Michael Goran, director and educational consultant at California college counseling firm IvySelect, also noted an information gap between these groups of students.

“[Among high-income students], there is almost a universal awareness of an early process,” he said. “It’s clear that there’s an information gap.”

The issue has been a common thread in the last five years. In 2007, when Harvard decided to eliminate the early action program, then-President Derek C. Bok argued that these programs “advantage the advantaged.”

Data collected from this year’s Class of 2017 survey also appeared to justify this concern with respondents from the two highest income categories being more likely to say they had been admitted early. The survey suggested that respondents from the two lowest income categories were underrepresented.

However, Harvard reinstated its early action program to meet the expectation of top students for whom applying early is “the new normal,” Fitzsimmons said Tuesday.

Fitzsimmons argued that further delay of bringing back the early program would have caused the College to miss out on students of all different economic backgrounds who would have applied early elsewhere.

Fitzsimmons said he did not predict that in the near future Harvard’s early applicant pools would be any more representative of economic diversity than in recent years. Still, he said that the College plans to develop more strategies and techniques to counteract the discrepancy.

“We’re going to run hard against the tide here,” Fitzsimmons said.

—Staff writer Zohra D. Yaqhubi can be reached at zohra.yaqhubi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter at @zohradyaqhubi.