Harvard move stirs rethinking of early-admission policies

Officials at several top colleges, including Tufts and Princeton, said yesterday that Harvard's unexpected move to eliminate early admissions will prompt them to consider doing the same thing, while admissions officers at other prominent schools, including Boston College and a number of Ivy League colleges, said their early admissions programs benefit students.

``As we wrap our arms around Harvard's decision, I'm receptive to thinking about whether Tufts could join Harvard in that type of policy change," said Tufts's dean of undergraduate admissions, Lee A. Coffin , who noted that he had not yet consulted the university's president, Lawrence S. Bacow , who is traveling in Asia. ``The early pool is less diverse in all ways. It's more Northeastern, more affluent, more independent [private] schools and more suburban."

Harvard's interim president, Derek Bok , said Monday that he believes early admission benefits more privileged students, and skews students' decisions by making them believe they must rush to pick a first choice in order to take advantage of the higher rates of acceptance for early applicants at most schools.

Thirty-eight percent of the students Harvard admitted last year got in early.

In hopes that other colleges will follow suit, Harvard is holding off on the change for a year, abolishing early admissions for students seeking slots in the freshman class set to begin in fall 2008.

``I think all the top 100 colleges are going back to the drawing board today and reevaluating what they do," said Marilee Jones , dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ``This is one of the biggest things that's happened in admissions in a long time."

Jones said she's content with MIT's early option at the moment. Still, as soon as she heard the news she sent word to the school's president, Susan Hockfield, and other top officials, and planned to gather her staff to discuss it.

While Cornell and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also said Harvard's move might influence them, admissions deans at BC, Brown, Dartmouth, and Stanford pointed to potential downsides of eliminating early admissions for students, suggesting that widespread change might not come quickly.

Some school officials who have criticized early admissions were unwilling to be the first to jettison the practice, fearing it could hurt their ability to attract top students.

``Harvard is going to become slightly less competitive now," said Amherst dean of admission Thomas H. Parker .

In many interviews yesterday, no one acknowledged worrying that giving up early admissions would be a competitive blow. But they pointed to other problems. Jones said MIT would need to hire more staff to read the applications in a shorter time. Coffin said it would be harder for schools to estimate the number of students they should admit in order to fill the right number of desks.

In a statement, Yale's president, Richard C. Levin, questioned whether giving up early admissions would help improve socioeconomic diversity, noting that Harvard, Yale, and others are already trying to recruit more low-income applicants.

Others pointed out that many students are grateful to find out in December instead of April that they've been admitted to the school of their choice.

``Kids are going to be anxious for longer," said Richard H. Shaw , dean of admission at Stanford.

Tufts had already cut back significantly on its early-decision program two years ago, reducing the percentage of the freshman class admitted early from about 40 percent to a third.

The result is a stronger class, Coffin said, because Tufts had previously given an edge to early applicants. Now, Tufts is looking at early applicants in the same light.

``We locked in too many students early, and then later on we got some really compelling candidates," he said.