<p>“They had no other choice, really. If they had not gone back to EA, they would’ve continued to lose students to Yale, Stanford, MIT, and colleges offering big merit money. (The latter still occurs, but with an early acceptance to H, the merit college then has to compete for sweatshirt-wearing for 3+ months.”</p>
<p>This assumes that Harvard has to be on the defensive. That is simply not the case as they SET the tone in admissions. They select their policies wisely and do not hesitate to weigh how such policies could hurt some of their peers. </p>
<p>Nobody possesses the muscle of Harvard. Development cases do not care for ED or EA or RD. Their fate is sealed on their terms.</p>
<p>PS SCEA is by far the best early application for all parties.</p>
<p>The knock against SCEA was that it disadvantages the poor and minorities.</p>
<p>Essentially, no one followed suit when Harvard and Princeton dropped out of EA but it looks like Harvard tried to ensure enough african americans and hispanics applied EA in order to claim it is no longer discriminatory. Would not be surprised if they admit most of the URM institutional needs in EA and don’t need any in RD.</p>
<p>I would love to know about the quality of the early pool at Chicago. I wonder if perhaps HYPSM are skimming the cream and Chicago’s raw numbers reflect just the application whoring it’s been doing.</p>
<p>When I lived on the east coast some of the very top students applied early to Chicago, which was very well regarded, especially in academic circles, and having been accepted there only applied to one or more of HYPS in regular decision. It was a common scenario and made the process much easier on some students. </p>
<p>It was much easier to get into Chicago a few years back when my kids were involved in the process. I don’t know how well this strategy works today.</p>
<p>edit: much easier for students with essentially perfect stats</p>
<p>They didn’t have to go back to SCEA - they could have done regular EA - which I like just fine. It’s the single choice aspect that I hate. I think the way MIT does EA (where they commit to only accepting a certain percentage of the class - I think it’s 15% - is fine.)</p>
<p>I like SCEA a lot better than ED. My preference would be for all the top schools to agree to a modified approach in which you could apply to, say, three schools early and no more.</p>
<p>It’s actually not that easy to apply to more than three early - neither of my kids found more than two that interested them. Older son applied EA to MIT and Caltech. (And would probably have done Harvard if it hadn’t been single choice.) He also effectively applied early to RPI which had some invitational early application that involved less work and they let you know within three weeks of the first quarter’s grades. Younger son applied early to Georgetown and Chicago - all his other schools only had ED.</p>
<p>mathmom - my kid also applied EA to some of the schools in your list just because we like those odds compared to single choice. RPI is a bit odd that they have ED1 and ED II these days. It was not on our list but we had to file one because of RPI scholarship award (the medal?) after 11th grade and we did not want to diss the high school after being nominated for it.</p>
<p>My daughter’s hs here in New Jersey has a huge number of student applying EA to Chicago. My daughter decided not to apply to Chicago. She thought its supplement was too much work.</p>
<p>^My son loved the Chicago supplement. It didn’t hurt that he recycled his Georgetown essay ending it with “So did you catch me?” for the “How did you get caught?” prompt. :D</p>
<p>mathmom, what did he write about for those two essays?!!</p>
<p>xiggi,
Please explain why you think SCEA is the best bet.
What if a student does not have a top pick school?
