Harvard ends EA -- Says Program Hurts Disadvantaged

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>strange behavior from both Harvard and Princeton. Neither of those schools are on my list, but I think that doing away with early admissions on a basis of the 'helping the disadvantaged' is disingenuous at best. Frankly, there should be better ways to help the poor than to trash EA.</p>

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<p>^^Getting rid of early programs doesn't help the poor so much as it removes an advantage that in practice is largely enjoyed by the rich. Hence, things are a little more even.</p>

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<p>"Frankly, there should be better ways to help the poor than to trash EA."</p>

<p>Eliminating a system that "advantaged the advantaged" is not a bad place to start.</p>

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<p>Kudos to Princeton. This is the right decision for so many reasons, and with Princeton joining the fold, it puts more pressure on Yale and Stanford. If they follow suit then I think the snowball will be rolling.</p>

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<p>Princeton Stops Its Early Admissions </p>

<p>By ALAN FINDER
The New York Times
Published: September 19, 2006
High school seniors begin a new college application season amid growing signs that the nation’s top colleges and universities have deep misgivings about the sanity and fairness of the annual admissions frenzy.</p>

<p>A week after Harvard abandoned early admissions as a program that puts low-income students at a disadvantage, Princeton followed suit yesterday, saying it hoped other universities would do the same. “I think it’s important for there to be momentum, because I think it’s the right decision,” said Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton’s president. </p>

<p>Their moves come after the presidents of Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Barnard and seven other selective liberal arts colleges, usually fierce competitors for students, also put early admissions on the table for discussion at a two-day session in June in which they voiced their profound unease about the world they helped create. </p>

<p>At the meeting in New York, the presidents said they spelled out their concerns over families’ paying of thousands of dollars for private college counselors, obstacles for low-income applicants and tactics some colleges use to rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. They spoke of efforts to drive up a college’s number of applications, so it can turn away a greater proportion of students and appear more selective, or to distribute merit aid to lure students who are top notch but not financially needy. </p>

<p>“It just feels ugly, the way it is now,” said one of the participants, Robert Weisbuch, the president of Drew University in Madison, N.J., while reviewing the sessions a few weeks later. “How do we remain competitive, which is a good thing in many ways, and yet at the same time try to make more rational and less fetishized this whole process for students and families?”</p>

<p>Patrick T. Harker, dean of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, said: “Some of the behavior that institutions engage in is quite unbelievable. There are perverse behaviors that get generated where people do things to drive the rankings.”</p>

<p>Some colleges and universities have already taken action. Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., said last month that its senior executives would no longer participate in an annual survey sent out by U.S. News, which asks university officials to assess other colleges. </p>

<p>At Amherst College, officials increased to 20 percent from 15 percent the number of working-class and low-income students in the freshman class that enrolled weeks ago. </p>

<p>The University of Delaware said in May that it would eliminate early admission. Princeton, in announcing its decision yesterday, said it agreed with Harvard that early admissions forced low-income students to commit to the university before they could compare financial aid offers from various universities. </p>

<p>“It’s the right decision for universities in terms of equity,” Dr. Tilghman said. “It’s the right decision for the high school students, for their parents and for their guidance counselors, who have found the two-tier system to be fraught with complexity, and that has encouraged a gaming of the system that I don’t think is good for any of us.”</p>

<p>Princeton’s decision will affect the class entering in 2008. In addition, each year officials from a loose association of 40 small, less well-known liberal arts colleges tour the country together, marketing their colleges as alternatives to high-pressure, high-prestige institutions. The event is known as the Colleges That Change Lives tour, after a book with that title by Loren Pope published in 1996 and revised this year.</p>

<p>“I’m not a believer in selectivity,” said Mr. Pope, a former private college counselor. “I think it’s phony.”</p>

<p>“Now everybody is obsessed with the idea of getting into a name-brand school,” he said. “The universities cannot do nearly as good a job as the colleges I like.” </p>

<p>The presidents of the 11 colleges represented at the New York meeting are discussing the creation of a statement of principles; the possibility of agreeing to reduce their use of early admission and merit aid, which is based on grades and test scores, not financial need; and whether they can commit to ensuring that at least 20 percent of entering freshmen are from working-class or poor households.</p>

