Princeton Follows Harvard

As I had been hoping, it looks like Harvard's elimination of early admissions may be just the spark needed to inspire other schools to follow suit. One of Harvad's main competitors for the same applicant pool already has:

A week after Harvard became the first Ivy League university to announce the dismantlement of its early admissions program, Princeton University followed suit yesterday, moving to a unitary applicant pool for the Class of 2012.

In announcing the move, Princeton officials echoed Harvard’s words—nearly verbatim.

“We agree that early admission ‘advantages the advantaged,’” Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman said in a statement yesterday. Princeton officials also said that early admissions programs can cause high-school seniors to make “premature” college choices.

Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said that the school had been considering changes to its early decision program for several years and that Harvard’s announcement facilitated the change.

“It would be difficult to make this decision unilaterally,” Cliatt said. “The fact that Harvard made its announcement was one of the factors we took into account when we were doing our review, and it did affect our decision.”

And that is exactly why Harvard was right to take the lead. In my years at Harvard and since, I've often been disappointed to see the university use its tremedous monetary and reputational resources largely to its own advantage, making strides in financial aid only in the wake of progressive moves by competitors like Yale. It is good to see Harvard taking the lead on this one, and I appreciate the candor of Princeton's spokeswoman in acknowledging that they might not have done this without Harvard's initiative.