The Guardian Article: Yale Retains EA Policy

Applying to College
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Yale Bucks Trend, Decides to Retain Early Action Policy</p>

<p>By Nathan Edgerton
The Daily Princetonian </p>

<p>Yale has opted to stick with its Early Action admission policy, despite recent decisions by rivals Princeton and Harvard to discontinue their own early-admission programs, the school announced last week.</p>

<p>The announcement comes as a blow to the college's fellow members of the Big Three, both of which had hoped that their decisions to scrap their versions of the controversial program last fall would open the door to widespread abolishment of early admission.....</p>

<p>"We don't believe that eliminating early admissions would change the socioeconomic diversity of the class," Yale president Richard Levin said in an interview with Yale Alumni Magazine. He added that abolishing early admissions at elite colleges would actually have a detrimental effect on high school seniors.

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<p><a href="http://ucsdguardian.org/viewarticle.php?story=news07&year=2007&month=01&day=11%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://ucsdguardian.org/viewarticle.php?story=news07&year=2007&month=01&day=11&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>I can't say I'm too surprised. I personally don't like Early Decision programs, but I have no issues with Single Choice Early Action. I think all three schools will have difficultly judging their yield accurately and might over-enroll/under-enroll when all is said and done. This could create issues down the road if they are forced to compensate and accept fewer students because there is no space.</p>

<p>On a random note: Richard Levin graduated from my High School.</p>

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<p>Finally, a college with some common sense. I understand ED is an advantage for kids with wealthier backgrounds, but EA has no advantages at all. Noone is forced to attend EA if admitted, I still don't understand why Harvard dropped EA, it makes no sense to me.</p>

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<p>It should make sense: Harvard wants their acceptance rate to drop even lower...why 9% isn't low enough, I don't know, but I guess Harvard wants to jump back to #1 on USNWR...</p>

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<p>That doesn't make sense Heavenwood. Their acceptance rate will go up RD because they were filling 1/2 the class with EA acceptees. Now they will have to accept many more people RD.</p>

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<p>good for Yale</p>

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<p>Many more people? Not necessarily...they'll just make tuition free for incomes up to $70,000 or something like that...it'll balance out...</p>

<p>(yeah, didn't realize that at the time, drummerdude, but, I think my new hypothesis may have some merit)</p>

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<p>Actually, I think harvard's acceptance rate is the lowest on the US News rankings. A drop in the acceptance rate by a percent or two won't really matter. The reason why they're ranked behind Princeton is because the percentage of classes with less than 20 students at Harvard is less than that of Princeton. So basically, to bump up their ranking they need to lower their student:faculty ratio.</p>

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<p>Why should Yale drop EA? The people that were going to apply early to Princeton or Harvard are just now goign to be applying early to Yale. Makes great sense for them.</p>

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<p>Although no one is required or obligated to attend an institution if they are admitted via early action, these programs still benefit wealthier students and white students. Harvard, for example, knows that historically it yields roughly 75% of the students it admits through EA, like in regular decision. If it admits more students through EA, that means less students will be admitted through regular decision. Most of these schools have their yield models down to a science - Harvard knows that if they admit 1000 kids in EA only 1200 kids can be accepted via regular decision to yield a class of 1650. However, if they admit 1200 kids through EA, that means only 1000 can be accepted in regular decision. Students with limited access to information about college admissions (like low-income students) and students who have traditionally not attended elite institutions (like students of color) are not as aware of early action (and early decision) programs as their wealthier or white peers. Since these early programs usually have a much higher admit rate, these programs can be seen as disadvantaging poorer students and some students of color. Of course, schools could change the way they recruit students to see a higher proportion of low-income students and students of color in their early pools, but no one (meaning representatives from the schools) has thrown that idea out yet...</p>

<p>What is also particularly unfair about early action programs is that they are often times used as a barometer for some students who do not intend to enroll or consider the institution their first choice, which is supposed to be the point of early action (find out early about your top choice so if you don't get in you can apply elsewhere). These students "test the waters" at a highly selective EA school before applying regular decision to other schools to see if they have a chance at getting in to another highly selective institution. This is why Brown (who, along with Harvard, started early notification decades ago) made the switch to early decision - it started early notification to give students who identified Brown as their top choice the option to know early if they were admitted. Initially, Brown and Harvard had no restrictions on their early action programs - student could apply to mulitple schools early action (they usually applied to the two). However, when Brown realized that some students were applying early action but clearly didn't consider Brown their first choice, they switched to early decision hoping that the agreement to enroll if admitted would deter those for whom Brown was not their top choice from applying early; Harvard, at the same time, moved to single-choice early action.</p>

