Decision Day For Last Early Admits

Today 875 students out of 4,008 hopefuls will open their mailboxes or e-mail accounts to find the golden ticket of college admissions—congratulatory letters and e-mails from the admissions office offering them a place in the College’s Class of 2011.

In its final year of early admissions, Harvard is inviting around 60 more students to join the incoming class than it did last year, the school announced today. The preliminary early admissions rate of 21.5 percent is almost identical to that of the previous two years.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said that it was too early to know socioeconomic details about the Class of 2011. He said, however, that next year’s incoming freshmen will be even more diverse in terms of ethnic groups and possible areas of concentration.

There are many more prospective engineers and math concentrators—61 engineers compared to 41 for the early admits of the Class of 2010 and 87 potential math concentrators compared to 62 last year.

According to Fitzsimmons, the rise in these numbers can mainly be attributed to increased visibility of Harvard’s Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which professors voted on Tuesday to rename the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“More professors and courses in that area resonated very well when we went out and talked to interested applicants,” Fitzsimmons said.

The number of Mexican American early admits increased to 22 from 14 last year and the number of non-Mexican Hispanic early admits increased to 36 from 30 last year, according to Fitzsimmons.

Finally, he said the upward trend in foreign nationals and students eligible for the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative continued for this year.

While Harvard has experienced positive returns in its final year of single-choice early admissions, Fitzsimmons said he is “very excited” for next year’s round of admissions and the changes it will bring.

“We will now be out on the road a lot more, travelling through October and until December instead of winding down at the end of October,” he said, adding that College admissions officers will be travelling with Princeton and the University of Virginia, which have both also given up early admission.

Fitzsimmons said the additional travel time will allow his office to “expand horizons” and visit schools that rarely or never send students to Harvard.

“We have a search list of around 80,000 promising students and with more time we can tap into some of those students from those high schools that almost never send people our way,” he said. “It could make a real difference both in the academic quality and economic-slash-ethnic diversity of our class.”

The admissions office is not sure how this new application process will affect applicant numbers.

“Instead of 19,000 regular [decision applicants], we’ll have 23,000 or 24,000 overall applicants, I think, but who knows what the number might be,” Fitzsimmons said.

There is, however, the concern that applicant numbers might decrease as potential students may apply and accept early decisions at other schools such as Yale and Stanford.

“That’s been an issue for a very long time,” he said. “Previously we were always faced with the idea that some very good students would end up choosing binding early decisions at other universities instead of applying here.”

“This is one of the reasons why we look at this as an experiment,” Fitzsimmons added. “We have to be realistic. If we don’t end up as strong as we are now or stronger, we will have to consider going back to [early action], but we hope that this doesn’t turn out to be the case.”

—Staff writer Aditi Banga can be reached at abanga@fas.harvard.edu.