Update on Early Admission
How Changes in University Policies
Affect Your Chances of Getting In

By Anne Marie Chaker
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

A year after several top colleges revamped their rules on early admissions, that change is already having an impact on who gets in where.

A number of colleges let students who apply before the rest of the pack find out sooner whether they've been accepted. But a version of that policy known as "early decision" has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Students who apply early-decision are required to attend if accepted, a rule that critics argue puts too much pressure on applicants and favors more privileged students who can afford not to wait to compare financial-aid offers.

Amid this controversy, Yale and Stanford universities decided to relax the rule two years ago, giving students who applied early for the incoming freshman class the option of attending other universities. Harvard went in the opposite direction, adopting stricter rules for applying early. It now requires students to submit only one early application rather than letting them apply early to other schools as well.

Easier Rules, Tougher Competition

The ramifications of all this showed up in mailboxes of last year's crop of early-decision applicants, the first to apply since the recent round of rule changes. Harvard saw its pool of early applicants for the fall shrink by 49%.As a result, there was a statistically greater chance for any one of those students to get in: 23% compared with 14% last year.

Yale and Stanford, on the other hand, received many more early applications this year than last-55% and 66% more, respectively. That made it somewhat harder for those students to get in: Yale admitted only 17% of its early applicants this year, compared with 21% last year. Stanford took 20% vs. 24% last year.

The heightened appeal of Stanford and Yale's new policies resulted in fewer early applications to some schools that didn't change their policies at all. Early applications to Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago fell by 26%, 21% and 17%, respectively. All three schools have a nonrestrictive early-application policy. Princeton, which has a binding early-decision policy and takes about half of its class from that pool of applicants, had 25% fewer early applications than last year.

"The best applicants have been taken out of the pool by Yale and Stanford," says University of Chicago Admissions Dean Theodore O'Neill.

Some other top schools, however, including the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, say they saw virtually no change in the number of applications and admits in last year's early cycle.

Early-application students apply in the fall, and generally get letters back by mid-December. The rest of the applicant pool usually has to have applications in by January, and responses arrive sometime in the spring.

Under the revised early-application policy at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, called "Single-Choice Early Action," students are allowed to apply to only one school early. But they aren't required to attend if accepted. That means they can send out applications to other colleges later in the year and then compare financial-aid offers in the spring.

As competition to get into top schools intensifies, anxious high-school students are sending out more applications than ever and have become more strategic in deciding where, and how early, to apply. "Everybody's trying to guess where everybody else will go," says Richard Zeckhauser, a Harvard professor and co-author of a book on early admissions.

'Nothing to Lose'

Typically, many top colleges have sought to get about a third to a half of their classes decided in the early-decision process. One reason is that it boosts a college's "yield," or the percentage of accepted applicants who decide to attend, a figure that has been a factor in some college rankings. Last summer, U.S. News & World Report, which publishes a widely followed college guide, said it would no longer include "yield" in its calculations. Still, some college officials say that move does little to deter many colleges from policies that lock students in early.

As for students, many who would never have considered applying to Yale under the old system did so this year. "I thought there's nothing to lose," says Chris Barth, a senior at Cherry Hill High School West in Cherry Hill, N.J., who had nearly perfect SAT scores. His application was deferred, meaning it was considered along with the applications in the normal pool. His counselor, Cigus Vanni, says he had four students who applied to Yale early compared with none the previous year. "A lot of these kids believe having an acceptance by Stanford or Yale in their back pocket will give them a very positive cachet" with other schools they are applying to, Mr. Vanni says.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling, an organization of some 8,000 counselors based in Alexandria, Va., has appointed a committee to investigate whether the new "single choice" policies violate the organization's principle that early-action rules not limit the number of applications students can submit.

Some schools say they intend to stick with traditional early-decision policies, despite the criticism that it favors students from wealthier families. "We're frankly not seeing that," says Karl Furstenberg, admissions dean at Dartmouth College, which saw a 5% increase in early applications from last year and a more diverse pool of applicants. "Our experience with it was very good."

Do you think early-decision policies are good for students? Do you support the rule changes at Yale and Stanford? Write to letters.classroom@wsj.com.