<p>The thing is, Harvard really has nothing to lose by getting rid of EA and neither does Yale, really, considering the size of their applicant pools in regular decision. Yale admitted way too few students this year and pulled a lot of kids off their waiting list...I think they are prepared to admit more in regular decision this upcoming year because, even if they admit 200 more this year than they did last year, their admit rate won't spike up that much (again, because the regular pool is so huge). I think Princeton - which enrolls about half its class via early decision - is going to see a spike in its admit rate unless it rangles up more applications next year. Brown isn't enrolling more than about a third of its students through early decision, yet their yield is still about 60%, so I can see them possibly getting rid of it; Penn is enrolling about half their class ED so I don't think they are going to mess with their yield by getting rid of ED - they've worked hard to get their admit rate down to less than 20% by using ED and aren't going to mess with it (and hence their big jump in the rankings over the past several years) - if they did, their admit rate would spike up.</p>

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<p>First off, thank you for sharing your perspective with us AdOfficer. </p>

<p>But comon. The "URM students have less access to information" argument to get rid of Early Action holds absolutely no water to me. Does the Internet discriminate on the basis of color? All one has to do is go to the college's website and figure it out. If URM's are smart enough to get into a highly selective institution, they should be smart enough to figure out the application process. Frankly, in my opinion it is insulting to tell URM's that they can't figure out basic, BASIC things like this.</p>

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<p>I agree. I definitely understand that ED could be seen as discriminatory, but EA? No financial obligations other than the $75 application fee (which can still be waived)...</p>

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<p>I'd like to see ANY hard evidence that URMs, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and kids from schools that don't send kids to elites don't "understand" EA/ED. Maybe it's true, but in the back of my head I know that what students like that (and ALL students really) do understand is that lesser schools and state schools will start accepting apps as early as September. Which kinda negates the "they don't know that you can apply early" line in my experience. In fact I think it's much more confusing (in my community with lots of poor, URMs, etc) for people to hear that you won't get a decision from some schools until April. Everyone at my school is used to dealing with state schools, rolling admissions schools, and other places where you expect a decision three weeks after you complete the app regardless of when that may be.</p>

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<p>Many students at high schools in lower income neighborhoods CAN'T apply early. Their overworked GC's simply cannot get their transcripts in on time. So early programs clearly discriminate against them. Early decision programs prevent students from comparing financial aid offers- so Princeton's ED, but not Harvard's EA, would be discriminatory.</p>

<p>However, and here is the hypocrisy, the major reason for applying early has been that it is easier to get in. Who decides that they will apply lower admissions standards to the early applicants? The colleges themselves. No one forces them to do this. If they find that this practice has the unfortunate effect of favoring the wealthier students who apply early, then they could simply stop making admission easier. Dropping early admission altogether is the colleges way of saying that they cannot control themselves.</p>

<p>If it were true that the only people who are admitted early and those who would be admitted in the Spring, then all that eliminating early admissions does is push the admissions date back, but maintain the same class as would have been admitted anyway.</p>

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<p>There is actually a lot of educational and public policy research out there that shows a huge information gap between students of color and white students concerning college admissions, in addition to financial aid. Patricia McDonough, Thomas Kane, Cabrera and La Nasa, Hart and Jacobi, and even research commissioned by the US Department of Education itself has pointed this out. The simple fact of the matter is that students who have the privilege to attend high schools where they are getting good college counseling know about early programs; those that don't attend these schools do not know about early programs as much - and there is a big disconnect between the kind of counseling white kids get as compared to the counseling black kids, for example, get - even when attending the same high school. </p>

<p>But this aside, simply looking at the demographic breakdown of who is actually applying early to schools indicates that black and Latino students aren't getting the message. Some of my own research in graduate school focused on this - I was appalled to see that over 85% of the kids applying early to the schools I studied were white; over 70% of these students came from families with yearly incomes over $150,000...I was not studying public instititutions, but elites (like several schools ranked in US News' top 25).</p>

