The Ear­ly Ad­mis­sions Fray

The New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG and REBECCA R. RUIZ
Published: January 20, 2012

THE big sto­ry con­cern­ing early ad­mis­sions pro­grams this past fall was the re-en­try of Har­vard and Prince­ton into the fray. Both de­cid­ed to re­in­state sin­gle-choice early ac­tion pro­grams be­gin­ning with the class of 2016.

While those who are ac­cept­ed un­der such pro­grams have un­til May 1 to de­cide wheth­er to at­tend, pro­spec­tive stu­dents are pro­hib­it­ed from put­ting in ap­pli­ca­tions early to any oth­er col­lege. The re­sult? More than 4,200 ap­plied early to Har­vard and more than 3,400 to Prince­ton. Sev­er­al com­pet­ing in­sti­tu­tions saw their ap­pli­ca­tions flat­ten over the pre­vi­ous year, if not drop. Still, the University of Penn­syl­vania has re­served a­bout half the seats in the in­com­ing fresh­man class for such ap­pli­cants, just as it had last year. So have Johns Hopkins, Co­lum­bi­a and Middlebury.

Ear­ly pro­grams have long been de­bated. Some be­lieve they rush stu­dents to con­clude their col­lege search­es, and fa­vor ap­pli­cants with ac­cess to so­phis­ti­cat­ed col­lege coun­sel­ing. Mean­while, applicants to bind­ing pro­grams can’t com­pare of­fers of fi­nan­cial aid.

The chart here pro­vides a snap­shot of this ac­a­dem­ic year’s early ad­mis­sion sea­son, col­lect­ed from a sam­pling of col­leges by The Times’s Choice blog.

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