EARLY APPLICATIONS AT HARVARD

Early applications to Harvard fell by almost 50 percent this year from the record-high 2002 level, a drop attributed to new restrictions preventing candidates from simultaneously applying early to other colleges.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said that preliminary estimates place the number of applications at around 4,000, down from last year’s record high of 7,615.

Fitzsimmons said this year’s drop is due entirely to a change in application policies that reinstated pre-1999 restrictions on early applicants, after several years of looser early application policies.

This year, Harvard offered a “Single-Choice Early Action” plan that is non-binding but prohibits students from applying early to other schools.

From 1999 through last fall, the College permitted students to apply to multiple Early Action programs. Last year, policies were at their most liberal, as students could apply to Harvard, other Early Action schools, and one binding “Early Decision” program.

Early applicants to Harvard swelled during that time, soaring 24.3 percent last year.

According to Fitzsimmons, this year’s application numbers were consistent with pre-1999 levels.

He said it’s hard to compare the application numbers for the years leading up to 1999 to now because times and peer institutions have changed.

Despite the dramatic nature of the decline in early applications, Fitzsimmons said he anticipated, and even welcomed the drop.

“It’s a return to an era in which people will be much more thoughtful about what they are doing early,” he said. “We hope they’ll spend the whole senior year thinking about where they want to be instead of making this rush judgement.”

Fitzsimmons said he could not predict how the decrease in applications will affect admission rates for the early applicant pool. While the pool nearly doubled over the past several years, the number of students admitted early stayed near 1,000.

Harvard isn’t the only highly selective school to see its early application figures change markedly this year.

Early applications to Stanford University soared by nearly 62 percent, surging from last year’s 2,468 applications to around 4,000 this fall.

Stanford and Yale, like Harvard, both switched to “Single-Choice Early Action” programs this year. But as both schools had previously offered Early Decision programs, the change had a liberalizing effect on their policies.

“The fact that we’ve received over 1,500 more applications than last year suggests that our new Early Action option more closely matches the needs and desires of our applicant pool than did our old Early Decision program,” Stanford Dean of Admissions Robin Mamlet said.