<p>When doing school visits, too, it's clear that black and Latino students haven't been educated about early programs. This past fall I visited a number of elite boarding schools in the northeast - most, if not all, of the white kids understood what I was talking about when I mentioned applying early as their counselors and parents made a point to tell them about it early on in their high school careers. A lot of black and Latino students, however, were not aware of these programs; if they were, they were not aware of the "advantage" one has by applying early. I would always ask if their counselors mentioned applying early somewhere, and usually they answered no. </p>

<p>Many black and Latino students do not have parents who went to elite colleges and universities and so they are often times left on their own to navigate the application process. Again, McDonough has done a lot of work on this, as have Andrea Venezia, Michael Kirst, and Anthony Antonio (see "Betraying the College Dream: How Disconnected K-12 and Postsecondary Education Systems Undermine Student Aspirations"), and Fitzgerald and Delaney (these are all names of educational reserachers off the top of my head who have done work on college access and attainment with respect to access to information about college admissions practices and requirements - this list isn't exhaustive, but I'm not a grad student anymore...I'm sure there's more stuff out there as well). </p>

<p>sfgiants makes the point that if you're smart enough to get into these schools then you must be smart enough to figure out the process. this is not entirely true and, actually, shortsighted, particularly when considering highly talented, low-income students of color. these students usually attend high schools that do not send applications to elite colleges; if your school is your only source of college advising, chances are you aren't going to get encouraged to apply early or know anything about it. i think there are a lot of people on here who don't really understand how horrible college counseling is for these students. for those who are proactive, they can find information if they know where to look...and if they have a computer; for students who are completely unfamiliar with college and the college search, however, just figuring out where to begin is difficult. If no one in your family went to college and your counselor hasn't heard of Macalester or Cornell, chances are you aren't going to know about how to apply and may not know how to get info on how to apply until later in your senior year...</p>

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<p>As a parent of child (now a freshman in college) I agree with AdOfficer's assesment of awareness of early admission. </p>

<p>We are in the suburb public school district. From all the meetings I attended during my son's junior and early senior year on college application preparation, I had not heard of mention about early admission. My son did apply early but that was after he was informed by the GC. </p>

<p>I am not sure if it is a school's policy that GC's are required to tell HS junior/senior about the college early admission. For me, and I guess for a lot of parents, GC's are the only ones we obtain the college information from. And I know they work hard. In our school one GC works with several hundred students.</p>

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<p>AdOfficer is 100% right. It is hard for us "normal kids" to imagine the life of a disadvantaged student.</p>

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<p>I had no idea early action and decision existed when I was in high school, either (back in the early 90s)...I mailed my apps really early and one school called and asked if I wanted to be considered for early action and that's how I found out about it!</p>

<p>You'd be amazed how many kids counselors are dealing with - even at a lot of the "best" high schools in the country. In California, the average high school counselor deals with over 900 kids/year; in Texas, it is almost as high...these are states that have the highest proportion of Latino students in the country...</p>

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<p>1) Methinks this doesn't really have anything to with race, but the quality of school you go to. Why is everyone obsessed with skin color? There are plenty of us lesser income white folk who go to horrible schools with abysmal counseling.</p>

<p>2) A lot of schools (especially those that are keeping their early policies) claim that their minority and poor #s are relatively the same EA as otherwise. Now someone has pointed out that the EA numbers are largely white and largely upperclass, but they failed to prove whether that is any different from the RD round. </p>

<p>3) I can see where having less money would turn a person away from SCEA or ED (I fit into this category), but why wouldn't unrestricticted EA be the answer? But we've reached a time and age where even the poorest of the poor and the most disadvantaged in every way have access to a computer (even if only at a public library) and should be expected to do the most basic research about the application process, else they have no real business applying to the school in the first place. Do you really want to make kids wait to April to have ANY decisions this side of Big State U.? That's just not good for anyone IMHO.</p>

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<p>"even the poorest of the poor and the most disadvantaged in every way have access to a computer (even if only at a public library) and should be expected to do the most basic research about the application process, else they have no real business applying to the school in the first place."</p>

<p>how naive you are</p>