Editorial: Against Early Action

We do not deny the benefits of early admission programs. In particular, instituting early admission would increase the University’s yield — the percentage of accepted students who matriculate — indeed, the yield did suffer a decline in the years following the University’s initial decision to eliminate early decision. These benefits, however, are outweighed by the disadvantages of early admissions. As a rule, the pool of early admission applicants contains a lower percentage of underprivileged applicants than does the regular-decision pool. Many such students lack either the knowledge or the resources to take advantage of early admission programs. Early admission, of course, is an asset that can provide applicants who utilize it with real advantages in the college admissions process. Instituting early admissions programs, then, unfairly advantages a particular segment of the applicant pool — the very segment that is already advantaged entering the process. The University has an obligation to ensure that the admissions process is as fair as possible, especially given that Princeton of all schools feels least the consequences of a slight drop in yield; that obligation should be honored. When the early decision policy was first abolished, President Tilghman said that the University was “making this change because we believe it is the right thing to do.” It still is. That reason is enough to justify the policy withdrawn yesterday.

If the University will offer early admission, we strongly urge it to shape such a policy in order to minimize the potential harms it may cause. To begin with, we commend the University for declining to reinstate an early decision policy, which was largely inaccessible to low-income applicants because it required students to commit to a school before they received their financial aid awards. Furthermore, we hope that Princeton will follow Harvard’s lead in accompanying its reinstatement of early admissions with an enhanced commitment to recruiting underprivileged applicants, which might at least mitigate some of the harms likely to follow. Finally, we urge the University to use the new early action program conservatively in shaping the incoming freshman class. Because students accepted through early admission are substantially more likely to matriculate, there is an understandable temptation to be generous and more lenient when considering early admission applicants. Due to the inherent inequalities in early admission, though, we urge the University to resist that temptation and try to err on the side of caution when reading applications. This step will maximize the number of slots available to the underprivileged students incapable of taking advantage of the early admission system.

Ultimately, while we regret that the University has chosen to take this step, we do maintain hope that it may be implemented in a fashion least likely to exacerbate the problems inherent in any policy of early admissions.