The Times has a week-in-review piece that provides a nice perspective on Harvard’s decision to go without an early decision program.What, then, might a world without early applications look like?
It would indeed go a small way toward leveling the field among applicants, researchers say. But it would also have an effect on colleges, and the biggest winner would almost certainly be Harvard, a fact that may prevent many other colleges — perhaps all of them — from mimicking Harvard this time. Any college that does so will risk losing some of its best applicants.This is what Andy mentioned earlier this week: the decision by Havard actually become an incentive for other schools to keep their early decision programs to encourage top students from otherwise attending the most desired school in the country: Harvard.
To show what the college admissions would be like without early decision, The Times cites a study by Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard, of the “revealed preferences” in colleges that are demonstrated by common-admits. (I originally talked about this study back in April when discussing Cornell’s low yield rate relative to places like Columbia.) I would encourage everybody to read the paper: it’s interesting and the math will not hurt you!
The Times even includes a handy table showing what percentage of common admits between any two colleges go where. Among common admits, Cornell wins (barely) to places like Duke, Northwestern, and Georgetown, but loses to Brown, Dartmouth and UPenn.
This is why it is in the University’s best interest to keep early decision: it will gain admit some students who otherwise would have gone to Brown or Dartmouth (or Yale or Harvard) by having them apply early. Similarly, Duke or Northwestern will get some students who otherwise would have gone to Cornell had it not been for early decision programs.
Now the study is not without its caveats (which I will discuss after the fold), but I wanted to point out something striking in one of the tables: Cornell loses a lot more common admits interested in either engineering or the humanities to places like Brown and Georgetown, respectively. And I think it would be a fair assessment to say that Cornell academics are a lot better than Brown for an education in the sciences and a lot better than Georgetown for an education in the humanities (even though Brown might be better than us for the humanities and Georgetown better for us in foreign relations). In fact, I knew transfers at Cornell from both schools who felt that the environment at Cornell relative to these places was wonderful.
So there's something about the nature of Cornell, its academic reputation aside, that precludes students from considering it. President Rawlings obviously wanted to create a more intimate educational experience for those who wanted it, and created the West Campus residential houses as a result. But doubly-stressing the University’s wonderful teaching and research opportunities can’t hurt either.
But I imagine a lot of student perceptions about schools boils down to what they hear about the place, and whether they think it is "an exciting" place to be. Are the students there doing stuff that is fun and cutting edge? Are the students there happy? Perhaps Cornell also needs to focus on these things more in order to win-out among common admits.
As for concerns about the methodology:
