HARVARD UNIVERSITY is to drop a controversial fast-track admission system for elite students in an attempt to open up America’s top colleges to more poor and minority students.
In the competition to attract top talent, Harvard’s “early admissions” policy enables it to lock in the best students four months before other candidates are allowed to apply — a system that largely benefits well-heeled applicants from good schools. Similar policies have been adopted by most of America’s top colleges, but they have been increasingly criticised as excluding poor and minority students.
“Early admission programmes tend to advantage the advantaged,” Derek Bok, Harvard’s interim president, said. “Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries and high schools with fewer resources miss out.
“Students needing financial aid are disadvantaged by binding early-decision programmes that prevent them from comparing aid packages.”
A recent Century Foundation study estimated that only 3 per cent of new entrants at the nation’s 146 most selective colleges came from the bottom socio-economic quarter, compared with 74 per cent from the top quarter.
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Harvard, which accepts more than a third of its students through “early admissions”, will now move to a single application deadline of January 1, with successful applicants being notified by April 1.
The change came a week after publication of a new book, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, by Daniel Golden.
The book argues that the “preference of privilege” favouring rich whites overshadows the number of minorities benefiting from affirmative action.
It relates how top institutions give preference to “legacy” applicants, whose families attended the same college, and “development” cases, whose families have no previous link with the university but are seen as likely to become future donors.
The book claims that the sons of Al Gore, the former Vice-President, Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood power-broker, and Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, leapt ahead of more deserving applicants at Harvard, Brown and Princeton.
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Harvard’s decision to end early admissions is a risky gambit, because it could lose top students to rival institutions, but experts suggested that Harvard was the university most able to make the switch because its prestige virtually guarantees it will continue to attract the best applicants.