Yale ends early decision option amid criticisms

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Yale University will no longer require students who are accepted through its early decision program to attend the Ivy League school.\nYale officials said Wednesday they hope that by ending the binding early decision program, the university will slow down the college admissions process, which has become a speeding treadmill for high school students.\nBinding early decision applications will end with next year's freshman class. Yale's program will now be similar to Harvard's.\nYale President Richard Levin floated the idea of ending binding early decision last winter. He spent the year talking with other college officials, students, parents and teachers.\n"Early decision programs help colleges more than applicants," Levin said. "It is our hope to take pressure off students in the early cycle and restore a measure of reasoned choice to college admissions."\nEarly decision started at most elite colleges in the late 1990s as a way for top students to win admission to their first choice of college without having to go through the longer admissions process.\nYale started a binding early decision system with students who enrolled in the fall of 1996\nOther schools, such as Stanford, Brown and Princeton, followed suit a few years later.\nBrown, which started offering early decision last year, is considering whether to alter its policy, university admissions officials have said.\nPrinceton President Shirley Tilghman has said the school will not consider changing its policy until a new dean of admissions is appointed next year.\nTilghman also has said that Yale's decision will have no bearing on Princeton.\nSome schools have re-examined early decision programs because many more students applied early than were expected. Students said they believed they had a better shot of getting into their favorite school if they applied early, although admissions officers denied this was true. In addition, the early acceptance relieves months of uncertainty.\nLevin and some other college officials said that binding early decision put too much pressure on students at too young an age to make up their minds about what college was right for them.\n"We adopted early decision for the sake of the rare student who knows exactly where he or she wants to go by mid-fall of the senior year of high school. We never meant the early cycle to become the normal cycle," Yale undergraduate Dean Richard Brodhead said.\nYale said Wednesday that any student who applies for early decision can apply at other schools during the regular admissions period.\nA committee of faculty and administrators who are responsible for admissions and financial aid policy approved the change. The undergraduate student government also endorsed it.