<p>Dr</a>. Michele Hernandez: Harvard Hampers Admissions at All Top Colleges</p>
<p>I don't know if this piece had been posted earlier or not but I was just curious to gauge what people thought of it.</p>
<p>Interesting article. I generally agree that Harvard has made it more stressful for applicants by not offering an EA program and that even had princeton decided to keep its ED the process would be chaos. However, I don’t think that an ED program is necessary to restore some saneness back into the process and a Harvard EA program would get those harvard obsessed kids out of the other EA rounds and likely out of the RD round if accepted to harvard. Then the only kids you have to worry about messing up the system are the kids who are looking to collect admissions, which is unpreventable unless EA colleges say that, if accepted, you can only apply to x more schools. The action of eliminating the early program at harvard and princeton was based more off publicity than logic, “bringing harvard down to the common man”. However, Hernandez also contradicts herself by wanting mere mortals accepted and also advocating for better classes rather than lower acceptance rates. </p>
<p>Given that Harvard cheats by under-accepting and then going to the wait-list (which has a very high matriculation rate), of course they are going to have the lowest rate. Although harvard deserves an enormous smack on the head, we should be most blaming US news for creating this environment where statistics count to the .1%.</p>
<p>Interesting article. Why not blame those who are applying to 15-30 schools?! </p>
<p>The Common Application is partly responsible for the clogs in the system. If students have enough money for the application fees, it is not that difficult to apply to many, many schools. Applicants often apply without visiting or really researching schools, too. I think more effort should go into whittling down those long lists.</p>
<p>Guidance counselors should do more to reduce the number of schools kids apply to.</p>
<p>I have observed situations many times in the past few years, where 4 kids from our small high school apply to college x. For one student, it is a dream school, for the others it is just a safety, and one they care little about. The school will only take one or two from this particular high school. So one or two get in, but have no desire to go there. They get in somewhere else and tell college x no. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the student who really wanted to go to college x, and was quite qualified without the competition of the other 3, whose GPA’s were only slightly higher, had no chance at all to get in, and goes to his/her safety as well.</p>
<p>Students in my kids’ class responded to this type of situation by communicating amongst themselves, and not applying to schools as safeties, that friends and classmates really wanted to attend in a bad way.</p>
<p>There are all kinds of ramifications to the current trend of kids applying to so many schools, many of them hard to trace without a lot of thought. Certainly getting rid of early decision was a factor, but students were already applying to way too many schools, before Harvard made that change.</p>
<p>And the issue of affordability, the need to compare fa packages, is a very real one. Early decision really did impact the ability to compare, and reduced any bargaining power students and their families might have had to bring to the table.</p>
<p>True, US News is partly to blame, but hey, they’re only trying to report rankings and numbers to the best of their ability. They aren’t forcing the colleges to be so rankings-obsessed. Colleges want to seem unique or the best or whatever so they do what, for example, Harvard has done. But, seriously, if Harvard and Princeton bring back their early programs, this frenzy will subside a bit. I don’t get why Princeton has to follow every single thing that Harvard does. Haha, its kinda weird. First the comprehensive financial aid programs, then the removal of early decision and then finally the change in SAT subject test requirements.</p>
<p>Early decision does have its disadvantages but what was wrong with the Single Choice Early Action program that Harvard had? Applicants weren’t bound in any way with that. Therefore, Harvard had no good reason to do away with Early Action.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Everything Hernandez is complaining about was obvious when Harvard and Princeton made their decision. Look at the CC threads from that time.</p></li>
<li><p>That said, the increased number of applications per kid and increased number of kids who face uncertainty deep into the spring affect only a tiny, tiny slice of American kids. This is a huge issue if your kid is salutatarian at her high school, with 2300 SATs, but the rest of the world doesn’t care. And I haven’t seen anything to indicate that Ms. 2300 Salutatarian is winding up anyplace different than she would have five years ago when the dust clears – except for the much more fundamental issues of affordability and chasing merit aid, that have nothing to do with Harvard’s policy.</p></li>
<li><p>Hernandez has a dog in the hunt, of course. ED programs are great for the affluent, sophisticated, and super-prepared, and her clients are by definition affluent, sophisticated (if only through their advisor), and super-prepared. So she wishes two of the most desirable schools had an ED program? Shocker! (Her call for more ED rather than more EA shows that her pocketbook is doing the talking, not her analytic faculties.)</p></li>
</ol>
<br>
<br>
<p>Report rankings? Whose rankings? USNews invented the whole concept of ranking colleges and uses it to sell a bunch of magazines. They are not merely journalists reporting some objective rankings that fell down from heaven or were released by a government panel. They are the ones creating the rankings and the mania that goes along with them.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the person who was the first editor of the U.S. News college guide was Lee Raine, a Harvard grad.</p>
<p>“Space for mere mortals would remain in the regular round.” </p>
