Decisions sealed

Princeton deans closed the book on the first round of the admission process Monday night, sending out response letters to the University's 1,850 Early Decision applicants.

The University received almost 200 more Early Decision applications this year, representing an 11-percent increase from Princeton's about 1,650-member pool for the Class of 2004.

Though Acting Dean of Admission Stephen LeMenager said in an e-mail that the University has no fixed limit for the number of early acceptances, he added that he expects the students he accepted with that first round of letters to make up about 45 percent of the Class of 2005.

And while Princeton's acceptance and rejection letters already are in the mail, other Ivy League universities have yet to conclude their decision-making processes.

Yale's admission office announced on a voice-mail message that letters will be sent "late in the day Wednesday." And at Cornell, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, administrators were working furiously yesterday to get response letters out to applicants by Friday.

"[Tuesday] is the last day of Early Action," said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, the director of admission at Harvard. The administrators at Harvard's admission office were in committee meetings all day yesterday to complete the early admission process, she said.

And, like at Princeton, the early admission pools of prospective students for other prestigious institutions seem to grow stronger each year.

At Harvard, Lewis said, 6,098 high school seniors applied through the Early Action process this year, an increase of just more than 1 percent from the pool of 6,026 seniors who applied early last year.

Though Harvard's Early Action application pool did not significantly increase, Lewis noted that this year's pool is "just as strong at least as last year."

Lewis said Harvard's admission process is very different from the processes at most other Ivy League universities. At Harvard, decisions about each applicant are made by a majority vote of admission officers whereas at most universities — including Princeton — one individual makes the final call. "No one person makes any decision . . . ever," Lewis said.

Because Harvard has a non-binding Early Action policy — under which students can apply early to multiple universities — the students Harvard accepts early are not required to matriculate. According to Lewis, however, 88 percent of last year's seniors accepted early matriculated.

In contrast to Harvard, Cornell and Penn have a binding Early Decision application program like Princeton's.

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Administrators in Cornell's admission office were also in committee meetings all day yesterday to discuss this year's Early Decision pool, administrative assistant Jessica Carpenter said.

Carpenter said 2,540 high school students applied early this year. Thirty-two percent of the Cornell Class of 2004 was admitted via Early Decision.

Penn received 2,851 Early Decision applications from prospective students this year, according to Michael Cronin, assistant to the dean of admission. This was an 11- percent increase over last year, Cronin said.

Admission officers at Brown, Dartmouth and Columbia could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Back on Princeton's campus, it is clear that the early admissions process is continuing to grow in popularity with prospective students.

But for those students who were deferred from the Early Decision pool, all is not lost. There is still the possibility of being accepted via the regular admissions process.

So students continue to tour the campus and visit West College for interviews and information sessions. Though the University's Early Decision letters are already en-route to mailboxes around the world, the admissions process is far from over.