The colleges set the rules in the admissions game, with individual colleges changing their policies to gain competitive advantage over their rivals. They have several goals—attract applicants, admit the best, and then induce them to enroll—but relatively few instruments, primarily admissions decisions and financial aid packages, to achieve them. Since 1954, early admissions programs have proved to be an enormously successful way for colleges to compete with one another.
The purposeful actions of colleges may also prove harmful in the rapidly changing admissions environment. Sometimes colleges simply make mistakes, and in other instances, a policy selected by a college to accomplish one particular goal proves to serve another once applicants and other colleges respond. For example, early admissions programs were designed, in part, to reduce stress for some applicants by guaranteeing admission in the first part of senior year in high school. What no one anticipated was that these programs would grow to the point where applicants felt pressured to apply early. Although terminology has changed over time, colleges have always used early admissions programs for strategic purposes; the motivations and results have remained similar over time. In a story of déjà vu all over again, today’s debates about the benefits and costs of early admissions programs echo similar debates from more than thirty years ago.
Admissions from the Seventeenth Century to the Mid-1960s
For more than three hundred years—from the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the end of World War II—college admission was remarkably stable: virtually all academically qualified applicants were accepted. 1 As the 1952–53 report of the Harvard Admissions Office explained: “Until very recent times Harvard, like most colleges, followed essentially a simple laissez faire admission policy. We admitted those who applied and met the admission requirements.
There was no surplus of qualified candidates and no effort was made to persuade students to come to Harvard.” But there was a catch: the definition of a “qualified candidate” eliminated the vast majority of high school students. Before World War II, most colleges administered their own entrance exams. A number of elite schools, mostly in the East, used the examination written by the College Entrance Examination Board (now known as the College Board) to screen applicants for admission, though some applicants were exempted from the exam. These tests focused on subjects routinely taught by preparatory schools, such as Latin, but beyond the reach of many public schools.
In the 1930s and 1940s, twelve prestigious boarding schools sent an average of two-thirds of their graduates to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. These twelve schools supplied nearly 30 percent of the entering students at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in both 1930 and 1940. Public school students made up between 14 and 26 percent of the student body at Princeton and Yale during this period. At Harvard, where 20 percent of the students commuted, somewhat more students were from public high schools.4 Most students, particularly those at boarding schools, applied to only one college, were admitted, and then enrolled.
In 1932, for example, Yale admitted 959 of 1,330 applicants (72.1 percent), and 884 of them (92.2 percent of those admitted) entered the college.5 Among these students enrolling at Yale, 29.6 percent (262 of 884) had fathers who had attended before them. The percentage of alumni children in the entering class reflects the remarkable degree of social segregation of that period. Yet some admissions processes were also designed to ease entry for public school students.
For instance, Harvard instituted a policy known as the “top seventh” or “New Plan” in 1911 to guarantee admission to students in the top seventh of the class at approved schools, including a number of highly regarded public schools.6 Even in those early days, colleges competed fiercely for at least some applicants. Eastern colleges found themselves under pressure to relax their examination requirements, in particular the Latin requirement, from alumni who had moved to the Midwest and the West. Few high schools beyond the East Coast even offered Latin. (Latin was not approved to meet the foreign language requirement in California, for example.) Arthur Hadley, the president of Yale from 1899 to 1921, summarized the problem for his college: “The point is that we are not getting men from the high schools of the West . . . The Western boys who come to Yale are mostly going to preparatory schools in the East. That is a serious thing. It means that we are getting somewhat out of connection with the public school system of the country; not in the West alone, but in the West first, and probably in other places afterwards.”
Harvard jumped ahead of Yale with two innovations. First, it waived the Latin requirement for students in the sciences who enrolled for a Bachelor of Science degree rather than the traditional Bachelor of Arts degree. Second, Harvard’s New Plan, introduced in 1911, opened the door still further to public school students by waiving the entrance exam requirement entirely for those with sufficiently strong grades at certain high schools, and relaxing the exam requirements for all students.
In response to Harvard’s new policies, Yale relaxed its examination requirements slightly. This response was not sufficient, and so in 1916 Yale introduced its own New Plan. Thus began a consistent pattern that continued into the twenty-first century. Elite colleges, such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, regularly altered their entrance requirements to gain an advantage in the competition for applicants. Once one college moved, others responded. In the early twentieth century the jockeying was over foreign language requirements; since World War II, competition has been primarily in the realm of early admissions programs. The second half of the century saw significant growth in the number of college applicants.
When the GIs returned from World War II, they flooded the colleges. Many soldiers had interrupted their studies. More important, the GI Bill entitled veterans to attend college at government expense. The number of veterans who wanted to go to college, and also could afford to, exploded. By the Eisenhower years, 1952–1956, when the GI bulge had long since passed through the system, Harvard received 3,500 or so applications per year, roughly three times its prewar levels. And the Baby Boom generation waited in the wings.
