Since Early Decision's elimination, peers have not yet followed suit

The applications arriving at West College this month are part of the third admission cycle since the elimination of Early Decision at the University in 2006, announced a week after Harvard eliminated its own early application program. Administrators said the move balances the potential risks with a desire to allow low-income students to compare financial aid packages, while at the same time maintaining the quality and size of the applicant pool. Administrators also hoped other schools would follow suit.

Statistics show the University appears to have achieved its first goal: The shift has been accomplished without a dramatic change in Princeton’s admission rate or the quality of admitted students, and the percentage of students qualifying for financial aid has begun to rise. But the hope of leading a nationwide abandonment of Early Decision remains unrealized.

Retaining applicants

When the University announced it would eliminate Early Decision, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye acknowledged that the shift could have risks — a decrease in the quality or number of applicants, or a big change in the admission rate or yield. “It takes courage,” she told The Daily Princetonian in 2006, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

In an interview last month, Rapelye said those fears have not been realized. “Since we eliminated Early Decision, the applicant pool has continued to grow,” she explained. “We have had two record applicant pools, and our pool has continued to grow in terms of quality and quantity.”

Data provided by the Registrar support these claims. The admission rate is still at around 10 percent, even as the size of the overall student body has grown. In 2006, the admission rate was 10.2 percent, and it dipped to 9.7 percent in 2007 before climbing to 10.1 percent in 2009.

The SAT scores and GPAs of applicants have not dropped either, Rapelye said. “Last year in the pool we had more than 12,500 candidates with 2100 combined SATs or higher and more than 7,800 students with 4.0 GPAs. That was the largest in both of these categories that we have ever received.”

According to the Registrar, the middle 50 percent of admitted students’ combined SAT math and verbal scores were between 1390 and 1580. That is identical to the range in 2007 and slightly higher than the range in 2004. Additionally, the percentage of admitted students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class has remained steady — between 94 and 97 percent over the past five years.

These indicators of applicant quality have not changed much, but the number of students on financial aid has risen, indicating that the elimination of the Early Decision may be achieving its stated goal of making the application process easier for applicants who require financial aid.

While the percentage of students on financial aid stayed between 52 percent and 55 percent for the Class of 2008 through the Class of 2011, 60 percent of those in the Class of 2013 is on financial aid.

But the threat of the University losing part of its applicant pool still persists. For some students, the allure of knowing whether they have been accepted early somewhere pushes them to apply to other schools. Sarah Bluher ’13 said Princeton’s lack of an early admission program led her to apply early to Yale, though she pointed out she would have rather applied early to Princeton.

Bluher added that another student from her high school was accepted to Yale under its early admission program. “When I talked to him, he said he would have applied ED [Early Decision] to Princeton if that had been an option,” she said.

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Elizabeth Cai ’13 also applied early to Yale, though her “top choices were Princeton and Harvard, neither of which had ED.” Cai might have applied early to Princeton if it still had Early Decision.

“If Princeton was my number-one without a doubt, financial aid would not have kept me from applying ED, because I know that Princeton’s financial aid is one of the best,” she explained.

Though Rapelye noted that “there is a group of students out there who are set on applying early somewhere,” the loss of these students is not evident in the data.

The number of private school students in past Early Decision pools was disproportionately high in many years, so students from private schools might be expected to apply Early Decision elsewhere after Princeton eliminated its program. Forty percent of student from the Class of 2013 attended a private school, whereas 39 percent of the Class of 2011 attended a private school.

The early applicant pool also contained a disproportionately low number of minority students, Rapelye said, but the percent of students not identifying as an ethnic minority, 58 percent, is the same in the Class of 2011 as in the Class of 2013. Finally, representation of children of alumni has ranged consistently between 12 percent and 15 percent over the past five years.

Not buying into it

The data suggest that the University has increased the proportion of admitted students qualifying for financial aid, and that it is also not losing the interest of groups that were disproportionately large parts of the early admission pool. But this has not convinced peer institutions to end their early admission programs.

Princeton and Harvard remain the only Ivy League schools to have done so, and the University of Virginia eliminated its program a week after Princeton did, but the response from other college admissions officers has been lackluster.

Ronnie McKnight, senior associate dean of admission at Emory University, disputed Rapelye’s claims that Early Decision advantages wealthy applicants. “There are many students in our ED pool who have financial need, often substantial need,” he said. “If an admitted ED applicant’s family determines that our aid award does not meet their need, the student may walk away from the binding ED agreement.”

Different university contexts can also impact Early Decision policies. In his Daily Press op-ed, Broaddus noted that “not all highly selective universities suffer dramatic socioeconomic disparities between their early admission cohorts and the overall compositions of their enrolling classes.”

“Unless an institution fills so much of its class during the early round that insufficient spaces remain for competitive applicants who waited to compare financial aid packages, the early admission process itself imposes no barrier to low-income applicants,” he added.

Though Rapelye described Princeton’s past early admissions pools as “not balanced in terms of race or socioeconomic background,” McKnight said he finds Emory’s early applicants “diverse economically, racially, ethnically and geographically.”

“The population of admitted ED students,” he added, “rivals the diversity we see on our campus and in our regular decision pool.”

Eliminating the early admission program would be unfair to applicants who “know the university is their first and clear choice,” McKnight argued. These students would be able to finish a “very stressful” application process “in January or February instead of having to wait until April or May.”

For William & Mary to eliminate its early action program would cause more harm than good, Broaddus wrote, since “Early Decision can shorten the admission process and curb some of the anxiety about it … Waiting for regular decision neither benefits the student nor prevents a mistake.”

Broaddus said he worried the emphasis on eliminating early admission would divert effort and attention from helping low-income applicants overcome real challenges — the “lack of access to quality public education at the secondary level, socioeconomic bias in college entrance exams, perceptions of affluent cultures at selective institutions, the high cost of tuition and the insufficient availability of financial aid.”

“The elimination of early admission will no more improve access to elite universities for low-income students than the elimination of call-ahead seating would make dining out more affordable,” Broaddus concluded.

While officials at other schools remain unconvinced of the wisdom of the University’s decision, some members of the Class of 2013 said the elimination of Early Decision made the process of applying less, rather than more, stressful.

“The lack of an early admissions program made it easier for me to apply to Princeton,” Christina Campodonico ’13 said in an e-mail. “I could apply without worrying about trying to meet an early deadline, and once I applied I could apply for financial aid easily.”

Campodonico explained that since she was unwilling to apply to any school under Early Decision, “the fact that Princeton did not have an early decision program made it more appealing. I knew that my application would be viewed during the same review cycle, so I felt that my application would be on a[n] even playing field with everyone else’s.”

Connor Carreras ’13 said he was less worried about comparing financial aid packages than about commitment in general. “I wanted to keep my options open,” he said, “because I worried that if I committed to a school before I had even finished my first semester of senior year, I would regret my choice and wish I had given myself more options.”

“I had a friend who was accepted ED to a school the year before,” he said, “and by June he wished that he had applied to other schools as well. I didn’t want that to be me.”

Still, Rapelye said, as the Class of 2014 becomes the third to be accepted only in April, “clearly there is a group of students who wanted” to open those letters in December.