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In a major break from a nearly 70-year precedent, Harvard College will not publicize admissions data on the day applicants receive their application decisions.
The move, which comes amid rising scrutiny of Harvard’s admissions practices, was posted in a late October update to the Harvard College Admissions Office website. The College will release all information on the previous year’s application cycle — including the acceptance rate and demographic data of the matriculated class — in “the October/November timeframe,” the website reads.
Faculty of Arts and Science spokesperson James Chisholm declined to comment on who made the decision, referring The Crimson to the admissions webpage instead.
The College did not provide a statement or press release at the time of the decision change.
The change is a stark shift from decades of precedent, under which the College would release information on applicants and admitted students twice per year: once with the release of decisions for applicants under the College’s Restrictive Early Action program in December, and again with the results of the Regular Decision application round in March.
According to The Crimson’s archives, the College has released some form of admissions statistics for the incoming class around the time of decision since at least the mid-1950s.
The move — which, according to the website, was decided due to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to eliminate race-conscious admissions — was made to “provide the most complete view of the newly enrolled class, reducing confusion and offering a predictable timeline.”
“Due to the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision, we are unable to access all information about Harvard’s applicants, admitted students, and enrolling students, while the application review process is still underway,” the website reads. “The new timeline for sharing admissions and matriculation data will provide clear and comprehensive information about the entire admissions process that can be compared on an annual basis.”
The College had already released admissions data on its standard timeline for the Class of 2028 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. But information on the demographic composition of the Class of 2028 was delayed until the fall — a release that was steeped in confusion as the College declined to describe, and then quietly clarified, changes it made to its calculations.
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With the shift away from transparency, Harvard joins the ranks of peer schools like Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, which over the course of the past few years have stopped releasing their admissions data on the day they send out college acceptances.
Unlike Harvard, which attributes its decision to the Supreme Court case, these schools cited concerns around the mental health of applicants who they said may be discouraged from applying due to the rock-bottom acceptance rates. All the schools still have to submit applicant data to the federal government.
In 2022 — when Princeton and Penn announced they would no longer release admissions data — Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 told The Crimson in an interview that he values “transparency” in releasing admissions data and would continue to publicly release admissions statistics.
“We certainly believe in transparency and also just the idea that people would have a clearer sense of exactly what it is to apply to Harvard,” he said at the time.
Fitzsimmons reiterated that commitment as recently as May 2024, when he told The Crimson that “the more transparency there is, the better it is for us to get excellence from everywhere.”
—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves.
—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.
