Trying to Make Sense of College Admissions Early Decision Reforms
The early-decision process at colleges has been troubled for some time, and colleges might be reforming their system. The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote about this five years ago: "Everyone involved with the early-decision process admits that it rewards the richest students from the most exclusive high schools and penalizes nearly everyone else."
Early decision programs helped colleges increase their rankings in the annual U.S. News and World Report Survey by increasing their selectivity and yield. While publicly dismissing the importance of the U.S. News survey, colleges will do anything in their power to improve their rank. Universities are concerned with looking good on paper just as much as their applicants are.
My own grad school, the GWU School of Business, is trying to get a better ranking. Initially, this would theoretically improve my chances of getting a better job after graduation, but the Atlantic cited studies showing that a few years out, pay is merit-based.
Didn't some Ivies just change their early decision processes a few years ago in response to the Fallows article? In 2002, Yale and Stanford, but not Princeton, eliminated binding early admission, as if lots of students, once into the school of their choice, would then opt to fill out additional college applications. Harvard never had a binding early admissions process, but it didn't need to, since it won in most cases.
The University of Delaware elimintated its ED program in June 2006, but since they are not in the Ivy League, nobody noticed. On June 15 2006, a group of liberal arts college presidents gathered in New York to discuss admissions reform. Since the meeting was private, we don't know for sure what the results will be.
This fall, Harvard is eliminating its early decision process, and other schools are following, maybe. The NYT's David Leonhardt reported, "Officials at Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale, for their part, suggested last week that they had no immediate plans to make a change." (Sept. 17 2006) The next day, Princeton ended its binding early admissions program, according to the AP.