U.'s early app numbers stay fairly stable

Despite drastic changes in early application numbers at some of Penn's peer institutions, the size of the University's early decision pool has remained fairly stable in comparison to last year.

As of now, Penn has received 3,382 applications, which is just slightly less than the 3,401 submitted in 2002. However, this is not a final number, as there are still "some more to count," according to Admissions Dean Lee Stetson.

Because applications are required to be postmarked by Nov. 1, the total number has not been tabulated, but Stetson said that he does not foresee a great increase.

Other Ivy League schools, though, did see large fluctuations in application numbers.

The largest changes occurred at Harvard and Yale universities, likely because of a change in the schools' early admissions policies to a "single-choice early action" program.

Harvard witnessed an immense decline in early applications this year-- 3,894 as compared to 7,615 applications last year.

Previous to this year, Harvard operated under a non-binding early action program that allowed applicants to apply to a number of early action schools and one early decision school. However, under a new policy that Yale and Stanford have also adopted, the university offers a "single-choice early action" program that prevents students from applying to more than one school for early admission under a non-binding agreement.

Yale and Stanford, both of which previously employed a binding early decision policy, saw drastic increases in their early application numbers. Yale saw a 42 percent increase in early applications, while Stanford's numbers rose by 62 percent, according to The New York Times.

Harvard representatives said they are pleased about the decreased number of applicants.

"It's just what we expected and actually hoped for," said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, the director of admissions for Harvard.

Harvard's early action policy "opened the door to a lot of people who didn't have a focus in Harvard," Lewis said. "We don't think it did students and their schools a service."

"This seems to have had the effect we hoped it would have -- to reduce the number of poorly considered applications," Lewis added.

Lewis said that Harvard is probably going to stick with its new policy for now.

"Our interest is pretty simple," she said. "We want to enroll the best people we can find from around the world."

Stetson said that the large fluctuations in application numbers at Harvard, Yale and Stanford were to be expected.

"Nothing that has happened is surprising given their change of policy," Stetson said.

He added that Penn, which has a binding early decision program, has "not discussed the possibility of such a policy."

Brown, which in recent years switched from an early action to a binding early decision policy, has seen a slight increase in its application numbers for the Class of 2008. As of Wednesday, it had received 1,899, a slight increase from the 1,871 applications submitted last year, according to Michael Goldberger, director of admissions at Brown.

Goldberger added that Brown expects to receive about 20 more applications in the next couple of days.

"I had predicted that we'd go up about 40 or 50 applications," Goldberger said.

Goldberger said that although the possibility of changing Brown's early application policy is discussed every year, "we're going to wait and see what happens."

"Who ends up in the school isn't going to change if the policy does," Goldberger added.

According to The New York Times, Cornell and Columbia also had little change in their number of early decision applications, with Cornell up 1 percent and Columbia down 1 percent. Representatives from the schools' admissions offices did not return repeated calls for comment.

Admissions officials at Dartmouth College and Princeton University did not return calls regarding the number of early decision applications they had received.

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