Early Harvard Admissions Dip Applications

USA

The number of students applying to Harvard under the university’s early action program — which gave them the opportunity to make an admissions decision in December instead of March — fell by about 17 percent, the university said this week .

The deadline for the early phase of the admissions cycle was November 1, by which time Harvard had faced more than three weeks of unrest related to the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. The deadline also came just over four months after the Supreme Court, in a case involving Harvard, struck down race-conscious admissions programs.

In an announcement in the Harvard Gazette, the university’s official publication, the university said 7,921 people had applied under the early action protocol, which does not require an accepted student to enroll. Last year there were 9,553 early action applicants.

But early interest in Harvard was still greater than it had been a few years ago. For example, in 2019 the university received 6,424 early action applications.

The Gazette announcement did not include any speculation from the university about the reason for the decline, but Harvard officials have privately wondered how the Supreme Court’s decision affected applications.

Applicants began learning about Harvard’s early action decisions Thursday evening.

Yale reported a modest increase in early action applications, from 7,744 last year to 7,856 this year. The acceptance rate fell by a full percentage point to 9.02 percent, while Harvard’s, 8.74 percent, rose by more than a full percentage point. Princeton, the only other Ivy League university to offer a non-binding early admission system, has not released data for the projected class of 2028.

Unlike last year, Harvard did not publish racial demographics of the students it admitted early. However, it was reported that a large portion of these students were from New England (22.3 percent), and nearly 17 percent were international students, an increase from approximately 14 percent last year.