| The presidents of Harvard
and Princeton said canceling the programs helps disadvantaged students
and reduces college application anxiety.
"We think this will produce a fairer process, because the
existing process has been shown to advantage those who are already
advantaged,'' Derek Bok, the interim president of Harvard, told
the New York Times.
Mr. Bok said students who were more affluent and "prepped"
for college were the ones most likely to apply for early admission,
when their chances of being accepted are nearly twice as high
as regular admission.
In addition, many early admissions programs prevent students
from comparing financial aid offerings from competing colleges.
 Other
schools continue to reconsider the admissions process.
At a June meeting, presidents of selective liberal arts colleges
debated whether to change their policies, but could not make a
decision, according to the Times. They opted to stick with early
decision.
Other institutions have decided with little hesitation to keep
early admissions. Yale, Harvard's Ivy League rival for student
talent, simply rejected the decision from Harvard and Princeton.
Stanford University's dean of admissions and financial aid, Richard
Shaw, the former dean of admissions at Yale, defended the programs,
saying they benefit students with a strong sense of their first-choice
college.
"I don't think it should be used as a strategic ploy,"
he said.
At Yale and Stanford, a "single-choice early action"
policy permits students to apply early but exclusively to their
school, though their decision can be made later in the spring,
like other early action colleges.
|
Colleges
offer admission to some of these applicants in mid-December in
hopes of locking in highly sought after students. About half of
the 400 U.S. colleges with early admissions programs couple their
offers with an "early decision" policy, which binds
students to college from which they get an acceptance letter.
"For
early programs, when you come from a multi-generational college
family, it's certainly true that you may have students that have
stronger financial backgrounds [applying] early," said Stanford's
admissions dean Shaw, but he added that the availability of information
online is changing this trend.
And
though statistics like yield and "selectivity" -- the
percentage of students admitted -- are used in rankings such as
U.S. News and World Report rankings, in the four years since the
University of North Carolina dropped early admissions, they've
seen little change in their ranking, moving from 28th in 2002
to 27th in 2007.
It's important to understand both sides in an election, and I think it will be interesting to hear the Republican opinion on big issues. As a writer, it will be my job to take that perspective and share it with the youth of the country, a crowd that mainly supports Obama.
