Early admission numbers jump at peer institutions

The end of early admissions this year at Princeton, Harvard and the University of Virginia has coincided with explosive growth in the number of early applications received by other elite institutions across the country this fall.

Among the Ivies, Yale saw the most dramatic jump in applications, with a 36 percent increase in Early Action numbers to 4,820, up from 3,541 last year. Brown received 2,449 applications, up almost 6 percent from last year, while Dartmouth saw an 8.7 percent increase in its number of early applicants. Columbia, Cornell and Penn have not yet released their early application numbers.

Other selective institutions also experienced growth in their early application numbers. The University of Chicago saw a 42 percent increase in early action applications from last fall, while Georgetown received 5,925 early action applications, up 30 percent from last year.

But not all colleges that compete with Harvard, Princeton and UVa saw a large increase. Stanford's numbers remained relatively stable, receiving 4,504 early applications, compared with 4,574 last year.

The increased numbers suggest students are applying early to schools to take advantage of higher early acceptance rates even if they don't have a marked preference for a particular university. Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said she had hoped to discourage these exact kinds of calculations when dropping early admissions.

"My concern about Early Decision over the past years has been that students were not using it for their first choice," she said in an interview last month. "They were using it as a strategy."

But Rapelye said she is willing to accept the risk that high school seniors aiming for the security of early acceptance will focus on other schools.

"We literally had 10,000 students in our pool last year of almost 19,000 students who were qualified to be here, at the highest level," she said. "So what if some of them decide to go early somewhere else? We will still have thousands more from which to choose."

In recent years, the combined early applicant pool for both Harvard and Princeton had hovered around 6,000. The Admission Office received 2,275 early applications for the current freshman class, 2,236 for the current sophomore class, 2,039 for the junior class and 1,815 for the senior class.

Harvard dean of admissions William Fitzsimmons, who is on the tail end of a joint recruiting trip with Rapelye and UVa dean of admission John Blackburn, told The Harvard Crimson that the increase in early applicants at other top schools was expected.

"We all felt that some of those 6,000 students would possibly end up applying to an Early Decision school," he said. "And, more likely, we felt that they would apply to an Early Action school — and not just Yale. It could be Georgetown, University of Chicago, any number of schools."

The University announced its plans to abandon its Early Decision program in an effort to make the admissions process more fair and equitable. Early admission programs have been criticized for disadvantaging minority applicants and students from low-income backgrounds, who typically start their college search later than those from private schools. Critics have argued that such applicants are less likely to be aware of the opportunity to apply early — which traditionally yields a better chance of admission — and that if admitted, poorer applicants don't have the opportunity to compare financial aid packages before committing to one school.

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Students who apply to early acceptance programs usually send in their applications by Nov. 1 and are notified around Dec. 15. While Early Decision programs are binding, students accepted to Early Action programs are under no obligation to attend and have until May to make a final decision.

The rise in applications at peer institutions may make it increasingly difficult for universities to predict how many of the students they admit will eventually matriculate. Officials at Princeton and Harvard have said the two schools may experience a decrease in yield, a decrease in total application numbers and increased admittance rate.

In recent years, about 50 percent of the University's freshman class has been admitted early. Those students apparently faced an easier road to acceptance: 26 percent of early applicants were accepted last year, compared to 7.2 percent of regular applicants. The University accepted a record-low 9.7 percent of applicants for the Class of 2011, admitting 1,838 of the 18,942 prospective candidates.