According to a CNN report, the switch to early action at Yale and Stanford will take effect for the class of 2008. Students applying early to either school will have to promise not to apply anywhere else early. However, they will have the chance to apply to other colleges during the regular admissions cycle.
"In my view, a perfect system would say to students: think hard about your choices, apply to a variety of schools and hear back from us all at more or less the same time, making your decision towards the end of your final year of high school with all your options on the table," said President Tom Gerety.
In a statement that accompanied last week's decision Yale President Richard Levin said,"Early decision programs help colleges more than applicants. It is our hope to take pressure off students in the early cycle and restore a measure of reasoned choice to college admissions."
Tom Parker, dean of admission and financial aid, said that the College has no plans to abandon its early decision program. "We've behaved ourselves," he said. "We restricted [ourselves] to accepting no more than 30 percent early ... But schools that take more shift the focus towards the idea of getting in-it becomes more about strategizing than about the college."
Some officials feel that the program has gone far beyond its original intent. "We adopted early decision for the sake of the rare student who knows exactly where he or she wants to go by mid-fall of the senior year of high school," said Yale Undergraduate Dean of Admissions Richard Brodhead in a statement released by the University. "We never meant the early cycle to become the normal cycle."
According to Parker, the early cycle at Yale became so important that, last year, the school accepted over 40 percent of its freshman class early. Other Ivy League universities like Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Cornell also regularly take almost half of their classes early.
Parker does not believe that Yale's decision will automatically change things for the better. "To a degree, I applaud Yale's decision," he said. "But if early action still means 50 percent of the class gets admitted early-it doesn't solve the problem."
Students who are admitted under early decision cannot compare aid packages from different schools, and this is where Parker sees a fundamental conflict. "Taking a high percentage early depresses the number of students with financial aid," he said. "The game is played adroitly by most privileged kids. It should be a national scandal."
The segregated application pool that this system creates, where wealthier students apply early and those less-privileged have to wait, is something which Parker says "undermines [the schools'] mission." In a profile of the class of 2006 written by Parker, he says that despite early decision, the College "continues to practice genuinely 'need blind' admission and to meet the full need of all admitted students."
Parker also pointed out that the early decision program owes a large proportion of its growth to colleges and universities chasing after rankings. "It's driven by a larger force-the stupid competition to turn down more kids than other people," he said "It's absolute nonsense, and it's driven by U.S. News and World Report."
"In the long run, or in the short run, we should get rid of early decision," said Gerety.
The effect this switch will have on high school seniors is still unclear. Some current students said that their application decisions would have been very different if the program had been early action instead of early decision. "Amherst was my first choice, but I was afraid they wouldn't want to give me money," said Ashley Pecora '06, who chose not to apply early. "I definitely felt that I was losing out on an advantage by not applying early, but I didn't want to commit. There was the possibility of a full scholarship from somewhere else."
Other students came from schools where applying early decision to college simply wasn't an option. "I didn't apply early because I wasn't aware of the concept at the time," said Patrick Ziepolt '06. "We had horrible counselors in high school."