<p>“Do we really need to be part of this arms race in merit aid?” said Colin Diver, the president of Reed College in Portland, Ore. “Do we need to participate in this scramble to increase the number of students to whom we say no?”</p>

<p>“I talk to lots of presidents who would love to disarm,” Mr. Diver said, “but they’re afraid to do it unilaterally.”</p>

<p>They are also considering creating a new set of statistics to measure their educational standing. The proposed standards would be available to the public, but the individual measurements would not be combined to produce an overall score, as in the ranking guides. </p>

<p>“There’s the data, make of it what you will,” said Douglas C. Bennett, president of Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., and another participant in the New York session, describing the ethos of the proposal.</p>

<p>“I dislike intensely and have been pretty sharply critical of efforts to rank institutions on a single scale,” Dr. Bennett said. </p>

<p>Brian Kelly, the executive editor of U.S. News, said the magazine’s rankings appeared to satisfy a deep hunger from students and parents for unbiased, accurate information about colleges. “I see this as a pure exercise in consumer journalism,” Mr. Kelly said. “There is a tremendous demand for this. Fortunately, we have been able to create a model that’s sustained itself.”</p>

<p>“This is data that these guys collected 20 years ago and didn’t make public,” he added. </p>

<p>It is far from clear whether the college presidents can act in concert without being accused of collusive behavior, in violation of federal antitrust laws. Two dozen elite universities signed a consent decree in 1991, in which they promised no longer to exchange information on the amount of financial aid being offered to specific students. The Justice Department had been investigating the sharing of such information as a possible antitrust violation. </p>

<p>Anthony W. Marx, the president of Amherst College, said he thought the group should initiate a discussion with the Justice Department about what forms of collective action might be permissible.</p>

<p>“Competition is important and strengthens us and can spread our net,” Mr. Marx said. “But if it’s designed to drive us in a way that’s self-serving and not in society’s interest, then that’s a problem.”</p>

<p>The catalyst for the New York meeting was Lloyd Thacker, a former college admissions officer and high school guidance counselor who argues that the aggressive strategies of corporate competition, including marketing, branding and image making, have compromised education.</p>

<p>“As educators, we would not design a system that looks like this,” Mr. Thacker said. “Colleges are businesses, yes they are, but they are businesses of a certain kind. They are public trusts.”</p>

<p>“We’ve sharpened our business acumen by confusing what is good for business with what is good for education,” he said.</p>

<p>Many of the presidents said one of their goals would be to instill in high school seniors a sense that which college they attended did not determine the course of the rest of their lives. “It’s not God’s judgment on your soul,” Dr. Weisbuch of Drew University said. </p>

<p>Not all of the presidents agree on what needs fixing in college admissions. Many of the most prestigious colleges do not offer merit aid, and some of the less selective institutions are still determined to increase their number of applicants each year, to find more good students and achieve a broader mix in their freshman classes. But many of them believe it is time to take some risks. “If we can’t behave well,” said Thomas H. Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst, “then who can?”</p>

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<p>Bad logic. The only thing that will change will be that the process will be "fetishized" in February, not December.</p>

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<p>But at that point all applicants wi8ll be on a more equal footing than is currently the case.</p>

<p>I'd say the long range solution is something akin to the medical school system, where applicants rank their top choices and are matched up with them to the extent numbers permit.</p>

<p>Applicants would get into their top choice to the extent that college deigns to accept them, and if not, then to the school ranked highest on their personal list to which they are accepted, subject, of course, to that school's diversity goals.</p>

<p>A very rational and efficient approach!</p>

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<p><em>you mean residency not medical school</em>
and the "match" is the most maligned and hated aspect of medical school as it subverts any system of an open market for residencies and allows for hospitals to continue to depress residency salaries. A more capitalistic approach would allow for nowhere institutions to compete better by raising salaries for superstars to drag them away from the top hospitals. It would probably help spread the talent in general - instead the match propagates eliteness at certain institutions.</p>

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<p>This dance of the college Presidents is really about 2 factors:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>how to admit (comparatively) less qualified but underrepresented minorities by fitting them under the "disadvantaged low income" category w/o finding themselves in court for blantant use of race as an admissions criteria</p></li>
<li><p>how to limit overrepresented/highly qualified minorities like Asians w/o appearing to put ceilings on their admission</p></li>
</ol>

