Harvard Admissions

Harvard Admissions Decisions

Harvard Early Decision, Harvard Admissions Decision, Harvard University Admissions Decisions

Harvard released its Early decisions in waves this December.

Back in the day, students were able to conjecture whether or not they were admitted to a university by observing the thinness or thickness of the decision envelope. Their conjecture was often accurate as universities that admitted students included additional information about the university in the hope of swaying them to attend (rather than choosing another school). And student denied admission didn’t need such supplemental material. It was that simple. The rumor that the thick envelope was good and the thin one wasn’t was a true one. But most students don’t find out by snail mail anymore. They find out online.

So are there tricks to knowing if you’re going to get in anymore without the aid of thick and thin envelopes? Sometimes there certainly are! For instance, when the Harvard admissions decisions went out for their Early pool recently, if you happened to have been monitoring “College Confidential,” you’ll have noticed that the decisions went out in waves. Just check the message boards. You’ll see a bunch of “deferred,” “deferred,” “deferred” as students announced their admissions decisions from Harvard. And then a bit later, students started getting “admitted,” “admitted,” “admitted.”

The difference in timing is no coincidence we assure you. Schools are known to send out their admissions decisions in waves and Harvard University is no exception. Have you had a similar experience with a university you applied to? Tell us your stories by posting below! We want to hear them.

Admission to Harvard College

We’ve been rather critical of Harvard in the past with respect to their efforts at welcoming LGBT students as seen here: Harvard and LGBT Students. In short, Harvard, unlike its Ivy League peers, doesn’t rank very highly on the Campus Climate Index nor does it rank in “The Advocate’s” list of gay-friendly colleges. And, unlike many of Harvard’s peer institutions, they also don’t have a resource center for LGBT students that is suitable.

Harvard College Admission, Admission to Harvard University, Harvard Admissions, Harvard Admission

A new question may soon be added to the application for applicants to Harvard College.

But Harvard is making strides in the area of LGBT inclusivity, perhaps to address its image problem. First, students led the way when Harvard wrestlers wore t-shirts in support of the LGBT community’s National Coming Out Day. Now, Harvard is considering adding a question to their application that gives applicants the option of stating their sexual orientation. But will one’s answer give students a boost? No, according to Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons as quoted in the article appearing in the “Harvard Crimson”: “Fitzsimmons said identification as LGBT would not act as a positive ‘tip’ in the application process, unlike other factors like place of residence and legacy status which can help land an applicant in the group of accepted students.

According to the “Harvard Crimson” article on admission to Harvard College, “The College is considering adding language to its application for admission that would allow prospective students to self-identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 told The Crimson. ‘We want to send a positive signal to students who are grappling with the issue of [sexual orientation] or gender identity,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘I think this campus is really welcoming to all students and that’s the signal we want to send.’”

At The Ivy Coach, we salute Harvard College for their efforts! Maybe Mr. Fitzsimmons reads our blog and got tired of our criticism. In fact, we suspect he does indeed peruse our writings. Who else Googles “Williams Fitzsimmons Ivy Coach” a few times each year? Ah, the beauty of Google Analytics!

Admission to Harvard

In this photo from "The Crimson," you can see one happy fifteen year-old. She's off to Harvard in the fall.

College seniors frequently say that the freshmen look younger and younger every year. Usually, it’s just their minds playing tricks on them. But in the case of incoming Harvard freshman Saheela O. Ibraheem, they’re not wrong. Saheela will be matriculating to Harvard College next year at the age of fifteen. Like most of next year’s freshman class who gained admission to Harvard, Saheela applied as a high school senior. She just happened to skip the sixth and ninth grades!

Admission to Harvard for fifteen year-olds isn’t new. They’ve admitted younger whiz kids before. But it doesn’t make it any less intriguing! According to “The Crimson,” “Her parents—a quantitative analyst and an accountant—began teaching her advanced math at a young age. Ibraheem even scored a 700 in the mathematical reasoning section of the SAT as a fifth grader. Ibraheem said she applied to 14 schools in the fall, including seven of the eight Ivy League schools. She received acceptance letters from all of them except Yale. She made her decision to attend Harvard after visiting MIT and Harvard during their respective prefrosh weekends.”

Do you think fifteen year-olds are too young to be at college? Do you think they aren’t socially mature enough yet? Let us know your thoughts by posting below!

