<p>Whoops, am I behind the times already? My D is a college sophomore, and all of her apps were paper way back then. Paper copies of the app/common app (with time spent writing essays unique to certain colleges), teacher recs and counsoler recs, all copied 10+ times, as well as a copies for the home file; manila envelopes and stamps purchased, SAT/ACT scores and app fees paid for each college; alumni interviews scheduled, attended, and written up for 4 of the colleges…</p>
<p>Is it different now? Do colleges print out apps and scores and put them in a paper file? I don’t know the answer to this.</p>
<p>With Harvard EA, all of the above duplicative expense, time and paper waste would be eliminated for 800 or so students. That could be about 80,000 pieces of paper that do not need to be used, mailed, reviewed and disposed of every year, as well as $650,000 or so in fees and countless hours in man hours that will no longer be wasted.</p>
Harvard mails out invitations to apply to the school by the bucket-load. They <em>want</em> that many applications, it drives the admission rate down into the single digits (thank you, USN&WR).</p>
<p>And I gotta believe that a large percentage don’t take more than 20 minutes to put in the “reject” pile, so the $75 application fee is probably making them money.</p>
<p>Quite the contrary, it WAS quite lonely on cc. I was one of the few posters that pooh-poohed the fact-free decision way back then. In contrast, the masses here drank the cool aid and rejoiced in the decision.</p>
<p>btw: I also predicted its demise and reversal particularly since Yale and MIT both said, ‘No thanks, we’ll keep our EA’. (Stanford is not in the catchment area of the NYT…)</p>
<p>Is that a fact? Why should we assume that the students who opt for the non-restrictive EA will refrain to apply to a “bucket” of other schools in the regular admission round? Why should we assume that students and their parents will stop multiplying the applications for reasonable reasons such as comparing financial aid or visiting the schools before May … and for different reasons such as collecting admissions for the trophy cabinet? </p>
<p>The reality is that there are NO perfect admission systems. All of them work well for certain applicants and not so well for others. Schools will continue to adopt the system that gives THEM the biggest competitive advantage. Harvard introduced the change partly out of courage and partly as a predatory move. The schools that followed (Princeton and UVa) might not have fared as well as the King of the Hill. Harvard’s move would have been perfect if MOST of its competitors had followed. Obviously, a school such as Yale found it easier to TALK about dropping early admissions than actually DOING it.* For others such as Penn and Duke, dropping ED would represent too much of a handicap to overcome. </p>
<p>All in all, Harvard can continue to play the game and change admissions as much as it wants, and enjoy seeing how the domino effect impacts the lower ranked schools that cling to their admissions crutches.</p>
<ul>
<li>Of course, Yale might simply thing that SCEA is the superior alternative to all others. Stanford seems to agree!</li>
</ul>
<p>While we’ll never know for sure, I disagree my good friend xiggi. Fairtest and it’s pitchman, was all over the New York Times (owner of the Globe), selling snake oil as fact (‘all early admissions is bad…’). Congress, having nothing better to do, takes the well endowed colleges for to task (gaining for themselves, free, positive PR from the NYT). Thus, I firmly believe that H’s policy change was defensive.</p>
<p>Given the huge number of applications, out-of-control cross-admits and increasingly lowering yields, I think HYPMS should all start ED and start applying a clear defined FA program for ED admits. It’d ease the overwhelming workload for AOs, reduce the huge influx of application in Dec, and increase the yield for all. That’s the way out before the crowd stops pursuing the few colleges like crazy, which looks unlikely in the near future.</p>