In 1956 Benjamin Fletcher, the president of Smith College, spoke of the “‘tidal wave’ of students now in elementary schools who will soon be pressing for admission to the colleges.”10 Fletcher’s statement foreshadowed sentiments heard often today. Even in the late 1950s, admissions officers responded with “mixed feelings,” or perhaps crocodile tears, to each new increment in applications: “The staff was stretched to the limit to take care of the burden of interviewing, correspondence, and folder-reading; and the number of good candidates who had eventually to be disappointed in their hopes of entering Harvard was painfully large.”
As applications increased, colleges moved to more selective admissions practices in order to limit the size of entering classes: “For the first time we can, within limits—and in fact we have to—consciously shape the make-up of our student body instead of allowing natural selection or laissez faire to determine it.”12 Eugene Wilson, the dean of admissions at Amherst, echoed this sentiment in 1959: “For generations prior to the last war, the central problem of admissions at Amherst and similar institutions had been one of recruitment— finding enough qualified candidates to fill each entering class. Since 1946, however, the central problem of admissions has increasingly been one of selection—picking the ‘best’ candidates from a great excess of qualified applicants.” At that point, it was common for liberal arts and Ivy League colleges alike to receive four applications for each spot in the entering class.
Applicants could no longer be confident of admission to a particular college, so they spread their applications to a bevy of colleges. As a result, many applicants were admitted to more than one school, presenting colleges with two new problems: luring the best students to accept, and managing the size of the freshman class in a world with uncertain matriculation rates. Within a decade of World War II, the Admissions Game had become vastly more complicated. Dean Wilson lamented, “No longer does an admissions committee select an entering class.
To-day [sic] the admission committee selects candidates who by their ‘yeas’ and ‘nays’ determine the composition of the entering class.”15 Yield rates, which represent the percentages of admitted students who matriculate to a given college, fell to between 50 and 60 percent for top colleges. 16 As a result, competition to attract the top applicants stiffened. 17 Until 1952, the College Board required students to list a topchoice college as part of the exam registration process. Once this practice was abolished, almost concurrent with the rise of multiple applications, colleges faced the significant danger of over- or undershooting the desired size for the next entering class.
In 1955 Amherst enrolled 306 students, 56 more than its desired entering class of 250. Predictably, college administrators found a way to blame their problems on the applicants. Admissions officers decried “ghost applications,” “admissions letter collectors,” and even “shoppers” (who applied to multiple colleges to increase chances of receiving a scholarship to one of them).19 They labeled students as selfish if they did not withdraw applications to other colleges immediately after learning of admission to a likely top-choice school. In 1958 Reverend Miles Fay, the dean of admissions at Holy Cross, wrote that predicting the size of an entering class was an “educator’s blind man’s bluff,” forcing colleges to adopt “an egregiously oversimplified rule of thumb . . . ‘capacity plus one-third.’”20 Safety margins of this scale were unacceptable. In the mid to late 1950s, colleges realized that they could manipulate the timing of the application process to their own advantage.
At first, colleges tried to gain an edge on their rivals by sending admissions letters to applicants before their competitors did so. Williams, for example, tried to preempt Ivy League colleges in this manner.21 An applicant faced a very hard choice when one college required an answer to its offer of admission before other colleges even sent acceptance and rejection letters: “This candidate could find himself with three equally cruel options: (1) accept his ‘second choice’ and prematurely withdraw his application to his ‘first choice’ as required; (2) accept the second choice, put down a deposit (up to $300) without withdrawing from his first choice, and then forfeit the money if accepted at the favorite; (3) turn down the second choice and stake everything on getting into his favorite, which may mean ending up with no college at all.”
Today, more than forty years later, students confront a variant of this problem when they decide whether to apply ED, which requires them to commit to one college before receiving an admission decision from any other college. The process continued to move forward in time until 1961, when a consortium of leading colleges agreed to adopt uniform dates for application deadlines (January 1) and notification (decisions sent to applicants in mid-April with a deadline of May 1 for selecting a college). The Boston Sunday Herald underscored the need for standardized “mail-out” and “candidate’s reply” dates: “Up to this year some colleges, including Amherst and Williams, required definite commitments from admitted candidates in early May—often before the large schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had even mailed out their notices.” Seeking competitive advantage, some colleges, including Wesleyan, preempted the common mail-out date.
As the Herald noted, “such schools are often willing to assure qualified candidates of acceptance several months before formal notices are mailed, if the students withdraw other applications.” These programs, in effect a delayed version of Early Decision for regular applicants, were the precursor of today’s Early Decision programs. Currently offered at such colleges as Haverford and Wesleyan, Early Decision allows applicants to apply at the regular deadline, while making a commitment to matriculate if admitted.
Read More : The History of Early Admissions