<p>The elite universities who worship at the altar of "diversity" are addicted to selective color-coding and really have no idea how to move to an actual race blind admissions policy</p>

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<p>This Month's News: The Harvard Scam </p>

<p>Hi everyone and welcome to the Admissions Insight of the "bi-week," or of the month lately! </p>

<p>I've done a ton of interviews lately about the Harvard Scam. I wrote an op-ed piece (the NY Times passed on it and now I'm trying to get it published in USA Today, but feel free to read it). Since the Harvard decision is the topic of the week. I'll include a draft of my thoughts so you can learn more about the issue:
Harvard’s Bait and Switch</p>

<p>By now Harvard’s “unprecedented move” to abolish its early admission program has made headlines across the country. Back in Lake Oswego, Oregon, I turned on my computer only to be swamped with emails from scores of private clients asking what effect this decision would have on other top colleges. Of course the assumption is that if the mighty Harvard leads the way, everyone else will join the procession. Interim President Derek C. Bok maintained: “We feel that if anybody is going to step up and take the lead to try to get rid of something which is really doing more harm than good in high schools across the country, it’s us.” Harvard seems to think, egads, that their early policy provides an unfair advantage to applicants from privileged backgrounds. How noble their new policy! How timely! How cutting edge!</p>

<p>But it’s a sham. A cover up. A distraction from the real news that Harvard is desperate to hide. Sure, we all knew that top colleges took some “hooked” applicants, most of whom happened to be white and wealthy. But not many realized the extent to which these preferences were institutionalized by Harvard in a way that lent legitimacy to the process. Harvard’s secret committee is called Harvard’s Committee on University Resources (COUR), made up of Harvard’s biggest donors (Harvard’s endowment is over $25.5 billion dollars, the highest in the country.) Needless to say, children and friends of these committee members get admitted to Harvard at an alarmingly high rate. As Daniel Golden calculates in his new book, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates: “the number of COUR offspring who have gone to Harvard works out to 336 children of about 340 eligible members – an astonishing enrollment rate of one child per major donor.” Let’s just say that’s much higher than Harvard’s overall admit rate which was 9.27% last year. Does it come as a surprise that when you admit students based on their parents’ ability to raise or donate money with lower academic qualifications, they perform below their classmates? Only about 1/5 of the donor children at Harvard graduated summa or magna cum laude from Harvard at a school where more graduates earn high honors or honors than not. </p>

<p>Estimates vary, but if colleges abolished preferences for legacies, development cases, elite athletes of patrician sports like squash, fencing and riding, and faculty children, at least 25% of the class would be freed up for students who are actually qualified academically. That number is even higher -- in my first book A is for Admission, I pointed out that a full 40% of every Ivy class is reserved seating for legacies, development cases, minorities, VIP’s and recruited athletes. A move to abolish all these preferences would do much more to attract minorities and lower income children than a nod to abolishing early action which will have no impact whatsoever on the composition of the student body. The simple effect will be that rich students will wait until April 10th rather than December 10th to find out where they got in. As long as those seats are reserved, the deadline makes little difference. In the movie theater that is college admissions, the starting time doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that some seats will still be reserved even if you arrive late to the show.</p>

<p>Plus, what if tomorrow every other top college decided to abolish their early policies? Imagine the tremendous repercussions this would have on college admissions! The beauty of early decision and early action is that it allows students to apply to ONE school to increase their chances. If everyone waits until January first, every student who WOULD have been admitted early to a college will still be school-less. Therefore, each student would probably apply to 15-20 colleges each – multiply that number by the current number of 15-20,000 applicants to each top colleges and it’s easy to see that admissions officers would be besieged by closer to 50-60,000 applications every year for the same number of slots! College offices would have to quadruple their staff overnight! Think of the bottleneck – instead of one smart kid getting accepted to one college, that same student might be accepted to 10 colleges, even though he can only attend one. I can only pray that colleges won’t jump blindly into abolishing their early policies. The simple solution is to keep the early admission policy, but limit the percentage of students you accept to under 30% of the class. Schools like Dartmouth College do this already, limiting early acceptances to no more than a third of the class. It would also be a great help to make the most generous aid packages available, particularly to students with family incomes of under $60,000 to encourage low income students to apply early. Eliminating early action/decision all together will only succeed in overloading the system, leading to multiple acceptances from the same top students and squeezing out virtually everyone else.</p>