See “The Crimson” article on the 15-year old admitted to Harvard.

Check out this post on another Harvard Admit and sign up for a free 30-minute consultation today.

A Harvard Admit

With an applicant pool of nearly 35,000 students and a 6.2% admit rate for the class of 2015, Harvard College admitted one student who many of you may have read about. She’s not a Hollywood celebrity nor is she a famous politician’s daughter. She’s Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld. Yes, that Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, the daughter of Amy Chua, aka, The Tiger Mom. The woman who wouldn’t let her kids have sleepovers. The woman who demanded only A’s. The woman who wrote the tell all parenting book that received rather negative reaction.

But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Sophia was accepted to Harvard College. Amy went to Harvard College (and Harvard Law School). Sophia’s dad went to Harvard Law School, too. She’s a legacy. She obviously had top grades and test scores. And her letter to the “New York Post” demonstrated that she could write. She had a distinct point of view. She was raised by The Tiger Mom. If her college essays happened to focus on her mother, they’d be a college admissions counselor’s dream. So why is it a surprise that Sophia was admitted? It isn’t.

You don’t have to be a Tiger Mom if you want your kid to get into Harvard College. Students with all sorts of mothers get into Harvard. Short mothers. Tall mothers. Pretty mothers. Savvy mothers. Even absentee mothers. Does that mean that the children of the Tiger Moms won’t get into Harvard? No. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise either.

There is an editorial in today’s “Boston Globe” that the return of Early Action to Harvard makes the admissions process more equitable: “The admissions advantage for athletes has been a source of contention at Harvard for decades. A situation in which athletes get an early word, but few other applicants do, was hard to square with the overall philosophy of promoting equity. It’s far better to bring back early action — and to make sure all potential applicants know about the option.”

While it is true, athletes who applied Regular Decision these past couple of years to Harvard were indeed receiving Likely Letters at the time when candidates for admission would have received their notices if Early Action remained in place, reinstating Early Action at Harvard will not end this particular advantage for athletes. Coveted athletes who choose not to apply Early Action to Harvard but instead to apply Regular Decision next year will likely still be receiving those Likely Letters in December.

And early programs do not promote equity in spite of what the deans of admission and university presidents may say. Are early programs great for universities? Yes! Are they great for students who want to get accepted early on in their senior year and not have to worry about their admission decisions for many more months? You bet. But students who are admitted early are historically less diverse than those who are admitted through Regular Decision.

Premed Applicants

There was a great article in yesterday’s “The Harvard Crimson” that explored how students who arrive at Harvard and want to get on the premed path often end up changing their minds. The article points out that many students with an interest in medicine are exposed to medicine from an early age, either because of their annual doctor appointments, the prevalence of medicine on television series such as “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” or one or both of their parents are physicians and they want to follow in their footsteps.

At Harvard, like at so many universities throughout the country, students will so often find that their interests change while in college when they are exposed to new disciplines, to new possibilities. This isn’t just true of premeds. It’s true of students who apply to colleges thinking they want to be lawyers or business executives or politicians and that’s why it’s always important to keep your options open. Says Lee Ann Michelson, director of premedical and health care advising at Harvard’s Office of Career Services, “While approximately 20 percent of students informally declare an interest in pursuing the premed track when they first arrive on campus, only seven percent eventually apply to medical school as seniors.”

Check out the full article in “The Harvard Crimson.”

The Harvard and Princeton Admission Spin

Harvard and Princeton’s announcement this past Thursday that they will be re-instituting Single-Choice Early Action programs for the Class of 2016, after they announced the elimination of similar programs in 2006, came as no surprise in the world of competitive college admissions. And neither did their PR spin.

For years, Harvard had a Single-Choice Early Action program and Princeton had a binding Early Decision program. Yet in 2006, the Harvard and Princeton administrations chose to eliminate these programs and instead only offer admission through a single Regular Decision pool. Their chief motivation? They claimed it was to increase the diversity of their student body.

Said Harvard President Derek Bok three years ago, “Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged. Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries, and high schools with fewer resources miss out. Students needing financial aid are disadvantaged by binding early decision programs that prevent them from comparing aid packages. Others who apply early and gain admission to the college of their choice have less reason to work hard at their studies during their final year of high school.”

