CORRECTION APPENDED

With Harvard, Princeton, and University of Virginia out of the early admissions race, Yale and a handful of elite colleges are reporting skyrocketing early application numbers.

Applications to Yale jumped 36 percent as 4,820 early applications flooded in this year, up from 3,541 last year.

In an effort to make admission to top schools more accessible to a broader range of students, Harvard and Princeton dropped their early admissions programs this year. These programs, critics said, gave an advantage to students from affluent families who could afford private guidance counselors.

The dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, Jeffrey Brenzel, refused to attribute the increase in early action to Harvard’s decision to end their program.

“Our early numbers have been 4,084 in 2005, 3,541 in 2006, and 4,820 in 2007. I don’t have a basis for speculating how much any particular factor explains the fluctuations,” he wrote in an e-mail. Brenzel added that the increase in applications would not change applicants’ chances of being admitted.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, who is currently on a joint recruiting trip with officials from Princeton and UVA, said the increase in early applicants at other schools was expected.

In past years, the combined early applicant pool for Harvard and Princeton had been approximately 6,000.

“We all felt that some of those 6,000 students would possibly end up applying to an early-decision school. And, more likely, we felt that they would apply to an early-action school—and not just Yale. It could be Georgetown, University of Chicago, any number of schools,” Fitzsimmons said.

It is possible that Harvard could experience a decrease in its yield or a decline in total application numbers, Fitzsimmons said.

Last year Harvard had more than 23,000 applications, the most in Harvard’s history.

Early Application numbers have risen for schools other than Yale. Georgetown, another school that released early application numbers yesterday, saw a 31-percent increase in early applications university-wide. University of Chicago saw an increase of 42 percent, and th Massachussetts Institute of Technology expects a 10-percent rise.

However, Georgetown’s dean of admissions, Charles Deacon, said the increase in applications will not necessarily translate into a higher early acceptance yield.

“There’s a high probability that we will not win a percentage of those we accept,” Deacon said.

However, the increase in early applications to Yale by individual high schools is mixed. According to the director of college counseling for Phillips Academy Andover, early applications to Yale rose by 58 percent, from 17 applicants last year to 27 this year. Phillips Academy also saw an increase in applicants to University of Chicago.

Early applicants from the Boston Latin School in Cambridge, however, did not increase significantly. Last year, 27 out of 79 of its applicants to Harvard were early action applicants. According to the school’s director of guidance and support services, Jim Montague, the number of early applicants to Yale increased from two to four this year. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

—Staff writer Arianna Markel can be reached at amarkel@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION

The Nov. 15 news article "Early Applications Increase at Yale" incorrectly stated that the Boston Latin School is in Cambridge. In fact, it is in Boston.