Most consumers of media are savvy enough to realize that some “announcements” are significant, and others are not very important at all. This week’s announcement by Harvard, that it will be eliminating early admissions beginning with the incoming class of fall 2008, is significant. While other schools may disagree, Harvard is truly the leader of higher education in America, and policy changes the school makes have a ripple effect throughout the college and university landscape. In this particular instance, admissions directors of many top schools are already speculating that Harvard’s decision to do away with early admissions will, at minimum, cause them to review their own policies. Others go further, and boldly predict the widespread demise of early admission in the wake of Harvard’s decision.

You can read that story elsewhere, however, and this newly launched blog is intended to get inside the story and sometimes to challenge the status quo. My challenge today is to ask if eliminating early admissions, ostensibly for the purpose of reducing the overall “college admissions frenzy,” will really accomplish that in the end. For some students, early admissions does make an awful lot of sense. If they know that they really want to attend a certain school, and they have done the research which shows their chances of admission at that school are strong, then why not have those students apply early, get the college admissions frenzy behind them and move on with the rest of senior year of high school?

What do you think? For those who are parents of current college students, did your child apply early admission and what are the pros and cons you would like to share with your peers? If you are the parent of senior in high school or younger, how much have you been counting on early admissions as part of your own child’s admission strategy? Has your child’s high school guidance weighed in with his or her view? Please share your views with me and other parents by clicking on Comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 10:35 am and is filed under College, General, High School, Incoming Freshman, Applications & Admissions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.