(Editor's note: After a decade in which high school students across the country have increasingly turned to early decision when applying to college, national controversy has erupted over the benefits of binding November applications. This is the first article in a three part series examining the complicated issues surrounding early decision policies.)
Dartmouth will continue to offer prospective students the option to apply early, despite recent debate about the merits of binding early decision policies and a suggestion by one Ivy League university president that highly selective schools jointly end early decision.
Yale University President Richard Levin added fuel to the controversy over early admissions by telling The New York Times that he favors ending early decision programs among selective schools, a comment that came on the heels of a jump in the number of early applications to Yale and colleges across the country.
Arguing that early decision creates added stress for applicants and is only beneficial to universities, Levin suggested that binding admissions programs force students who are undecided about where to attend college to commit prematurely to a school because they believe that applying early increases their chance of admission.
Recent years have seen a surge in early applications nationally. Some schools, including Dartmouth, fill approximately one-third of their freshman class in the early decision round. Last month, acceptance letters were mailed to about 380 members of the Class of 2006 who applied early decision.
Dartmouth's number of early applicants has consistently remained between 1,100 and 1,200, compared with an average of 10,000 regular decision applicants.
Critics of early decision say that the rush to meet the November deadline disproportionately benefits affluent white students who are more likely to apply early and those students who are not looking to compare financial aid offers from a number of colleges.
Many studies and reports have questioned whether early acceptance programs give those generally more well-off applicants an edge over students who wait to file college applications in January, the deadline for regular decision.
A study done by researchers at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government indicates that, on average, students with SAT scores between 1,400 and 1,490 have a 70 percent acceptance rate nationwide during the early process. Only 48 percent of students in that SAT range were admitted during the regular decision round.
Dartmouth Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg said such studies are misleading because they do not take into account groups of students, such as legacies and athletes, who would have an advantage in both the early and regular rounds.
Colleges disagree over whether early admission gives students an edge over the regular decision competition.
Cornell University's admissions website states that early decision students clearly do have a competitive edge over students who apply regular decision. This is because "enthusiasm for Cornell is considered a plus, early-decision applicants stand a better chance of gaining admission -- a fact reflected in the statistics."
But, "there is no student we accept early that we would not accept regular," Furstenberg said.
At Dartmouth, the median SAT score for students accepted by both early decision and regular admission is 720, Furstenberg said. Nor are there major quality differences between those who apply early and those who are part of the larger regular applicant pool, he said.
The intense competition among highly selective schools to enroll the best students "has become a motivating factor" for some schools to manipulate the early decision process out of "institutional self-interest," Furstenberg said. But, he added, abolishing early decision would not solve the "commercialization" of the admissions process because there is "an industry of people feeding off the process."
"We've used and managed [early decision] judiciously," he said.
Unlike opponents of early decision who argue it has put more pressure on high school students to rush to select a school, Furstenberg said that having early decision "de-escalates the pressure" for many students.
Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania both indicated reluctance to end early decision, a process they say benefits both institutions and students.
Furstenberg said he has not discussed abolishing early decision with admissions officers at other selective colleges and has no plans to do so; each school should make its admissions policies individually, he argued.
Levin said Yale would not unilaterally end early decision, saying this could disadvantage the university because strong applicants would apply, and be committed to, other institutions.
While Dartmouth has offered early decision -- with an application deadline of Nov. 1 -- since 1958, the proliferation of binding decisions at many other universities increased only in the last decade.
Seven of the eight Ivy League schools now have binding early decision programs. Students who apply early must commit to attend if accepted, and may only submit an early application to one institution.
Harvard's early action program is a less common form of early admissions that does not bind students to attending one school and allows them to file applications to other schools in the regular decision round.
Furstenberg said that some schools --but not Dartmouth -- use the early decision process to manipulate their admission rates. A school "as selective as Dartmouth" is not concerned with lowering its admission rates, but rather seeks to strike a balance between the needs of the students and the institution, he said.
The College "does not promote early decision," Furstenberg said.
