Early action applications inched up this year, slightly reversing last year’s precipitous decline.
While early action applications are still arriving, Dean of Admissions Charles Deacon said that he expects close to 4,000 applications, up nearly 4 percent from 2003 but still 21 percent lower than the peak year of 2002.
Deacon said he was not concerned about the change, which he attributed to the false inflation of the number of early applicants during the last half-decade, largely because of changing early admissions policies at top-tier universities.
After a decade of relative stability, early admissions first began to increase dramatically after 2000 when Georgetown, Harvard and Brown decided to allow students to apply early action to several universities.
The trend continued through 2002 when schools that have early action allowed students who had applied early decision elsewhere into that pool. That inflated the numbers of early applications by allowing students to apply early action and early decision to different schools.
In 2003, Harvard, Yale and Stanford decided to change their policies by only permitting single-choice early action, where students can only apply to one school early. These new restrictions prompted Georgetown’s crop of early applications to plummet nearly 25 percent from the previous year.
This year, the world of college admissions has returned to relative stability and Georgetown is predicting slightly more early applications than last year. Georgetown continues to allow early action applicants to apply early to other schools as well, a principle that Deacon sees as fundamental.
“Our policies are built upon the principles of freedom of choice for the students,” he said, emphasizing that Georgetown has had a consistent policy throughout. “Our litmus test isn’t how much they love Georgetown, its how much we love them and we don’t want to limit their choices.”
In fact, since universities started strategically tinkering with their early admissions programs in the late 1990s, Georgetown has seen about a 50 percent increase in early applications. Schools such as Harvard, who also saw early applications peak two years ago, have since seen early applications drop as well with no net gain.
Students often apply early thinking that they will have a strategic advantage in doing so. Deacon, however, said that Georgetown admits the same percentage of students from its early applicant pool as it does from its regular decision pool. It is one of the few schools to do so.
The early action yield rate has also increased, from 37 percent in 2002-03 to 60 percent last year, but yields continue to be lower for students who apply for financial aid. The yield rate represents the percentage of accepted students who choose to attend the institution.
Colleges with early decision applications find that those applicants are less qualified overall than their regular decision pool, he said. Among colleges that use early action programs, the early pool is, on the greater part, more qualified.
Deacon said that average SAT scores in the current pool of early action applicants to Georgetown seem to demonstrate an increase from previous years.
Within the early application pool itself, the exact demographics have yet to be thoroughly analyzed, but preliminary results show slight increases in applications to the School of Foreign Service and no change in the number of applicants to the College. The School of Nursing and Health Studies and the McDonough School of Business saw slight decreases in applications.
Deacon, however, said that all changes were relatively insignificant.
“The trend, if any, is toward strong interest in international affairs,” Deacon said, noting that applications to the SFS and MSB are particularly contingent upon world affairs. Applications to the SFS, he said, decreased following the end of the Cold War and have been increasing since Sept. 11, 2001.
In 2002, the year of peak early applications, the National Association for College Admissions Counseling ordered early action schools to accept early applications from students who had applied early decision elsewhere.
Because of the overwhelming response and record applications, Harvard, Yale and Stanford decided to defy the NACAC ruling and only allow single-choice early action applicants. The NACAC later validated their decision.
Regular decision applications for the class of 2009 are due on Jan. 15.
