Although Harvard University and Princeton University announced Thursday that they will institute single-choice early action programs for undergraduate applicants to the Class of 2016 overriding their previous regular decision offering the change is unlikely to impact Dartmouth's early decision applicant pool, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Maria Laskaris. The difference in Ivy League admissions policies may decrease the number of regular decision applicants to the College and other peer institutions, Laskaris said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"We all saw a jump in applications when the schools eliminated their early programs several years ago because a group of students who would have applied early to either Harvard or Princeton didn't have an early option and so they applied regular decision to a broader cross-section of schools," Laskaris said. "So I think [the recent announcement] would certainly depress some of the growth in the applicant pool that all the schools would see."
The decision by Harvard and Princeton to adopt an early action policy is unlikely to influence other institutions' admission programs, David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"Their decision to move back to early action is not likely to cause a lot of aftershocks in the admissions community precisely because I think a lot of the institutions who already have early action are unlikely to change anything," Hawkins said.
Institutions that offer an early decision option, meanwhile, may "not have the luxury" of eliminating such a policy because it helps them shape their incoming classes, Hawkins said.
Harvard and Princeton may have chosen early action policies rather than early decision policies to give students more freedom in the admission process, Laskaris said.
"My guess is that they do not necessarily want students to make that full commitment and want to give students the opportunity to consider other offers," she said.
Representatives from the Harvard and Princeton admissions offices declined to comment.
The downside of early action, however, is that some students may still apply to other institutions after gaining admission to the school they identified as their first choice in order to "collect multiple admission offers," Laskaris said.
Hawkins characterized single-choice early action as a "contented medium" among early admissions policies.
Laskaris said that Harvard's and Princeton's approaches to the admissions process differs slightly from that of the Dartmouth Admissions Office. The difference in policies represents how admissions officers at various institutions approach early admissions program with different philosophies, according to Laskaris.
Low-income students are less likely to apply to a school through an early decision process because it does not provide them with an opportunity to compare financial aid packages, Hawkins said.
"Colleges have less of an incentive to be generous with people in early decision because they know that they're locked in if they are accepted," he said. "It provides a disincentive for low-income students who are unsure of whether they will be able to afford the institution to apply early." Laskaris said low-income students are not disadvantaged by binding early decision programs at the College since Dartmouth offers "a very strong and comprehensive financial aid program."
The binding nature of Dartmouth's early decision policy is also not the reason that the College's early decision applicant pool is less diverse than the regular applicant pool, Laskaris said. "I think it's a lack of readiness to apply early some of that is lack of preparation in terms of schools and counselors helping students to begin to think about the college admissions process in a more timely fashion," she said. "I think if you haven't, for instance, gotten the majority of your standardized testing done by the end of your junior year, it's tough to get an early decision application out the door."
Students who are unable to visit or learn about universities early in their high school careers also tend not to apply early, Laskaris said.
Harvard and Princeton eliminated their early admissions options because officials from both universities were concerned that low-income students would not want to put themselves in situations in which they were unable to compare financial aid offers, according to Hawkins.
"The debate in the earlier part of the last decade centered around the question of whether colleges were whether deliberately or not accepting students using a lower standard in early decision because they knew that they were a sure thing, and could fill their classes early and not have as much uncertainty down the line," Hawkins said. "There were a lot of questions about whether students knew about this trend, whether colleges were doing it deliberately, whether they were communicating that to students and whether there were certain groups of students who were disadvantaged by a binding early commitment."
The universities, however, were unsuccessful in their attempt to create an "avalanche" of movement away from early admissions policies, Hawkins said.
The recent economic downturn prompted more students to take advantage of early admissions programs, which disadvantaged schools that did not provide this option, The New York Times reported.
Harvard decided to adopt an early action policy to attract top students including "some of the best prepared low-income and underrepresented minority students" who were choosing other universities that offered early-action options, Harvard Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Smith said in an interview with The Times.
The decision by Harvard and Princeton to adopt early action rather than early decision policies indicates that these institutions recognized the disadvantages that early decision creates for both students and colleges, according to Hawkins.
Early decision programs are controversial due to the admissions advantage associated with such programs, Hawkins said.
"What the research suggested is that applying early decision basically gave students a bump of something like 200 points on the SAT," Hawkins said.
Prior to 2006, Harvard offered a single-choice early action program while Princeton offered a binding early decision option.
Both universities stated in 2006 that their decisions to eliminate their early admissions programs were intended to make the admissions process more equitable, according to press releases from both institutions.
"One of our foremost goals in eliminating an early program was to encourage excellent students from a broad array of backgrounds and geographical areas to consider Princeton, and to assure them that their applications would be reviewed with the same care and attention as every other applicant," Princeton Dean of Admission Janet Lavin stated in a press release last week. "Our single admission program helped us to make progress toward those goals, to which we remain fully committed."
