In spite of Dean Furda's deceptive comment, early admissions is never beneficial to most students requiring financial aid. Early decision does not allow applicants to compare different financial aid offers, including those based on merit. It offers the university a reliable source of students requiring less or no aid than in the regular decision round. It also assures Penn, and other schools with grossly inflated early admissions, a large pool of applicants with 100% yield. Twenty and thirty years ago most universities with early decision programs filled about 20% of their classes this way. That number crept up to 30%. Now it is 50%. The regular decision round is skewered by this practice. Students applying regular decision have a significantly lowered acceptance rate due to this program. Penn is not the only school indulging in this selfish practice but at least the admissions dean should be honest about it.

I disagree with Malka617's first paragraph above. Stale, maybe. If we just talk about the Ivies, most Ivies tout excellent financial aid programs, with Penn's being excellent. So aid is truly a non-issue.

The real problem in applications is that the Ivies have increasingly out-of-control application volumes. According to Ivy websites, the descending order of demand: Cornell 36,338, Harvard 30,489, Brown 30,135, Penn 26,939, Princeton 26,247, Columbia 26,179, Yale 25,869, and Dartmouth 18,778. This list provides the real ranking, not acceptance rates, where, of course, smaller numbers of available slots result in lower rates.

So, what I believe is the best for Penn is if it admits 100% from early admit applicants. Reasons are 1) these students attest to being devoted to Penn; 2) early applicants clearly are not procrastinators (the real reason why many students end up applying for regular admission); and 3) Penn would thereby avoid taking advantage, financially and emotionally, of applicants per below.

Ivies and other universities/colleges seem to be immoral in taking financial advantage of the admissions frenzy. Just multiply $70 or whatever is the going rate (despite waivers) to the 27,000 applicants for each school. So I propose that Ivies as a group should 1) reveal cut-off academic and character criteria that will reduce these ridiculous numbers; and/or 2) limit each applicant to three Ivies each with breach resulting in admission to none; and/or 3) return half the admission fee to rejects; and/or 4) require applicants to promise not to engage in underage drinking or be subject to automatic withdrawal of admission.

I agree with Malka617. Just because generous financial aid is available doen't mean people know this (or even believe it).

But I think the bigger issue is Penn's drop in yield under Furda. Taking out ED admits, and assuming ED admits all enrolled, compare Class of 2011 RD yield (50.38%, Stetson's final year, http://web.archive.org/web/20080213223110/http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/profile/) to Class 2014 RD yield (45.97%, http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/profile/).

Who cares how many apps Penn gets early or regular? The real test of a school's ability to recruit and attract the best lies in RD yield. Seems that Furda has a lot of work to do in this area. Why is RD yield falling?