Despite growing concerns about the fairness of early decision, its use continues to proliferate throughout the Ivy League, with some schools filling half of their incoming freshman slots with early applicants.
The most dramatic increase came at the University of Pennsylvania, where 50 percent of its freshman class will be admitted early this year, up from 43 percent last year.
Columbia, accepting 490 students, admitted 49 percent of its incoming class early. It saw a 6.5 percent increase in the number of early applicants and its early admission acceptance rate was 29 percent.
The growing popularity of early decision has raised many serious questions.
Recent criticism has arisen that early decision favors affluent students over students in financial need. This is because early decision does not allow students in need of financial aid to weigh offers from other schools. Once accepted under the program, a student must attend regardless of better financial aid offers at other institutions.
For this reason, most early decision applicants tend to be from relatively affluent backgrounds.
Throughout the debate on early decision, the College has steered a relatively conservative course towards the middle ground, admitting the lowest percentage of its freshman class through early decision among the Ivies.
"My own feeling is that we should not go beyond 35 percent because we want to keep a large proportion of the freshman pool open to regular decision applicants. Some schools go higher because they want to make their admissions statistics better," Dartmouth Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenburg said.
Dartmouth accepted 387 early applicants out of a pool of 1,118. At 35.5 percent of the Class of 2006, that's 2.5 percent more than were admitted under the early decision program last year.
Harvard accepted 1,172 early applicants out of a pool of 6,126. Last year, it accepted 1,105 early applicants out of a total 6,096.
Brown, which this year switched from an early action program to an early decision program, accepted 510 '06s early. It witnessed a decrease in the number of early applicants, probably as a result of its admission policy switch. On the other hand, Brown's early acceptance rate increased by 5 percent to 26 percent.
Now that Brown has adopted an early decision policy, the only remaining Ivy League school not to offer such a program is Harvard.
"We have a non-binding program," Harvard Director of Admissions Marilyn McGrath Lewis said.
"We oppose early decision because it causes a student's chance to compare financial aid to be a problem. It is a rich kid's game if there ever was one," Lewis said.
Despite such criticism, most of the nation's top schools continue to implement early decision programs, which Lewis said results from concerns about student yield.
Furstenburg agrees that early decision slants in favor of the more affluent applicants. For that reason, he believes that it is important not to take a large percentage of the freshman class early.
"On the other hand," he said, "if we took fewer students early than we do now, that would undermine our whole program. If we artificially cut back, then we will be hurting students who had done their homework and chosen Dartmouth as their first choice."
Although complete statistics on Princeton could not be obtained, it will be admitting 45 percent of its freshman class early this year.
Cornell experienced a slight increase in its number of early applications. The number of students applying early to Cornell rose 3.2 percent to 2,861 this year. That is compared to the 2,589 who applied early last year.
Yale was the only exception, seeing a decline in its early acceptance rate from 29 percent last year to 26 percent this year. At the same time, the percentage of its freshman class admitted early increased from 40 percent to 42 percent. Out of the 2,115 students who applied early, 549 were accepted.
While acknowledging in a USA Today opinion column that "the early decision program is not for everyone," University of Pennsylvania Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson supports early decision.
Stetson defended early decision as an opportunity for the students who most want to attend a university to do so.
"It is a lot like a happy relationship. Both parties are in it because they want to be and because each party knows the other wants it just as much," he wrote.
Ultimately, Furstenburg said that the early decision game is about the self-preservation of schools that are worried about maintaining their reputations in the competitive admissions environment of today.
"Colleges are looking out for themselves more than anything else," he said.
