By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and JENNY ANDERSON
Published: January 13, 2012
Early admission to top colleges, once the almost exclusive preserve of the East Coast elite, is now being pursued by a much broader and more diverse group of students, including foreigners and minorities.
The democratization of the process — and the overall explosion in applicants — made the early-admissions game much tougher this year for the group that has long dominated it: students in prep schools in New York and beyond where the vast majority of seniors apply to their top choices in November in hopes of avoiding the springtime scrum.
“Their odds have definitely decreased,” said Christoph Guttentag, dean of admissions at Duke University. “You can sort of envision the appeal of early decision radiating outward, from the most affluent to the middle class, and westward from the East Coast and then across the Pacific.”
Duke, for example, received 400 early applications this year from California or overseas; in 2005, it was fewer than 100. Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, saw early applications from abroad double this year from last. And at the University of Chicago, there were double-digit rises in the percentage of early applications from black and Hispanic students.
You do not need a perfect score on the math SAT to know that if more people are applying — many top-tier colleges say the number has doubled or tripled over the last five years — competition is stiffer. So in certain precincts of Manhattan, parents of those who were deferred or rejected in December have been swapping stories ever since about the seemingly perfect senior at the Spence School who did not make the cut (“If not her, who?” lamented one parent) and the six Brearley School girls who were deferred from Yale (“I thought Yale loved Brearley,” cried another, pointing out that 20 Brearley graduates have gone to Yale in the last five years, more than any other university).
Was it the international students who pay full freight? The public schools who do more for diversity? Occupy Wall Street fomenting anger at the 1 percent?
“Maybe it’s that they are tired of New York City private school kids,” worried the mother of a senior who was deferred from Yale, echoing a common refrain. “The juniors,” she added, “are flipping out.”
Spence and Brearley, both girls’ schools on the Upper East Side, declined to comment on early-admissions data, and many parents spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearful that complaining publicly might hurt their children’s chances in the regular admissions round now under way. Other schools, including Scarsdale High, in Westchester County, said they had not seen significant change, but declined to be specific.
And some places saw plenty of success this season. At the Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, more than half of the seniors who applied on the early track were accepted (the school would not say where while the admissions process continues). At Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, 61 of the school’s 80 seniors applied early, and 52 were admitted — including five to Yale, three to Harvard and two to Princeton.
But college counselors, teachers, tutors and parents in these rarefied circles said students had to digest a hefty dose of deferrals and outright rejections this December.
“There was a lot of disappointment from kids who had prepped hard and got high scores on their tests,” said Tim Levin, founder and chief executive of Bespoke Education, a tutoring and SAT prep company.
Grading early admissions can be a little like analyzing a baseball game after four innings, but it has grown in importance over the last decade, with many Ivy League and other prestige campuses filling 45 percent or more of their classes in December. Generally, students may apply early to only one college, and more and more are doing so, believing it gives them a leg up.
Duke got 2,700 early applications this year, up from 1,482 in 2005. The University of Chicago’s growth was even steeper: 8,698 in 2011, compared with 3,776 in 2008 and 2,774 in 2005. Early applications to Pomona College jumped 33 percent this year over last.
Vincent J. Tompkins Jr., head of school at Saint Ann’s and a former deputy provost at Brown University, attributed the huge increase to “the sense that applying early enhances one’s chance of getting into a highly selective college,” though some colleges dispute that notion.
While many experts say the curve has been getting steeper for several years, 2011’s math was made worse at some colleges, in part because Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia returned to the field after several years without early admissions. During those years, some other top East Coast colleges increased their number of early acceptances, presuming that some of those accepted would abandon them if they got in later to one of those three colleges. Now, places like Yale and Georgetown have cut early acceptances 10 percent, expecting more of the “yeses” to ultimately say yes back.
“Because of those schools resuming early admissions, we think more of our early applicants are people who are really committed to Georgetown,” said Charles A. Deacon, dean of admissions.
Whether or not they gain an advantage, the early-applicant group is shifting; along with minorities, foreigners and public school students, it now also includes more athletes, as college coaches push recruits to enter the early round as well.
“Early decision historically tended to be more homogenous than the regular pool — more white, more upper-class and upper-middle-class, less international,” said Jess Lord, dean of admissions and financial aid at Haverford. “That’s changing fast.”
Of the 726 students accepted to Princeton last month, 56 percent attend public high schools, up from 50 percent five years earlier, the last time it had early admissions; and 37 percent are minorities, up from 31 percent. Among Harvard’s 772 early admits, almost 20 percent are black or Hispanic, compared with 15 percent of those admitted early in 2005.
Amid huge budget cuts to the vaunted University of California system, East Coast colleges like Haverford and Duke are seeing much more interest from the West. At Harvard-Westlake, a top prep school in Los Angeles, 22 students applied early to the University of Chicago this year, compared with 4 in 2007, said Tamar Adegbile, an upper school dean. Eight were accepted.
Foreign students have a particular appeal, and not just because many of them have sterling credentials and make for a more diverse student body. Unlike the overwhelming majority of American students, most foreigners pay full price.
After years of being relatively flat, the number of undergraduates from other countries studying in the United States has jumped 25 percent over the last four years, hitting 291,000 last year, according to the Institute of International Education. The number from China soared to 57,000 from 10,000.
The change has been more pronounced in the early admissions pool, where top colleges report getting two to four times as many international applications as they did a few years ago.
“It used to be that no internationals applied early,” said Mr. Deacon, the admissions dean at Georgetown. “More Asian families, particularly in China, have become able to afford education in the United States, and they focus on the elite institutions, or one tier down.”
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