<p>This makes little sense. The “highly qualified applicants” who are “duplicating themselves on paper” are not competition for the “mere mortals.” Colleges adjust for this phenomenon with complex models of their yield. The students the author is referring are not disadvantaged by this increase in applications, since despite their multiple applications they can still only attend one college. The number of places at these colleges remains relatively constant, so the overall competitiveness cannot increase unless the sheer number of qualified applicants does. One college or another may get more difficult to get into as its popularity raises both applications and yield (i.e. Harvard) but barring additional highly qualified applicants, this is impossible.</p>
<p>As a side note, one source of these highly qualified applicants may be those who previously couldn’t have afforded a top-notch education, but can due to the new finaid initiatives. It is these applicants, who previously may have attended a state school or merit-scholarship heavy institution, who are entering T20 admissions in droves, lowering the acceptance rates for the students the author is referring to.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Statements like this in the article make me wonder if the author thinks that the quality of Harvard’s student body has decreased due to the elimination of ED.</p>
<p>Hm.</p>
<p>
This makes a lot of sense.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not quite right. </p>
<p>The biggest financial aid reforms occurred at Princeton a few years before Harvard modified its plans. Princeton’s reforms received a huge amount of publicity at the time. If Princeton was ‘following’ any school here, it wasn’t Harvard. In fact, the most important element of that reform–replacing all loans with grants that needn’t be paid back–didn’t originate at Princeton either. Davidson College in North Carolina was actually the pioneer in that area but didn’t attract the same publicity.</p>
<p>Harvard has just now dropped its requirement from three to two SAT subject tests. Princeton had preceded it by a year and Yale by three years. </p>
<p>Only in the case of the dropping of its early program did Princeton follow Harvard. Princeton had stated its desire to do so long before that but wanted it to be a mutual decision and when Harvard jumped, Princeton was happy to join it. UVA joined in as well but few others have followed.</p>
<p>So, I’d say it’s more like two “leads” and one “follows” at least with respect to Harvard. :)</p>
<p>I agree with JHS’s analysis of the motivation of Ms. Hernandez.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>No, both were following the University of Delaware:</p>
<p>[UD</a> to drop ‘early decision’ for 2007-08 applicants](<a href=“http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2006/jun/early060606.html]UD”>UD to drop 'early decision' for 2007-08 applicants)</p>
<p>Good point about financial aid initiatives attracting more applicants. Add to that the fact that Ivies are actively seeking “economic diversity,” making explicit efforts to increase applications in economic/social groups that previously would not have applied at all.</p>
<p>“Though…the applicant pool is stronger and deeper, in reality, the number of high-quality applicants hasn’t increased – it’s just the number of applications that’s increased.”</p>
<p>To single out Harvard for the mess in the admissions process is disingenuous. There’s certainly enough blame to go around. For example: colleges that have chosen to allow students to super score their SAT’s and ACT’s have done so to increase their pool of qualified applicants. While this has allowed many more students to “meet the bar”, it has also driven down the declination rate at many institutions.</p>
<p>compmom: "The Common Application is partly responsible for the clogs in the system. If students have enough money for the application fees, it is not that difficult to apply to many, many schools. </p>
<p>I may be opening a can of worms, but here’s what happening at my son’s school, which recently qualified for Title 1 funding <a href=“http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html[/url]”>http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html</a> ; When parents are footing the bills, parents are limiting the number of college applications student’s can submit – the number varies, but it’s usually around 10-12. However, students who qualify for fee waivers are applying to 15-30 colleges because it doesn’t cost their parents a dime.</p>
<p>"3. Hernandez has a dog in the hunt, of course. ED programs are great for the affluent, sophisticated, and super-prepared, and her clients are by definition affluent, sophisticated (if only through their advisor), and super-prepared. So she wishes two of the most desirable schools had an ED program? Shocker! (Her call for more ED rather than more EA shows that her pocketbook is doing the talking, not her analytic faculties.) "</p>
<p>Thank you, that’s exactly right. This article is a load of hooey. ED disadvantages the disadvantaged, plain and simple. EA does too, though to a lesser degree because it doesn’t affect one’s ability to compare fin aid packages.</p>
<p>I don’t mind people charging what the market will bear for quality help, but come on. Advocating against a level playing field is pretty sketchy.</p>
<p>How does SCEA disadvantage anyone??!! You do know that the applicant has over 4 months to think about their offer before formally replying!! Hernandez is biased towards the rich and, in most accounts, is a total fraud (just go to her website to see the price of Grammatix lol) BUT her point here is completely valid!</p>
<p>Read what she says. She’s not arguing for SCEA:</p>
<p>
emphasis added</p>
<p>SCEA, like all early systems, disadvantages those who don’t have good advice about their chances. The opportunity to be looked at in a smaller pool, and to be looked at twice, is meaningful, even when colleges insist that they don’t give SCEA applicants a boost. The kid who doesn’t know that early programs matter, or whose high school doesn’t have its act together in time for the SCEA deadline, or who mistakenly thinks he has a chance at Yale when he really doesn’t, wastes his opportunity to get a closer read at a school he might get into. That is a disadvantage.</p>