A college-admissions edge for the wealthy: Early
decision
Nathan Hanshew, 17, a senior at Washington Latin Public Charter School, is embraced by the head of the school, Martha C. Cutts, after learning that he received a full-ride scholarship to attend George Washington University. GW President Steven Knapp, at lower right, visited the school March 17 to make the surprise announcement. (Logan Werlinger/GW Today)
Many of
the nation’s top colleges draw more than 40 percent of their incoming freshmen
through an early-application system that favors the wealthy, luring students to
commit to enroll if they get in and shutting out those who want the chance to
compare offers of grants and scholarships.
The
binding-commitment path known as “early decision” fills roughly half of the
freshman seats at highly ranked Vanderbilt, Emory, Northwestern and Tufts
universities, as well as Davidson, Bowdoin, Swarthmore and Claremont McKenna
colleges, among others, a Washington Post analysis found.
The
Post found 37 schools where the early-decision share of enrolled freshmen in
2015 was at least 40 percent. At Duke University, the share was 47
percent, and at the University of Pennsylvania, it was 54 percent.
The
rising influence of early-decision enrollment underscores a stark and growing
divide in college admissions between the masses of students who apply to
multiple schools through the “regular” process in quest of the best fit and
deal and a privileged subset who apply early and simultaneously pledge to
attend just one, without fear of cost, at a time when the sticker price for
private schools often tops $60,000 a year. Call them the Shoppers and the
Pledgers.
College
admissions: The Early Decision advantage
Nathan
Hanshew, 17, a senior at Washington Latin Public Charter School in Washington,
D.C., said he applied to a dozen schools but did not opt for early decision
anywhere.
“That
was too risky,” he said. “You’re stuck in a bond, like a marital bond.”
Shopping
around paid off hugely for Hanshew, a Polish immigrant, who learned March 17 in
a surprise announcement in front of cheering classmates that he won a full-ride
scholarship from George Washington University.
Kate
Morrison, 17, a senior at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Md.,
said she was drawn to Bowdoin after a soccer coach there encouraged her to
apply early. She visited the Maine college last spring. “I just loved it so
much,” she said. “I was really, really content.” No athletic scholarship, no
financial aid. But she applied early decision in the fall and was admitted Dec.
11. Her search was done.
This
week, angst is cresting for traditional applicants as prestigious colleges
finalize who’s in and who’s out. Ivy League decisions are scheduled to be
released Thursday evening. But admitted early-decision students are tranquil;
they’ve known for months where they’re going to college. Early-decision
applicants also enjoy a crucial edge over the regulars: Their admission
rates tend to be much higher. That’s because schools want good students who
really want them, and they want to lock them down.
At
Penn, the admission rate for early applicants was 24 percent for the class that
entered in 2015. The total admission rate, early and regular, was 10 percent.
Eric Furda, Penn’s dean of admissions, said the academic credentials of
students who win early admission tend to be stronger than those admitted later
in the cycle. Furda also said more early-decision students than ever are
qualifying for need-based financial aid.
“This
pool is becoming broader and deeper and more diverse than it’s ever been. It’s
time to start telling that story,” Furda said. “I don’t want lower-income families
to be told, ‘Don’t apply early decision because you’re going to need to compare
financial-aid packages.'” These days, nearly as many early-decision freshmen
receive need-based grants from Penn as their peers admitted in the regular
cycle, he said.
The Post
reviewed 2015 admissions data for 64 schools as reported through a
questionnaire called the Common Data Set. The analysis covered top-60 schools
on U.S. News and World Report lists of liberal arts colleges and national
universities, and it found 48 schools in which early-decision admits comprised
at least a third of the total enrolled class and 16 in which they comprised at
least half.
While
most early-decision admits enroll, a few do not. The most common reason: If a
financial aid offer is deemed insufficient, an admitted student may be released
from their pledge.
Within
the Ivy League, Penn appears to be the most aggressive user of the early
process. The early-decision share of freshmen at Dartmouth College was about 43
percent. At Brown and Cornell universities, it was about 38 percent. Columbia
University, which also uses early decision, is the only Ivy League school that
refuses to make public its Common Data Set reports.
Harvard,
Yale and Princeton universities also allow students to apply early, but they do
not require admitted students to decide on enrollment until May 1. That
technique, which enables comparison shopping, is known as “early action.”
Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT and hundreds of other
schools use early action.
Georgetown
University’s longtime dean of admissions, Charles Deacon, said he favors early
action because students should be as sure in May of where they want to attend
as they were in November. He calls it a “student-centered” approach to
admissions, in contrast to “enrollment management” techniques in vogue at many
schools.
