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.

Yale’s admissions officers did not return phone calls yesterday.

With other elite schools offering more liberal admissions policies, those sticking to Early Decision programs may have a harder time attracting candidates,

Princeton University, which remained with an Early Decision program, showed a more than 20 percent decrease in applications since last year, according to Princeton Dean of Admissions Janet Lavin Rapelye. The decrease may be as high as 25 percent, Rapelye added.

Princeton admissions has not reached any conclusions about why numbers dropped.

Rapelye said the numbers reflect Princeton’s 2001 applicant levels and that the university does not plan on abandoning its Early Decision program.

The return to restrictive admissions policies puts Harvard and its peer institutions in violation of guidelines adopted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) in 2001. Fitzsimmons said that NACAC would be studying the issue further.

‘Sanity Has Returned’

This year’s decline in applications to Harvard is reflective of the potential benefits of the new policy, which Harvard representatives say is intended to both reduce the burden on admissions officers and encourage students to more carefully consider the early application decision.

Last year, Byerly Hall was swamped with applications, prompting officials to reconsider the policy. According to Harvard’s Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73, single-choice Early Action has had the “magical effect, beneficial effect of reducing numbers to a level that will allow us to pay careful and single attention to early application applicants.”

She said the “big story is that sanity has returned.”

And according to Fitzsimmons, the lightened load will allow for more care to be given to applications over the whole year.

“In general, we’ll have a lot more time over the course of the year, not just in Early Action but in regular admissions as well,” Fitzsimmons said. “Last year...at 7,600 applications, we felt we were reaching close to the limit.”

Several high school college counselors agreed yesterday that students are benefitting from the new policy.

“I would like to think that students are hearing what the schools have been saying for a while, and that is don’t rush into your college decisions,” said John Anderson, director of college counseling at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. “High schools have been worried that this huge increase in early applications was being fueled by jumping on the bandwagon and students are now deliberating more, approaching searches in a more deliberate fashion.”

According to Bruce Breimer, college counselor at Collegiate School in New York, the decrease in Harvard applications is not so much a drop as a reordering. He said that last year’s spike in early applications was a fluke, coming as a result of a “nonsensical” policy.

“Harvard is much better off for having stopped this one year experiment,” Breimer said.