Early Application Policy Has Affected Applications Nationwide

The policy change at Harvard, Brown and Georgetown that allows high school seniors to apply early action at more than one school appears to have boosted the number of early applications at all three universities.

Compared to the Class of 2003, Harvard's number of early action applicants jumped by 31.8 percent. The Brown Daily Herald reports that Brown experienced a 58 percent overall increase in applicants. According to Georgetown's Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Charles Deacon, 46 percent more students have applied early to Georgetown.

Deacon attributed the increase to the recent policy change. He said Harvard's change in particular was important "because people feel the need to apply early since [Harvard] takes so many students early. There's no question there has been an influence."

Michael Goldberg, Brown's Director of Admissions, has a similar opinion.

"Our changing [the policy] along with Harvard and Georgetown has to have had the major impact on this change" in the number of early applicants, he said.

Goldberg said the full impact of the change will not be known immediately.

"Either it will be a strategy for sophisticated, suburban kids or real diversity will increase," he said.

One college counseling director at a high school, Dawn Cobb of the Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California, disagrees with the change in admissions procedures.

"It just moves up the anxiety," she said. "It's already an anxious time for kids. It just helps colleges with their enrollment procedures, not kids."

On the other hand, Harvard's Director of Admissions Marilyn McGrath Lewis '70-73 believes that the change will decrease stress for high school seniors.

"I think its going to have very little impact, but it will makes people's lives simpler," Lewis said in September. According to Cobb, the change in policy has not had a significant impact on the senior class at her high school, for only three students applied to multiple schools under the new early action programs, even though a majority applied to colleges early.

"In my school, kids have done a good job of using early applications responsibly," Cobb said.

Daniel Saracino, the Assistant Provost for Enrollment of the University of Notre Dame, which has a similar non-exclusive early action procedure, lauded the change in the other schools' admission policies.

"I want the student to have a proper option to decide where to spend the next four years," he said. "It's good to give plenty of time to make the right decision."

Deacon praised the change as well.

"It's definitely a change in a positive direction. Early action is a better policy," he said. "It allows students to consider their choices. And in our case we simply allow the best students who have their act together to have a greater variety of options."