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Yale ends binding early admissions
©Associated Press NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Yale University is taking some of the stress out of elite college admissions by ending its binding early decision admissions program. Instead, students will be able to apply early but won't be made to attend if they get in. Yale leaders hope the new policy, called "early action," will prompt other top colleges to also end their early decision programs, which have been criticized for putting too much pressure on high school students by forcing them to choose before they are ready to. Harvard, where students who apply early aren't required to attend if they are accepted, is an exception. Yale's new policy, however, won't allow early applicants to apply for other nonbinding programs -- unlike Harvard, which does. Yale's policy takes effect next year. Yale president Richard Levin acknowledged that the change may cost the Ivy League school up to 20 percent of the top applicants. "Our final thinking was that it would be unfortunate, but the value of making the change outweighs the concern," Levin said. Levin floated the idea of ending binding early decision last winter. He spent the year talking with other college officials, students, parents and teachers, who generally opposed them. The policies are especially difficult for students who need financial aid, because they cannot weigh aid offers from competing schools. "Early decision programs help colleges more than applicants," Levin said. "It is our hope to take pressure off students in the early cycle and restore a measure of reasoned choice to college admissions." Early decision started at most elite colleges in the late 1990s to allow top students to win admission to their first choice without having to go through the longer admissions process. Students apply in the fall, instead of in the spring. Yale started a binding early decision system in 1995. Other top schools, such as Stanford, Brown and Princeton, also started a program. Brown, which reluctantly started offering early decision last year, is considering whether to alter its policy, university admissions officials have said. Princeton won't change its binding program, university spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown said. Last year, Levin triggered a national debate by arguing that the early admissions process put unneeded pressure on high school seniors, rushing some of them into applying before they feel informed and confident about their college choice. Other members of the Yale Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid Policy say that early decision favors wealthy students who can commit themselves to a university before they know the size of their financial aid package, since aid is not decided until the spring. Early decision policies are attractive to colleges because they help lock in a guaranteed percentage of incoming freshmen, many of whom apply early because the school is their first choice. For students, the early decision system can also carry some benefits. Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, on their admissions Web sites, indicate that students who apply early could receive an admissions preference as a result, and that students are encouraged to apply early if those schools are the students' first choice. At Yale, the rate of early decision admissions was "significantly higher" than the overall acceptance rate of 13 percent last year, an official said Tuesday. About one-third of Yale's 1,300 freshmen were early decision applicants last year; that proportion is as high as 40 percent at some schools. -- Information from the Boston Globe was used in this report.
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