Princeton and Harvard Drop Early Admission

The college admission process in the US is part merit, part money and part luck. At Princeton and Harvard, two rather well-regarded schools in two perfectly awful towns, the process just got a bit more sensible with the abolition of early admission. Now if they could get rid of legacies, forget the SATs and remind students that learning is the purpose of a university not handing out sheepskins, things would really be moving in the right direction.

Early admission has its origins in antiquity, but the idea is to let people who really, really, really want to attend a given college a chance to find out earlier than everybody else whether they have been accepted. Deadlines are in the autumn, and one receives an answer around New Years. It does cut down on stress. The catch is, one must attend that school if accepted. Quite how this is enforced is hard to say, but apparently it is. Some schools have grown more flexible allowing students to decide in May if they will accept such a spot.

Of course, early admission benefits those who know the admissions process, and that usually means kids who attend high schools where there is a college prep officer rather than a police officer in the building. People who can afford or who can borrow tens of thousands view college differently from those who are trying to get the money together for this month’s light bill. And in general, parents are clueless about the process, and since it has changed since most of them went through the process themselves, pros are needed to guide kids to the “right school.”

That of course raises the question of what is the “right school.” Harvard and Princeton are, as universities go, not too shabby. The faculty members are world class, but few freshman will be taught by anyone other than a PhD candidate working off a loan. The facilities are exceptional, but with the internet, one doesn’t really need access to the rare books room. The real reason people attend Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne or the University of Tokyo is the cache the name carries with it. Dickens, Samuelson, and Newton are all the same whether one studies at Princeton or the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The unpleasant fact is that a university can only provide an atmosphere in which to study and resources to utilize in that study. The student has to do the work. Moreover, the 17-year-old who gets accepted is not the same person as the 20-year old who decides the college stinks after a couple years’ experience. Also, one shouldn’t forget those who enter university after a few years in the “real world.” The most diligent and aggressive students aren’t always the bright kids from Central High; often, they are the veterans on the GI Bill, or the 28-year old single mom who sees college as we way forward, or the man who finally got his GED at 30 because he discovered book learning later in life. Early admission does nothing for them, but they are more likely to find their education of value on its own merits than the diploma of the guy who got in because grandpa donated a gym.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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