“No
matter what anybody tells you, the early pool favors those who are more
advantaged,” Deacon said. “They’re the ones who have been better advised. They
know more from their families. There’s an advantage, for sure, and that plays
itself out particularly at the early level.”
Early
decision, which developed gradually among elite schools from the late 1950s
through the 1970s, has drawn criticism in recent years, earning a critique in a
2001 Atlantic article headlined
“The Early-Decision Racket.” In 2006, the public University of Virginia announced that
it was ending an early-decision program in an effort to attract more low-income
students. It now uses early action.
“For
us, the early-action plan makes the most sense,” U-Va. dean of admission Greg
Roberts said. “And it’s more in line with our values and enrollment goals.”
Most top-tier schools with early decision are private. An exception is the
public College of William and Mary, in Virginia.
Though
some schools have spurned the practice, the volume of early-decision
applications to elite schools is growing, and some of them are filling a larger
share of their seats with those applicants, making it far more difficult to get
in during the normal cycle.
At
Williams College, a premier liberal arts school in Massachusetts, a little more
than 40 percent of freshmen come through early decision. Williams President
Adam Falk said early decision provides stability for the college in what can be
a volatile market, and it provides peace of mind for successful applicants who
can then leave “an insane-feeling rat race” during their senior year of high
school.
Jon
Reider, a former Stanford admissions officer who counsels students at San
Francisco University High School, said that 15 years ago, early decision was
not a central part of most of his advising conversations. Now it is. Another
important variable is that ultra-selective Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and
Yale are “single-choice” early-action schools, meaning that students may not
apply early to any other private school, with few exceptions. So students must
weigh their top choice carefully, and it can feel like making a life-altering
gamble.
But the
calculations are much more complex than a simple ranking of choice, Reider
said. Sometimes admission to that first-choice school is so tough to obtain,
even in an early application, that it makes more sense to apply early decision
to a second choice, or even a third choice. “You’ve got one chip,” Reider said.
“One card to play. It’s an absolutely crazy system.”
Even
more bewildering: Some schools offer two rounds of early decision. Some
— the University of Miami, for example — offer two rounds of early
decision and early action.
Charlotte
Smith, 17, a senior at Walt Whitman High, put her early-decision chip on Wake
Forest University, in North Carolina. Her application was deferred into
the regular pool. For many applicants, that is demoralizing. For Smith, it was
a relief.
“I’m
actually glad,” Smith said last week as she had several applications pending
and some offers in hand, including some with scholarships. It’s hard in
November, she said, “to pick one school and say this has everything I want.” As
students, she said, “we’re still trying on different versions of ourselves.”
Micah
Guthrie, 17, a senior at Washington Latin, is shooting for liberal arts
colleges but not through early decision. “I make a lot of my decisions
last minute,” he said. In the fall, he said, “I really didn’t know a lot about
a lot of colleges.”
Among
his targets is Davidson, advertised on a sweatshirt he wore to school the other
day. His mother, Michelle Guthrie, a registrar at Washington Latin, said money
is a factor wherever he gets accepted. “We’ll make it happen,” she said. “But
I’m hoping some scholarships come with those choices, too.”
Davidson
had the highest share of early-decision admits in its entering class among
colleges The Post analyzed: about 60 percent. Davidson said it is firmly
committed to access, with half of the early-decision students who were admitted
qualifying for need-based financial aid. That is nearly the same as
the share in regular admissions who receive need-based aid. The small college,
which has a robust NCAA Division I sports program, said it also relies heavily
on early decision for athletic recruiting.
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A few
years ago, the share of early-decision students entering Emory was less than 40
percent, said John Latting, the university’s dean of admission. Now two rounds
of early decision fill about half of Emory’s class. Latting said the volume of
early-decision applications has doubled in the past four or five years.
“Mostly
what’s going on is an unbelievably competitive marketplace” for top students,
he said. “Early programs bring some calm to what is otherwise a frenzy.”
Latting
said Emory uses financial aid aggressively to ensure it enrolls a diverse
class. About 20 percent of freshmen have enough financial need to qualify for
federal Pell grants, a sizeable share for a private university. But Latting
acknowledged that early-decision applicants, the Pledgers, tend to be
more affluent than the regulars, the Shoppers. That creates added pressure on
schools hunting for more students from low-income families.
“I
wouldn’t for a minute say this is the right system for the nation,” Latting
said.
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