The Early-Admit Game Gets Rougher
Colleges that once deferred now reject
The thin envelopes came early this year. Amar Shibli of Westchester County, N.Y., opened his with trepidation: turned down by Yale a week before winter break. Luke Moughon of Erwin, Tenn., was "hit like a ton of bricks" by the rejection letter from the California Institute of Technology. Bonnie Fitzpatrick, a guidance counselor in a tony Maryland suburb, got the news that Stanford University had spurned a boy with near-perfect SAT scores, high grades in Advanced Placement classes, and impeccable recommendations. "In the past," she says, "it seems that these students would have been deferred, not rejected."
College administrators confirm the trend. Schools used to give a polite "maybe" to early applicants who didn't make the first cut and then keep them waiting until spring for a decision. But now, inundated with applications, more schools are just saying no. Middlebury College in Vermont last month rejected 14 percent of its early applicants, compared with fewer than 5 percent two years ago (as usual, Middlebury deferred decisions on hundreds of students). "We see no reason to string kids along by deferring them," says Monica Izer, admissions dean at Babson College in Massachusetts, which turned down nearly 20 percent of early applicants--compared with 8 percent a year ago.
The rules. What started decades ago as an approach favored by a small number of college applicants has become the preferred way for many to get into college, especially selective ones. Under early decision, students apply to one school in the fall and, if accepted, are bound to attend (a less rigid option offered by some schools, "early action," also gives applicants an early answer but is not binding). These days, nearly 500 colleges accept early applications, and parents and students know that at most of those schools early applicants have a much better chance of getting in. Last year, for example, Connecticut College accepted 202 of its 361 early applicants, leaving 4,080 regular applicants vying for the last 248 places. And Harvard fills more than half of every class with early applicants.
The increase in students applying early results from the same demographic bulge that has made getting in tougher and tougher. With more kids applying--and more convinced that they must get into selective schools--many guidance counselors urge students to apply early when possible, to get that edge. Meanwhile, colleges and universities defend the large numbers of early selections, saying they prefer students who are passionate about spending four years on campus.
But the blatant edge early applicants get annoys public school guidance counselors, who argue that immigrant students, those from poorer families, and those living outside of achievement-obsessed communities are rarely ready to decide on their first-choice college a few weeks into the senior year of high school. And everyone agrees that 17-year-olds frequently apply in the first round because they want to capitalize on the favorable odds, not because they are smitten with a particular school. "When we go to college fairs, kids always say, `I'm applying early, but I don't know where,' " says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, which received 2,851 early applications this fall, an increase of 11 percent over last year's record number.
As applications to competitive colleges have surged, high schools have exhorted admissions officers to be candid with early applicants who simply aren't going to be admitted, says Dan Saracino, assistant provost of the University of Notre Dame and former president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Cornell and Tufts universities, which used to defer everyone who wasn't admitted early, last month started sending outright rejections.
As for the rejected students, they're learning to look at the bright side. Amar Shibli is hoping for better luck with his post-Yale round of applications. Luke Moughon, who wants to study aeronautical engineering, isn't fretting about his Caltech denial, or his deferral from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he's even sanguine about the upcoming four-month wait for a response from Stanford, ever since he was admitted to the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is considering him for a merit scholarship.
And though Jamie McMenamin, captain of the cross-country team at a school near Baltimore, was disheartened last month by Notre Dame's thin envelope, she gleefully read about a snowstorm in South Bend, Ind., the same day. "I decided I didn't want to be cold for the next four years," she said last week, having applied to colleges in Arizona, California, and Georgia.
This story appears in the January 22, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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