The Early-Decision Racket

With no change in faculty, course offerings, endowment, or characteristics of the entering class, the college will have risen noticeably in national rankings. He didn't add what his college's own figures show: the yield for regular admissions had been steady in that time. Preparing students for SATs and related tests is the basis of The Princeton Review's and Kaplan's success. The answer I remember best came from a sophomore at Harvard-Westlake, Tom Newman, a curly-haired, open-faced boy. Back in college crossword. "I can't think of one secondary school counselor who sees the benefit of the program. Rosters of Nobel laureates or top leaders in any industrial field demonstrate that admission to a selective school is not necessary for success.

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Fortunately, though, the same hierarchy that skews the system could make a difference here. Without it the test-prep industry, private schools, and suburban housing patterns would all be very different. Not because we think they're that relevant but because we don't want to slip in the rankings. If the right few colleges agreed, that could be enough. American Presidents of the past half century have included two from Yale; two from the service academies; one each from Harvard, Southwest Texas State, Whittier, Michigan, Eureka, and Georgetown; and one (Harry Truman) with no college degree. This, too, is a realistic figure for most top-tier schools. "Because it is an annual activity, admissions is one aspect of university life where you can have a more immediate impact on the character of an institution than you can in the long-term process of building academic programs. Back in college crossword clue. I was the editor of U. This was part of Penn's strategy in pushing its binding ED plan. Under the old system, he told me, trophy-hunting students would "collect a lot of admissions from places that were not their first choice, and would take up the space that might have gone to other students. "

Sample question: "Have you visited the college that you like more than any other college? When Stetson first visited the Harvard School, a private school for boys in California's San Fernando Valley, he found that few students had even heard of Penn. But Georgetown also benefits from the fact that its nonbinding program attracts applications from some talented students who start out considering the university a "safety school" but end up deciding to enroll. High school counselors, most of whom take a dim overall view of early decision (but also master its nuances in order to get the right edge for their students), admit that for some students in some circumstances it can work just right. The increased emphasis on SAT scores shows the same thing. "It's all about Harvard, it really is, " Mark Davis, of Exeter, told me. The other dates on the college-prep calendar must also be moved up. At Scarsdale High students who have been accepted to very selective colleges under early action may submit at most one other application during the regular cycle. The Early-Decision Racket. "Years ago many children of alums were not viewing Penn as their first choice, so they didn't apply early, " he said. In 1978 Willis J. Stetson, known as Lee, became the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is leaving the counseling business to enter a more relaxed field—nuclear-weapons control. But for the great majority, no. In the regular decision process, which most students still follow, students spend the first semester of their senior year deciding on the group of colleges—four, six, thirty-three in one extreme case I heard about—to which they wish to apply. "We put on our 'spring hats, '" he told me recently, "and if there is someone we are absolutely sure we will admit in the spring, we make the offer in the fall. "One thousand would say no. "What's interesting is that from the start competitive considerations among colleges seem to have been the driving force, " Karl Furstenberg, of Dartmouth, says. The system exists, and it rewards those who are willing to play the game. In practice it largely keeps people with an early acceptance at Harvard from clogging the system at Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. ) For the rest, Penn was the place that had said yes when their first choice had said no. Admissions fees were waived for students who used the form. A similar-sounding but different program is called early action, or EA. Backup college admissions pool crossword clue. Below this formal structure lies a crucial reality, which Penn is almost alone in forthrightly disclosing: students have a much better chance of being admitted if they apply early decision than if they wait to join the regular pool. News should ask for, and separately report, early and regular totals for selectivity and yield.

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If those eight colleges made a decision, others at that level would have to follow. " Early decision distorts high school mainly by foreshortening the experience. Backup college admissions pool crossword puzzle. If after five years schools for some reason missed the early system, they could return to it with a clearer sense of why they were doing so. But individual schools felt powerless to do anything about it. A counselor at a private school that has long sent many of its graduates to Penn showed me a list of the students from that school who had applied to Penn last year. Hargadon's argument for a binding ED policy is in part positive: ED gives an admissions office the best chance to assemble some of the diverse talents, range of backgrounds, and personalities necessary to make up a well-rounded class. "You can't overstate what that does for the mood of the campus.

When it had a nonbinding early plan, Princeton could end up wasting its decision-making time and, worse, its scarce admission slots on students who were hoping to get into Yale or Harvard. "The sense is that New York, say, has a lot of high-scoring, high-achieving kids, and if they wait for the regular pool, the students will eliminate one another. " "It would be naive to think we could ever come up with a system that would not allow someone to play games, " Basili says, "but it seems like this one is built for people to play games. More bodies and more money were coming into the college system at just the moment when American colleges were going through their version of economic globalization. That may well be true at the richest two or three schools. If the answer is yes, the process is over, because by virtue of applying early, the student has promised to attend the college if accepted. "In an ideal world we would do away with all early programs, " Fitzsimmons said when I asked him about the right long-term direction for admissions systems. Then, in March of this year, Allen suffered a stroke while greeting a group of prospective USC students.

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They start talking to us about colleges before sophomore year starts—I think we had an orientation in late summer after our freshman year. "You can always argue for taking one more kid in the early stage, " Jonathan Reider says, referring to his time as an admissions officer at Stanford. Colleges swear that in making need-based aid calculations they don't discriminate against early applicants. The reasoning, he explained, is that if a legacy candidate is not sure enough about coming to Penn to apply ED, then Penn has no real stake in offering preferential consideration later on.

That is why many counselors view ED as a device promoted by colleges for their own purposes, with incidental benefits to other institutions and companies—but not to students. The selectivity of a school made no significant difference in the students' later earnings. ) The out-of-control ED system is my nominee. You can narrow down the possible answers by specifying the number of letters it contains. Rich and poor students alike may be free to benefit from today's ED racket—but only the rich are likely to have heard of it. It therefore became more "selective. Similar effects are visible in the college market. If more, then colleges would carefully distinguish between early and regular applicants when reporting their selectivity and yield rates. Higher-education network is remarkable precisely for how many people it accommodates, how many different avenues it opens, how many second chances it offers, and how thoroughly it is not the last word on success or failure.

But whatever the difference in details, everyone I spoke with seemed sure that some small group of elite colleges could change the system. "To put it as bluntly as I can, " Hargadon said in a long note he had prepared before our talk, Early Decision seems to me to be the most "rational" part of the admissions process these days. A college's yield is the proportion of students offered admission who actually attend. It means that one is emotionally prepared to deal with a rejection if necessary and then to rush regular applications into the mail right away. Penn coped with that change by investing in its curriculum, faculty, and physical plant. "To say that kids should be ready a year ahead of time to make these decisions goes against everything we've learned in the past hundred years. " The rise of early decision has coincided with, and may have contributed to, the under-reported fact that the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, is becoming more rather than less influential in determining who gets into college—despite continual criticism of the SAT's structure and effects, and despite the proposal this year from Richard Atkinson, the head of the vast University of California system, that UC campuses no longer consider SAT scores when assessing applicants.