Pressure to pick college cheats students of choices
Last week, about 1,000 prospective college freshmen and their families visited Cornell University for tours by student guides skilled at walking backward while talking loudly. That same scene is being repeated on hundreds of campuses this summer.
What the visitors see on the tours are lots of near-empty buildings and anxious high schoolers like themselves. What they don't see are the students and professors who make up the heart of any university and are important factors in picking a college.

Yet many college-bound students have little choice but to cram their visits into the summer instead of waiting until classes are in session. The application process has become so accelerated that some colleges accept half their freshmen on an "early decision" timetable that forces students to pick a single favorite college and apply by Nov. 1. If accepted, they must enroll at that school.

Because early decision programs offer advantages to applicants — the equivalent of a 100-point boost in SAT scores — many students can't ignore the option in spite of the extra stress it inflicts on them.

Last year, the major players in the admissions system promised to take action to reduce an increasingly frenzied application race caused by early decision and other factors. But their small steps have done little to empower the students and families who are shopping for colleges.

Feeding the frenzy:

• Early decision. Although early decision programs provide colleges with a dependable pool of interested students, they can force students to commit to a college before they are ready. The demands of the early decision process also make applicants cram all of their academic achievements into their junior year. Then, if the students are accepted in mid-December, the balance of their senior year becomes a meaningless holding pattern. Plus, the system is unfair to students who need financial aid. They must forgo the early decision route so they can compare aid offers from multiple colleges.

• Skewed college rankings. College rating systems place the weight in the wrong areas. For example, U.S. News & World Report partially bases its rankings on "peer review," what college officials think about other colleges. To score high on that scale, schools engage in popularity contests, bombarding other colleges with prestige-boosting brochures. Even so, most officials confess they know little about other schools.

• Poorcollege counseling. Too many counselors stress the competitiveness of the college application race. Yet that is true only at a few dozen big-name schools that lure too many students who could find a better match elsewhere. Overall, 91% of students are accepted by either their first- or second-choice college, according to the UCLA Higher Education Institute. But students aren't getting that message.

Though colleges have promised to reform the admissions system, change is slow in coming. A few schools have backed away from the early decision process. The University of North Carolina, for one, has dropped the option. And Yale and Stanford swapped early decision for early action programs, which inform students of acceptances early in their senior year but don't require them to give a binding pledge that they'll attend.

In another positive move, U.S. News last month abandoned a controversial practice that had spurred colleges to increase their reliance on early admission students. The magazine has stopped ranking colleges in part on the basis of their "yield" — the percentage of accepted students who agree to attend. The change lessens the incentive for colleges to accept high numbers of students who are required to accept the offers.

Still, what's really needed from college-ranking publications is information that helps students assess the education a school offers: the percentage of students earning spots in graduate schools, student satisfaction or employers' ratings of graduates.

Colleges also could help If they were more candid about the application process, parents and students would be less perplexed and anxious. For instance, most colleges say applying early does not give students any advantage, a claim refuted by many studies, including The Early Admissions Game, a book released this spring.

The stress could be reduced further by high school counselors who emphasize that finding a good college fit is more important than pursuing a high-prestige name. Graduate schools and employers consider a student's academic performance a better indicator of success than the cachet of the college that issues the diploma.

If all college admission players moved together to reduce the frenzy, the need for empty-campus tours would diminish.

Early decision is good option
By William T. Conley
For the most selective colleges in the country, this summer has had its usual commotion and special tension. The annual summer hordes of prospective students and their family members descended on our campuses. Meanwhile, college personnel were speculating on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action and tracking the continued media attention on such matters as early decision.
Affirmative action was decided in a court of law. The fairness of early decision, however, continues to be debated in the court of public opinion. Highly selective colleges brace for another year of explaining admissions processes that necessarily must reject more than half of the applicant pool. Early decision has been the lightning rod for criticism of all that is wrong with the current admissions environment. Critics claim that colleges, bowing to the rating gods, use early decision for selfish ends, with little or no regard for the student's interest.

In the past year, Stanford and Yale universities made a big splash with their decisions to drop early decision in favor of early action, under which students don't have to commit to attend. Earlier, the University of North Carolina decided to drop "early" options altogether.

But after the flurry of policy shifts subsided, the early decision landscape looks remarkably, and thankfully, unchanged. Johns Hopkins University maintains its commitment to binding early decision because we feel it has an important place on the spectrum of decision options. Appropriately administered, early decision benefits both colleges and students.

One out of three incoming freshmen enrolled early at Johns Hopkins. A recent study showed that 35% of college-bound students began their search before junior year. By fall of their senior year, a significant number of students are ready to declare a first-choice college. Early decision was created 30 years ago to accommodate those prepared students. It seems the demand is still there.

At Johns Hopkins, we awarded financial aid in the same proportion to those admitted early and under regular decision. This year's freshman class is arguably the most diverse in our history, and the early decision cohort includes underrepresented minorities in nearly the same proportion as in the class as a whole. These results contradict the claim that early decision is the privilege of an elite majority.

We review the final transcripts of all enrolling students. There is no demonstrable difference in senior-year performance between early and regular-decision students. Our students appear to remain motivated even when admitted in December. With only a tiny percentage of college-bound students admitted early, the early decision group could hardly be blamed for any real or imagined plague of "senioritis."

Early decision is not going away anytime soon, and we think that is a good thing.

William T. Conley is dean of enrollment at Johns Hopkins University.