<p>There is one final injustice that should have elite colleges up in arms – Asian discrimation. When top colleges recruit minorities, they tout statistics like “30% of our campus is made up of students of color.” Here’s the best part – almost 18-20% of these students are Asian! But Asians get zero minority preferences – in fact, Asians have to be 50-100 points higher than their white counterparts to get accepted in the first place, yet they are counted as “of color.” Would that color be yellow? What kind of diversity measures itself by melatonin levels and has the nerve to count one group as a color, the very group that gets no benefit at all from minority recruiting. Why aren’t Asians outraged? Why aren’t all of us?</p>

<p>If Harvard wants to be a leader in attracting low income and minority students, they simply have to do better. Yes, lead the way, but do so in a substantive manner, not in a pussyfooted maneuver to draw attention away from the rich white children it woos every year who occupy the seats of their low income brethren.</p>

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<p>
[QUOTE]
Harvard’s Committee on University Resources (COUR), made up of Harvard’s biggest donors (Harvard’s endowment is over $25.5 billion dollars, the highest in the country.) Needless to say, children and friends of these committee members get admitted to Harvard at an alarmingly high rate.

[/QUOTE]
</p>

<p>
[QUOTE]
The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates: “the number of COUR offspring who have gone to Harvard works out to 336 children of about 340 eligible members – an astonishing enrollment rate of one child per major donor.” Let’s just say that’s much higher than Harvard’s overall admit rate which was 9.27% last year.

[/QUOTE]
</p>

<p>Wow! This is pretty high number.</p>

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<p>Byerly is probably right in predicting a match system. The main reason is it simplifies the process for the institutions (bottom line: it saves money and time). It also rewards the people who are in the most competitive place (bottom line: Harvard will stand out much more from its current main competitors. Money, convenience, and power. What a great thing!</p>

<p>As someone who has gone through a match system (that's how I got into Harvard in fact) I think it is worth reporting its positive and negative sides.</p>

<p>How it works
Applicants rank the places they would like to go in exact order (1 is X, 2 is Y, etc). Though it can be based on any system of preference, I assume what will happen with real applicants will often look like the lists we see on CC. Typically some sort of HYPSM etc. The institutions match each of their applicants also in order, based on any criteria they want to use.<br>
Neither the applicant or selection committee know each other's rank orders. It is all done by computer. So, for example, if you put Princeton third, Harvard second, and Stanford first and got into Stanford you don't know if you got into Harvard or Princeton.</p>

<p>Positive</p>

<ol>
<li>It makes it easier to apply. You can apply to 100 places almost as easily as one.</li>
<li>It "appears" more objective. Everyone had to fill out all of this vastly detailed info about everything they had ever done in their life basically, plus right a bunch of specific essays (alot), plus send in a very specific list of additional materials. </li>
<li>You knew exactly when you will find out. It can be wierd thought, since in some match systems you learn first if you have matched with any place and only later find out where. This is supposed to allow people and schools who didn't get their matches to prepare for the second round (see below about the second round, which tends to be pretty unpleasant).</li>
<li>You don't know what places you did or did not get into. You only know the one you matched with. This does diminish the competitiveness of the process a bit (but it increases it some other ways, see below).</li>
<li>For reasons that I still don't quite understand, most people get one of their top matches in this system. Same for most selection committees.</li>
</ol>

