at other schools. I’m not even the archetypal ’spot-stealing’ student, either–it’s just one fewer competitor.

In conversations with Yale admissions officers, high school counselors and administrators also expressed concern that eliminating early admissions might lead to more competitive students receiving multiple offers from top- and second-tier schools that would otherwise have gone to other students, Levin said. [YDN]

Am I happy that I had an Early Action acceptance last month? Absolutely. All the same, I don’t feel that the system can’t be improved here somehow. My real question, which I haven’t seen adequately answered by anyone at Harvard or Princeton or UVA or elsewhere, is just how eliminating early programs reduces college stress. ‘Starting the process early’ isn’t a big concern, since it’s just one application. If anything, starting the process early with just one school is a good way of ‘easing in’ to the college admissions process. There are some stress-relieving factors that would come up if everyone had only regular decision, but I think that the looming fears and threats of super-applicants applying to more and more schools might counterbalance that relief–and then some.

4 Responses

James

January 10th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
1

Checking the first choice college seems like a bad deal for students who are applying to more than one school. Presently, many students do not apply anywhere early, and colleges that receive regular applications cannot easily separate the students who have applied early to other institutions from students who haven’t. This maximizes the proportion of students selected for merit, not hunger for the spot.

A bigger concern is that elite schools might virtually stop admitting anyone who doesn’t mark them as 1st. Yale will suspect that a perfect applicant wants to go to another elite school(she might and she might get rejected from that different school and have Yale as her second choice). Yale will then likely reject her. I suspect that the check-system would limit top students to having a realistic shot at only one top school, even more so as demographics continue to swell the applicant pools.

Granted, early admissions system does the same thing. However, it does so on a much smaller scale (at a lot of top schools the class is about 33-50% EA/ED, versus what I expect would be a much higher percentage 60-90% under a check-system).

So your alternative would make things less fair for every applicant in at least one dimension, but perhaps would be better for applicants in difficult financial situations. It isn’t readily apparent which is worse.
Sam Jackson

January 10th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
2

Robert– I’m not in favor of such an interest-demonstrating system necessarily for just the sort of reasons you cite. However I feel that it could be a more accessible standardized metric of intreest than ea/ed so far as preference is concerned for the lack of F.A. barriers . A counter to the argument that there exists no other hypthetical indication of interest and a scenario which undermines some of those ea/ed arguments. : )

Also! I’ve posed the question “what do we think?” to the Yale 2011 kids, I’ll try to make a post about the responses once I get a few more.
Observer

February 3rd, 2007 at 10:23 am
3

What do you make of the overall 9.7% decline in applications to Yale this year, even as app numbers were rising at most elites? Regular round apps were down 8%, after SCEA apps declined 13% compared to numbers for the Class of 2010.
Sam Jackson

February 7th, 2007 at 10:36 am
4

Hmm, well, I’m only in a position to speculate as I don’t know what’s in the ‘black box’ of marketing and institutional cachet that would result in the downturn, I don’t know what’s expected or predicted as year-to-year fluctuation. The important thing, as the YDN pointed out, is that ‘2000 fewer thin envelopes in the spring won’t result in a worse class.’ I just don’t know where those fewer applicants are coming from, I am curious and worried about who might have been discouraged from applying. We’ll see soon enough, I suppose.

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