<p>Harvard</a> Examining Early Admissions | The Harvard Crimson</p>
<p>It’s probably not going to change.</p>
<p>^why do you say that? The article says UV reintroduced early action, so why wouldn’t harvard consider an EA program again?
I think Harvard is probably missing many quality candidates who prefer to get notified in December. Even though they are certainly getting a huge number of extremely qualified applications, they are certainly missing all those applicants applying and getting early to other schools who might choose to apply to harvard given the opportunity.</p>
<p>My question is, is it best to do a SCEA or just EA? If enough schools do EA (UVA, MIT, Chicago, Harvard), Yale and Stanford will lose a lot of early applicants. Perhaps in five years, EA will be the big thing at all the major Universities. What does everybody else think?</p>
<p>I wish Harvard had an early action program</p>
<p>
Even if Stanford/Yale lose many of those applicants, the applicants that they retain would probably want to be at Yale/Stanford more so than the other students. I think colleges would be better served to use SCEA rather than EA. SCEA is almost like ED, except that its not binding. Students who apply SCEA are giving up applying to a lot of other good schools, so I suppose colleges would rather institute that program. SCEA also has a higher yield than EA.</p>
<p>@luceverita, As seen by the article, it is obvious that Harvard is looking at possible initiation of EA, I didn’t say they weren’t. But just because Virginia did it, that means Harvard will do it? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>The reason I feel like this is because of the fact that there hasn’t been much noise on Harvard’s part, or sentiments saying they felt like they were losing top applicants to other schools. If some students truly had a desire to apply to Harvard if given the opportunity, they wouldn’t apply ED elsewhere. I think the whole goal of eliminating ED was to diversify the applicant body, which has been achieved. I would be surprised if Harvard reinstated the ED program.</p>
<p>Of course harvard will not reinstate EA just because Virginia did it, but originally only harvard, princeton and virginia abandoned their early policies. The fact that Virginia goes back to it means they did not achieve whatever objective they had.
Again, I think the absence of an early program at harvard is hurting it because such programs exist in places like Yale or Stanford. A lot of the credible applicants to Harvard must be applying to either of these schools under their early policy. The fact of being involved early with a school creates a bond that Harvard no longer can achieve. Also, admissions being so unpredictable, some applicants may choose a safe path by applying ED elsewhere and Harvard will simply never see these applications. I do not want to be provocative, but I wonder if the quality of the applicant pool hasn’t overall declined after Harvard dropped its early program?</p>
<p>The elimination of Early Decision was an institutional initiative to create a more equitable admissions picture with the single-date deadline. Students with more advantaged backgrounds disproportionately took advantage of the option, which tended to excessively work against the favor of those less advantaged backgrounds. The classes of 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 entered/will enter under the lone-date deadline, but Harvard explicitly stated in its press release published at the commencement of the practice that it would reconsider early admissions (in one of its varieties) for the sake of preserving the overall caliber of its student body after a brief pilot run.</p>
<p>I feel that Early Decision is almost certainly a vestige of the past for Harvard, though Early Action and Single-Choice Early Action remain potential candidates. The latter would perhaps being the most likely if it decides to reinstitute the procedure.</p>
<p>For those students whose first choice is Harvard (or Princeton) , it would be nice to have the option to apply early and actually (hopefully) be done with the process by Dec rather than applying early to a second choice just to be “in somewhere” but then still also applying to Harvard (Princeton) for a shot at your first choice too.</p>
<p>I don’t imagine that H is losing too many potential students to Yale or Stanford’s SCEA programs. Those programs are not binding and if a student is admitted under one of the programs they can still apply to H with the pressure off. So, if they are the type of student that is not truly in love with Y or S to start with, they will apply to H to see what their options are for the May 1 decision date. If they were in love with Y or S to begin with, then any type of EA/SCEA/ED program by H would not attract them. At the end of the day H still handily wins the cross admits with both of these (and all other) schools so they are getting the majority of those who are open to multiple schools.</p>