<p>Negative</p>

<ol>
<li> This is the biggest one. Many people ended up at places they did not wan to be, since the match system is binding. In particular, I found that <em>many</em> (in my sample MOST) people at Harvard who I was with only were there because it was Harvard and they knew it would help them for other purposes (e.g., the next phase of their career). They did not appreciate what Harvard had to offer them. I actually did appreciate it, but it was not fun to be with alot of the other people who kept complaining while also bragging. Yuck.</li>
<li>As noted, there is a "second round". You can fail to "match" anywhere if you don't play the game right. This is also possible for admission committees too. It leads to loads of crazy tension right after the match. Plus lots of stupid mistakes and regrets. Guess who will have the good side of this bad situation, the insitution or applicant in the best position in the competition. Among undergrad programs this is clearly Harvard. Great for Harvard, but not necessarily great for most applicants or most colleges.</li>
<li>The second round is humiliating. Everyone knows you didn't make your first match. Second round people are treated worse.</li>
<li>There is much less room for any negotiations. You are in or out. You can't say "I also got into another place that offered me more money, so can you increase my aid a little bit to match?" This is not good unless there is a universal standard of student aid that all agree to.</li>
</ol>

<p>That's my view of the match. I don't mean to sound sour about it (I did well, and got my first match as do many strangely enough). But I wanted to warn people what they might be facing. </p>

<p>As I said, I think there is a good chance this system will be coming soon to college and graduate school admissions. And that's because it is convenient, cheap and helps those who are already doing well.</p>

<p>Right now it is limited to only some professional programs, of which the best known is medical residencies).</p>

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<p>I call BS. No professional consultant would actually find it "astonishing" that people give buildings to Harvard in order to get their kids in, or that this tactic works. S/he's really trying to say that s/he disapproves of that system, which is fine, but unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple of centuries, it's not news that giving $10 million+ to any private institution wins you special privileges at that institution. Big whoop.</p>

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<p>The match system interestingly described in post #192 is based on the "perfect marriage" algorithm (which was actually developed mathematically and formally proved after the match system was first used for medical residencies). It is provable, by going back to first mathematical principles, that there is no better way to maximize the number of applicants who are happy with the choice they obtain. (Google about the "perfect marriage algorithm" or other related search terms.) If an applicant learns, after attending a program, facts about the program unknown to that applicant beforehand, that would goof up any system of placing applicants in programs. It is most prudent to research programs well in advance, to avoid sour grapes.</p>

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<p>Well, personally, I don't think it's very helpful since Early often helps bring down people's stress, but now if they decide to do this, it does keep the stressing lower?</p>

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<p>For every applicant who's "stress" is brought down, there are three or four for whom the stress level is heightened immeasurably.</p>

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<p>"I don't think it's very helpful since Early often helps bring down people's stress, but now if they decide to do this, it does keep the stressing lower?"</p>

<p>EA brings stress down only for the lucky handful who get in. The vast majority who are deferred get double the stress, since they get to go through two admission/rejection cycles instead of one.</p>

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<p>"EA brings stress down only for the lucky handful who get in. The vast majority who are deferred get double the stress, since they get to go through two admission/rejection cycles instead of one."</p>

<p>Thanks scipio - this speaks for the majority of parents and students applying for EA/ED!</p>

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<p>Ending early decision or single choice early action will not change the fact that certain categories of not as qualified applicants get accepted to Harvard and other ivy league schools. Ending early decision or SCEA will not stop legacies, recruited athletes, development cases, celebrities and others who give substantial amounts of money to these schools from getting accepted while other applciants who may have higher SAT scores, grades, class rank, better extra curricular involvement ect, may not. During the regular decision round Harvard and others can and most likely will continue to take these applicants. Recriuted athletes will get the benefit of applying early without actually doing so as they will receive letters shortly after their application is filed indicating that they will most likely be accepted and asking them to commit to the team. Legacies whose families have given large amounts of money to the school will probably receive likely letters as well giving them the benefit of knowing early. Applicants in the other categories that get special consideration will find out in the spring like the rest of the other applicants however eliminating early decision will not result in a changing of the schools posiition towards these categories.
Harvard and the other ivy leagues need to balance the classes and make them diverse. It is more likely that Havard and others will accept these lesser qualified but connected candidates in the regular decision pool (if their is no ED or SCEA) and accept applicants from different backgrounds and geographic areas to make a diverse class, while waitlisting a large number of white middle class applicants. Irregardless of whether there is ED, SCEA or not, the white middle class applicant probably will see no benefit from the change from eliminating early decision or SCEA.</p>

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<p>Probably mostly true. As stated by Harvard, getting rid of EA was designed to help even the playing field for disadvantaged students. Middle class kids are not usually "disadvantaged."</p>