“We agree that early admission ‘advantages the advantaged,’” President Shirley Tilghman said in the 2006 press release announcing the single admission policy. “Although we have worked hard in recent years to increase the diversity of our early decision applicants, we have concluded that adopting a single admission process is necessary to ensure equity for all applicants.”
As recently as December 2010, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye told The Daily Princetonian that her office was not looking to reimplement the early decision program, largely because the 2006 change “made the application process more equitable, which was the intended goal.” She said at the time that her office would conduct its annual review of its policies in the summer.
The University’s new policy is not an early decision program, which was concluded in 2006, but rather a single-choice early action program similar to Yale’s program. Applicants who gain admission to the University during the early non-binding round will not be committed to attending Princeton but will instead have until May to accept or decline the offer of admission.
A significant concern about early decision was its binding nature: Accepted students would be required to accept whatever financial aid package the University offered without the ability to compare it to those at other schools.
Since the elimination of binding early decision — which was in place at Princeton between 1996 and 2006 — the percentage of enrolled students on financial aid has steadily increased. Of the Class of 2013, 60 percent receive financial aid — a University record — and almost 59 percent of the current freshman class receives financial aid.
Under the new system, students now have time to compare financial aid packages from multiple schools instead of being forced to accept the offer of the school to which they are admitted during the early decision process.
A priority moving forward will be ensuring that groups that were previously underrepresented in the early admission pool — such as low-income and minority students — are aware of and have access to the early action option, Rapelye said.
The change provides an opportunity to discuss “ways that we can enhance our recruitment efforts,” she explained. While Rapelye said her office’s priority at the moment is admitting the Class of 2015, in April her office will begin to determine specific ways to ensure that disadvantaged students have access to the early option.
“This for us is very much a work in progress as we think about how we can reach more students,” Rapelye said.
The University plans to continue joint recruitment trips aimed at low-income students with Harvard and the University of Virginia.
Since the universities’ announcements on Thursday, many newspapers and blogs have carried speculation about how the change might transform the face of early admissions at elite schools. Before Thursday, Yale and Stanford were the only two top schools with single-choice early action programs. Now that Harvard and Princeton have implemented the program as well, college counselors have speculated that applications to other early action programs might decline.
“Some students who applied early to Stanford or Yale would end up waiting for Harvard or Princeton, regardless of what happened,” said Sharon Cuseo, the Upper School dean at the Harvard-Westlake school in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, she said, a lot of students who may have preferred Harvard or Princeton could have decided not to apply after getting into Stanford or Yale. “I think Harvard and Princeton were losing some good people that way,” she added.
Admission employees at Yale, Harvard and Stanford did not respond to requests for comment.
While Cuseo speculated that Stanford and Yale might see a modest decline in early applications, both she and Jeffrey Durso-Finley, director of college counseling at The Lawrenceville School, said they expect the drop to be more pronounced at schools with multiple-choice early action.
“We’ve seen an increase in applications to [early action] schools across the board — Georgetown, Boston College, Chicago, etc.,” Durso-Finley said in an e-mail. “I would think that we would see a decline, especially as the new [early action] policies are single choice.”
Nevertheless, Cuseo said, the change will likely reduce some of the stress and anxiety associated with the admissions process.
“It does diminish a bit of the gamesmanship,” Cuseo said. “That’s a positive, as it allows people to apply where they really want to go, rather than looking at who has an early program and then gaming it from there.”
Senior writer Jason Jung contributed reporting.
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