<p>Do you have any recent data regarding cross admits ? I am curious to see how it evolved since Harvard dropped it’s early program</p>
<p>
Why would an applicant waste their chance to apply early at Stanford or Yale if they truly weren’t in love with the school?</p>
<p>I think Harvard loses many potential students to Stanford and Yale’s early programs. The two programs have a very high yield, so I think the cross admits Harvard gets from these schools are mainly from RD.</p>
<p>
Harvard has the edge on cross admits, but I don’t think they win them ‘handily’. Like luceverita, I’d also like to see data on this</p>
<p>I, for one, think it would be a good idea for Harvard to reinstate EA, though preferably in the SCEA form. However, it without implementing outreach programs to those who are ignorant of such programs - I know that when I was applying to colleges, I had no idea about EA/ED/SCEA application cycles, and no one who was in my information network did either - it will result in the same groups taking disproportionate advantage of the process as before.</p>
<p>32% of the yield loss that Stanford had this past year was to Harvard. If you work through the numbers you will see that Harvard won the cross admits. [Stanford</a> hopes to close financial-aid deficit in four to five years, Hennessy tells Stanford faculty | Stanford Daily](<a href=“http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/10/08/financial-aid-deficit-may-persist-four-to-five-years-hennessy-tells-stanford-faculty/]Stanford”>Stanford hopes to close financial-aid deficit in four to five years, Hennessy tells Stanford faculty)</p>
<p>^Thanks for the link.
True, but only a small percentage of those cross admits were from Stanford’s SCEA.</p>
<p>If either EA or SCEA for Harvard existed, I would definitely have applied.</p>
<p>An EA option would make it much more appealing to me also. I am applying RD, but I obviously don’t expect to have a huge shot at getting in. It’s just daunting to think that out of 30,000 applicants, they can somehow whittle that number down to 2,000 in one fell swoop. Not that it would improve my chances, but I would have much more peace of mind knowing that my application is being submitted within a significantly smaller pool of EA applicants. And if I was accepted early, I would definitely reduce my number of applications to other places, if not withdraw them altogether. For Harvard, I think that most EA acceptances would be just as good as ED in terms of students actually deciding to come.</p>
<p>There’s little question that early admissions programs “advantage the advantaged” and, as a philosophical matter, I know that Bill Fitzsimmons does not want to reinstitute one. But when Harvard did away with their early action program, they expected a number of other top schools to follow. Princeton and Virginia did so immediately, but then Yale, whose president was previously on record as being of the same mind, saw a market opportunity to grab students whom they had been losing to Harvard and Princeton. So the ever-flexible Levin did a 180 and announced they were keeping their early action program. That gave Stanford the cover to keep its early action program and the “groundswell” ended at three. Fitz continued to hope he could persuade others to join the fold eventually, but at this point it’s pretty clear that it ain’t happening. </p>
<p>Harvard’s admissions numbers haven’t been too hurt by it, but I know they’ve lost some students they otherwise would have gotten. My guess is that Virginia was more hurt, which would explain why they threw in the towel. I think the writing is on the wall and that Harvard and Princeton will eventually go back to early admissions programs as well. Just a matter of when. In my mind, not a good development, and I place the blame at Rick Levin’s feet.</p>
<p>I did the math from the link provided by cltdad.
If my understanding of the artcle is correct:
in the class of 2014, there were 17% crossadmits with harvard = 397 students
The yield was 71.6%, thus 665 admits decided not to enroll at Stanford.
Out of these, 32% chose to go to Harvard = 212 students
Therefore, from the 397 crossadmits, 212 went to Harvard=53%, or 47% chose to matriculate to Stanford.</p>
<p>In the [predicting</a> student choice](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html]predicting”>The New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Collegiate Matchups: Predicting Student Choices) article published in the nytimes back in 2006, only 27% of the crossadmits stanford/harvard chose to matriculate to stanford.
The figure therefore jumped from 27 to 47%.
There must be many reasons to this increase. How much of it can attributed to Harvard dropping its early program ?</p>