and what if the SCEA school is a big reach, but to meet an institutional need the student must apply SCEA? to me that means they MUST see the SCEA school as their first choice, as they are missing out on a number of good opportunities to go EA at school they might like as much or more, and/or be more a bit qualified for.</p>
<p>Did Harvard and Princeton miss out on any athletes, any URM’s, and legacies during the the years they did not offer SCEA?</p>
<p>Probably not the former, since H could always do an Early Write for a recruit, but I have no doubt that they did lose a cross-admit battle for other highly coveted students, particularly development types.</p>
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<p>xiggi: I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. If H wasn’t losing development prospies (and their money), it would have no reason to go back to EA. Yale’s program gave them 3 extra months to smooze the acceptee, so by the time that H came calling…it ain’t the timing of the accetpance.</p>
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<p>Exactly my point. If SCEA is better for H then, by definition, RD is not. Thus, the competition was getting to them. :)</p>
<p>My best guess is that H and P were losing URMs, as opposed to development cases. They may have also found their over-all numbers of cross-admits with Y and S choosing those schools more often.</p>
<p>Performersmom - it was a pretty weird essay. The Georgetown prompt (for the School of Foreign Service) was to write about an issue you thought needed fixing in the world. Most kids write policy papers. My kid decided that since Georgetown was such a reach for him he would take a risky more creative approach. So he wrote a first person description of himself as an architect showing off his latest green building to the reader. The only change he made to the Chicago version was the last time and describing the Chicago skyline instead of the DC skyline. (Chicago liked him, Georgetown didn’t.)</p>
<p>I don’t see any advantage to a student to have to either come up with a first choice by October or pretend to.</p>
<p>This is why Harvard said they made the move back:
<p>They HAD to say such thing because four years ago, they claimed that EA hurt recruitment/admissions of low income students (which a few of us on cc recognized as pure spin then…)</p>
<p>You know what? There’s another explanation that doesn’t involve secret codes, nefarious plots, or anything. </p>
<p>Harvard and Princeton tried to end early admissions because they thought it was the right thing to do, from a moral standpoint. Harvard’s former long-term and then-interim president, Derek Bok, and Princeton’s long-term former president, William Bowen, had just published a book-length critique of elite college admissions, with early admission being one of the things they singled out as a barrier to poor and minority applicants. They expected their peer institutions to follow suit, but the peers didn’t bite. Harvard and Princeton (the former with more success) figured out how to work around the disadvantages of having no early admission program, but the other colleges figured out how to recruit minority and low-income students to their early admission programs, so that early admission was no longer a way to give the privileged a leg up. </p>
<p>After a few years, it was clear that Harvard and Princeton were basically alone on this, that early admissions was popular with students, that it didn’t have to discriminate against minorities an low-income students, and that they were increasingly running a sub rosa early admission program in the form of likely letters and Questbridge matching. And of course Bok was no longer president at Harvard. So they rejoined the peloton, because there was no point to doing anything else. Their idiosyncratic position wasn’t doing anything for the students they sought to help.</p>
<p>Harvard and Princeton went back to EA because it benefits THEM, pure and simple. Comments by them about disadvantaging minority and low income students was just spin for the NYT.</p>
<p>fwiw: four years ago, I predicted that they would go back to Early admissions. It was impossible for them not to.</p>
<p>I think JHS is exactly right. I think it was not at all about H and P “struggling” to get top students. It was always about H and P trying to level the playing field for minorities and the disadvantaged – when it was clear that not offering EA was not particularly helpful to those students, they stopped. FWIW, H generally beats out in cross-admits. It did with my older kid who was accepted SCEA to Yale but chose Harvard on the RD round.</p>
<p>Mathmom, too funny, my DD also was highly annoyed by the Georgetown application and refused to apply . . . she’s not exactly a dynamo on the applications. So far two submitted. Two acceptances with scholarships (not formal “early” programs). And one trophy school SCEA. I keep suggesting maybe a few more would be a good idea but she seems to consider herself done.</p>
<p>Except that there was zero data then about how EA made the playing field uneven. (And there is zero data now, just a few years later, on how it the playing field is now even.) </p>
<p>Of course, the obvious was true four years ago and is still true today: applications to highly selective schools advantages the advantaged.</p>
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<p>No doubt. But H ONLY went back to EA to benefit itself. And if not admissions, which by definition what this issue is all about, why else would they rejoin the ‘peloton’?</p>
<p>Why so anti-Harvard? I think they went back both because they thought it was to the student’s AND Harvard’s advantage. I also think it was because they were losing URMs they wanted, not because they were losing developmental admits.</p>
<p>Sewhappy not only was the Georgetown application annoying in terms of the questions, they had the most incompetent system for uploading the application. So incompetent we mailed it in - which meant finding a post office open on a Saturday afternoon!</p>