Stanford: Not the Harvard of the West
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On September 12, Harvard University announced that beginning with students applying in fall 2007, it will no longer offer the option of applying single-choice early action, but rather will consider all students under their current regular admission option. Similarly, six days later, Princeton University announced it will follow suit.
As members of a university community, we can easily recall our own college admissions process, whether as few as one year ago or several years ago. Many of us were accepted to Stanford under its early action policy, and Harvard’s and Princeton’s announcements have certainly perked our ears.
Both colleges announced comparable reasons for ending early admissions: in Harvard interim President Derek Bok’s words, “Early admission tends to advantage the advantaged.” They argue that early admission perpetuates the insanity and frenzy that surrounds the college admissions process, that less advantaged students are less likely to apply early because of poor advising, and, in Harvard’s case, that students confuse the difference between early action and early decision, not wanting to lock themselves in to a binding agreement that will not let them compare financial aid packages.
Several flaws exist in Harvard’s logic, firstly, the confusion between early action and decision. Each student, whether they apply electronically or by paper, has the information in front of them about the conditions of a given college’s early admission program, whether it is action or decision. If this is too difficult for a student to distinguish, should this student really be considering an elite undergraduate institution? If Derek Bok thinks reading a mailed admissions policy makes a student “advantaged,” he should realize that this should not be considered a decisive advantage in the college application process.
Secondly, financially disadvantaged students, through familiarizing themselves with college applications, ought to know the policies that the college to which they are applying has regarding financial aid. Stanford should be commended, alongside Harvard and Yale, for adopting aid programs that do not require students whose parents earn a combined income of less than $40,000 annually to pay tuition. Adopted last year, it is a strong part of a strategy to encourage more students of families with smaller incomes to apply to Stanford. If such a disadvantaged student applies to one of these schools under an early admissions program, few reasons exist for him or her to not attend the school for financial reasons.
Students really deserve to have an opportunity to express to a college that it is their first-choice institution, and from the college’s point of view, it deserves to have a way for students to tell it that in a way that ensures they have not told that to every college to which they have applied. Both of these are accomplished under single-choice early action, Stanford’s early admissions policy for the past few years. If applicants choose Stanford early action, Stanford is the only school to which they can apply before the regular deadline, demonstrating to the admission committee their strong interest. If two students are equally qualified to attend the university, should not the one who clearly has a strong interest in the school be admitted over one who may prefer several others over it?
Unfortunately, whether or not we like it, Stanford and other colleges at the same level as or better than Harvard and Princeton will have adjustments to make in response to the latter schools’ decision. Borrowing words from a college admissions guidebook, many students “who also looked at” Harvard and Princeton “also look at and often/sometimes/rarely prefer” Stanford University. As a result, many of these “advantaged” students about whom Bok speaks who know the college process inside and out, especially when it comes to early admissions, will use it to take advantage of Stanford. Those who know Harvard or Princeton is undoubtedly their first choice school will start applying to Stanford under early action because it is not binding. By doing so, they knowingly break the agreement that Stanford is their first choice, violating a condition of early action. These students enter an applicant pool where they compete against students who know Stanford is their first choice, unfairly taking the acceptance spots of students who would definitely attend our great school. Expect the early admission applicant pool to swell by a larger factor than usual next year, swamping our Office of Admissions and Financial Aid.
In order to combat this new occurrence, despite early action’s merits, Stanford may want to consider returning to early decision admissions. Early decision would protect applicants whose first choice is Stanford University, discourage people from applying to Stanford early who would rather be at Harvard or Princeton, and prevent a deluge from falling upon the admissions committee. Stanford has already built in several mechanisms that eliminate many of the concerns that led Harvard and Princeton to end early admissions, including the encouragement of low-income students to apply through promised aid.
In this entire process, we can commend Harvard for one thing: that it admits that the elimination of early admissions will exist for a two- or three-year trial period. One can hope that the trial period goes by quickly so Harvard can end its experiment, and then admit that it was wrong in the first place. It would finally relieve the coming stress of weakening its applicant pool and placing increasing admission on other schools. Maybe then Harvard will discover that these so-called “disadvantaged” students who are apparently too irresponsible to make sound judgments in the most important decision of their life, choosing a four-year institution for their college education, should really not yet be applying to college.
