Alessandro van den Brink | Trust falls

Small Talk | Why Penn’s latest ED changes don’t bring in better applicants

By Alessandro van den Brink 09/13/16 11:53pm

Over the summer, Penn introduced a major tweak to its early decision application process that prevents students from applying early decision to Penn and early action to another private university. Penn’s Admissions Office claims that this will make it so that students who apply to Penn ED are more assured of their decision to pick Penn. However, until the problem of over-accepting ED students stops, this new policy does nothing to bring in more dedicated students.

A more accurate measure of an applicant’s dedication and commitment to Penn is not whether he or she applies to Penn over another school, but if he or she picks Penn over other schools despite being admitted to both. Not all schools have the same acceptance rates and therefore high school students must strategically apply by taking into account how realistic their chances are of being accepted.

One of the main reasons this is true is because of Penn’s vastly overinflated ED acceptance rate, which amounted to 23.2 percent for the Class of 2020. Compare this to Penn’s overall acceptance rate of 9.4 percent and the regular decision acceptance rate of 7 percent and it becomes obvious that many applicants may feel compelled to apply to Penn ED simply because it is their only chance of getting in.

Imagine a high school senior who is on the fence between Penn and a school with a higher admissions rate. This student would have a tough time selecting between both schools given that they would be accepted to both, but seeing as their odds of getting into Penn would be three times lower if they applied regular decision to both schools, the student might feel compelled to apply ED.

In the scenario above, Penn isn’t receiving the kind of fully committed applicant that Dean Furda would expect to apply ED to Penn. As The Daily Pennsylvanian Opinion Board argued in an editorial last year, Penn can’t keep admitting more than half of its incoming classes solely through ED — it filled 54 percent of the Class of 2020 through it. This results in students believing that their only shot of getting into Penn is through the ED system.

By admitting more and more of its incoming classes through Early Decision, Penn can increase its yield to a greater extent. This has obviously paid off, as Penn recorded its highest yield of accepted students enrolling in Penn this year at between 68 and 69 percent, around the same rate as that of Princeton. By increasing its yield, Penn can make itself appear much more desirable to future applicants who will note that a large majority of accepted students end up enrolling. It’s not stated explicitly, though, that more than half of those students who ended up enrolling did so through ED and therefore had no choice but to enroll.

ED as a system exists primarily to allow students to pledge their loyalty to Penn as their first choice school. By eliminating the possibility of applicants applying concurrently to early action private schools, Penn Admissions hopes that this ED pool will be more eager to be a part of Penn than ever before. However, as demonstrated earlier, these applicants may simply be applying to Penn ED because they feel that it is the only way they will be accepted — even if Penn isn’t their stand-alone favorite school.

There is no way that Penn will abolish the ED system any time soon, as that would make Penn less appealing to students who would prefer to finish the college application process by December. Therefore, I believe that Penn Admissions should lower its ED acceptance rate to a similar level as its regular decision acceptance rate and defer more ED applicants. This way, the perceived dedication to Penn that ED applicants offer can still be factored in, but those who are deferred to regular decision must prove their loyalty again by selecting Penn over other schools to which they are accepted.

If Penn Admissions truly values dedication to the school as much as it claims it does, this is the only path to ensure that it receives students who embody those very qualities.

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