Said Princeton President Shirley Tilghman, “We agree that early admission ‘advantages the advantaged. Although we have worked hard in recent years to increase the diversity of our early decision applicants, we have concluded that adopting a single admission process is necessary to ensure equity for all applicants. We believe that elimination of early admission programs can reduce some of the frenzy, complexity and inequity in a process that even under the best of circumstances is inevitably stressful for students and their families. We hope very much that our decision will encourage other colleges and universities to join in eliminating early admission programs.”

Now four years later, Harvard and Princeton are re-instituting Early policies and, interestingly, university administrators are citing the very reasons they used to eliminate the programs in 2006 as they are to reinstate them in 2011. Said Princeton’s Tilghman upon reinstating the program, “By reinstating an early program, we hope we can achieve two goals: provide opportunities for early application for students who know that Princeton is their first choice, while at the same time sustaining and even enhancing the progress we have made in recent years in diversifying our applicant pool and admitting the strongest possible class.”

Charlie Sheen’s longtime publicist recently resigned in light of his client’s rampage in the press. Is it possible he has resurfaced as the spin doctor for Harvard and Princeton? The truth of the matter is that Harvard and Princeton are reinstating their early programs because other colleges did not follow suit by eliminating their own early programs. Harvard and Princeton were thus left at a competitive disadvantage and while their applicant numbers and admission statistics continued to rise, they likely could have risen even higher if they had not eliminated their Early policies in the first place.

For all the applicants who want to use their early card and maybe even end the process in December, no doubt many of them applied Early Action to Yale or Stanford, or Early Decision to another school. It has long been said that Early Decision or in Yale’s case, SCEA (Single-Choice Early Action), attracts the best and the brightest – certainly the most motivated because these applicants are finished with their applications by November 1st. For all we know, the applicant pool at both of these schools may have been weaker than in the years when Early Action and Early Decision were in existence at Harvard and Princeton.

Said Dartmouth Dean of Admission & Financial Aid Maria Laskaris in an article in “The Dartmouth,” “We all saw a jump in applications when the schools eliminated their early programs several years ago because a group of students who would have applied early to either Harvard or Princeton didn’t have an early option and so they applied regular decision to a broader cross-section of schools. So I think [the recent announcement] would certainly depress some of the growth in the applicant pool that all the schools would see.”

And therein lies the truth.

Harvard College, Shame on You!

The administrators at Harvard College should take a course in business planning at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business because obviously they haven’t learned anything from what’s being taught at HBS.

The deadline for applications for transfer students for fall 2008 was February 15th but a few days before the 15th, it was announced that the deadline was extended to February 16th. Now, over a month after applications were due, it has been announced that the college is not accepting transfer students for the next two years. Just yesterday, March 20th, Harvard’s Director of Transfer Admissions, Marlene Vergara Rotner, e-mailed applicants with this news.

Harvard administrators attribute this decision to a lack of available housing. While the college doesn’t require students who enter as freshmen to live on campus for all four years, they do require transfer students to reside on campus for the entire period of their undergraduate studies. Since the stock of available dorm space has not changed for some time, we wonder how Harvard administrators could not have come to this decision before they made transfer applications available for the upcoming 2008-2009 school year.

Students invest their hearts, minds, and scores of hours in writing essays for a Harvard application. If these administrators had to come to this conclusion so late in the process, couldn’t they have at least continued to accept transfers for one more year? Then, when they made public their decision to not accept transfer applications for the subsequent year or two, there would have been fewer casualties. This would have been the kinder and more responsible thing to do, and much more in line with what one would expect from an institution such as Harvard.

The following is Harvard’s Transfer Admission Announcement posted on March 20, 2008:

“Harvard College will be unable to enroll any transfer students for the next two academic years, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010. Following the most thorough examination of its residential housing in Harvard’s history, the Dean of Harvard College, Professor David Pilbeam, has concluded that the Harvard Houses cannot successfully accommodate any new transfer students. Instead, the College has embarked on a planning process for substantial capital investment to renovate and revitalize its residential spaces.

In important respects, undergraduate education at Harvard College is residential in character. Students learn a great deal from the residential experience and contact with one another, complementing the experience of classrooms and laboratories. Harvard does not admit transfer students to non-residential status.

The College offers a Visiting Undergraduate Program, which enables students to enroll in Harvard College for academic credit at their home institutions. Visiting Undergraduates are not ordinarily offered College housing, and they are not permitted subsequently to transfer to Harvard as degree candidates.”

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