Columbia claims to evaluate applicants on a need-blind basis. Does its early decision process suggest otherwise?

Upper West Side NY

15 February, 2022

3:02 PM

Description

Columbia Daily Spectator BY BENJAMIN STEIN FEBRUARY 15, 2022, 1:06 PM The University's undergraduate admissions website prides itself on diversity. Touting the tagline of "need-blind admissions," applicants are assured that their financial situation plays no role in their admission decision. "Columbia has an official policy that for U.S. applicants, undergraduate admissions are need-blind and … we're supposed to admit applicants based only on academic ability, diversity, considerations like that that are considered valuable in their own right," Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia, said. "I'm not sure that's the case." Admissions at Columbia, in keeping with a general trend among peer institutions, has become increasingly more competitive. Over the last 15 years, Columbia's acceptance rate has dropped from 11.4 percent for the class of 2010 to 3.7 percent for the class of 2025. Particularly in recent years, test-optional policies have drawn more applicants, further plummeting acceptance rates. Financial aid, however, has remained fairly stagnant, with only 50 percent of the class of 2025 receiving some amount of need-based financial aid. While peer institutions like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford adopt a restrictive early action admission policy, Columbia continues to admit students through early decision. Each year in mid-December, Columbia early decision applicants anxiously open their admissions portals. When some are greeted by a huge "Congratulations" overlaid upon a video of the Morningside campus, they immediately enter the ranks of Columbia undergraduates. But the early decision process isn't just another means of admission to Columbia. Instead, experts say it often serves the University's admissions office primarily as a way of locking in students who will pay full tuition and fulfill the University's financial goals. Representatives from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid maintain that there are no demographic differences between early decision and regular decision applicants. By definition, early decision is the process by which students apply to a singular school months before they submit their applications to anywhere else in the regular admissions cycle. In doing so, they identify that school as their top choice and are contractually bound to attend that school if admitted. Statistically, the early decision admissions cycle provides a significantly higher chance of admission for prospective students—for Columbia's class of 2025, the early decision acceptance rate was 10.1 percent while the regular decision acceptance rate was a mere 3.15 percent. Early decision admits comprise a significant portion of individual classes even though applicant pools are considerably smaller. For the class of 2025, 6,435 students applied early decision out of 60,551 total across both application rounds, but early decision admits make up 41 percent of the class of 2025. Eric Sherman, a college counselor at IvyWise and former Columbia admissions officer, said applying early allows applicants to compensate for any imperfections in their high school record by demonstrating that Columbia is their top choice, making it an appealing choice for students aiming to boost their chance of admission. "During ED, students can sometimes bridge the gap between where they are academically and what Columbia is looking for," Sherman said. "Applicants that wouldn't hold water in RD may be able to get a slight bump in ED, but that advantage has really narrowed as schools become hypercompetitive." Just as students use early decision to shoot for otherwise out-of-reach schools, admissions officers and institutions find early decision to be a useful tool in both finding students who are truly committed to their top choice college and also identifying students who are more likely to pay full tuition. For admissions officers, the choice of an applicant to apply early to Columbia is incredibly significant. According to Sherman, a priority of admissions is always to admit people who are eager to attend. "Columbia has strategically positioned itself to pull in a high proportion of students from early decision because they want students who identify Columbia as their number one school," Sherman said. "I think it boosts morale when you have students who really want to be at your school." But according to Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center and research professor in education and social policy at Columbia's Teachers College, the practice of early decision admissions is primarily a mechanism used to systematically admit wealthier students that can pay the tuition. "A student taking financial aid wants to get admissions from multiple colleges so that they can get multiple financial aid offers," Jenkins said. "If you go early decision, you have to stick with whatever they're gonna offer you, which is one of the reasons that people with the means [to pay full tuition] tend to go for early decision." Even though applicants can break their early decision contracts if the financial aid offered is insufficient, many students seeking significant financial assistance are reluctant to enter into the binding agreement of early decision in the first place because it deprives them of the ability to compare Columbia's financial aid offer to that of another institution and pick the one that is most feasible given their or their family's socioeconomic status. Knowledge of the early decision process is also an obstacle that prevents students from low-income backgrounds from applying early and further benefits wealthier applicants. "The biggest distinction in early versus regular applicants is when students identify Columbia as a top choice school, they typically have a greater degree of familiarity with the college and are also highly competitive," Sherman said. For some applicants, this knowledge of early decision comes from family members who have already attended college. Others hire counselors like Sherman to guide them through the college application process. Yet, a counseling meeting with Sherman can cost over $1,000 per hour, making the service inaccessible to the vast majority of prospective students. Aaron Pallas, the Arthur I. Gates professor of sociology and education at the Teachers College and the chair of the education policy and social analysis department, emphasized that institutions are acutely aware of the fact that early decision benefits wealthier applicants. "Early decision applicants have to be confident that they are able to afford attendance without looking at other offers," Pallas said. "It's a strategy for universities to maximize the likelihood of locking in a substantial portion of their entering class that they know is more likely to be able to pay full freight." In fact, Jenkins described the admission of wealthy applicants being ingrained into the admissions process through early decision as an integral part of private colleges' business models. "Schools that have an endowment, especially like Columbia, their business model is to admit more kids from wealthy families who can pay more … not because they're necessarily more qualified," Jenkins said. "Having wealth generates wealth. They're more likely to be rich donors in future years, and that's another part of the business model." On top of the numerous financial purposes, Pallas also noted that early decision increases the prestige of a university. A significant metric in national rankings of universities is the yield rate, or the percentage of students admitted who ultimately choose to attend that institution. "Because early decision applicants are committing to attend, assuming the financial aid offer is acceptable, that means that the vast majority of those applicants will attend," Pallas said. This improves the yield, … making the institution look attractive in the eyes of the broader public." As schools like Columbia continue to pull large portions of their undergraduate classes from the pool of wealthier early decision candidates, overall student diversity suffers. Claremont McKenna College professors Heather Antecol and Janet Kiholm Smith concluded in their 2012 paper in the Journal of Law and Economics that "heterogeneity decreases as schools enroll larger percentages of students through ED." They also found that socioeconomic division from the heightened proportions of wealthy early decision admits also has a racial component, as "higher [early decision] enrollment percentages appear to strongly and negatively affect Asian American and Hispanic students and positively affect white students." According to Jenkins, a common defense of admissions practices like early decision is that the additional tuition revenue assists in the distribution of more financial aid during the regular decision round. "The university would say that if they wrap up more of their admissions goal of full pay students or mostly full pay students in early decision, they'll have more money to pay financial aid," Jenkins said. "This is true, but again, your admission rate for lower-income kids who don't go for early decision is lower." However, Antecol and Smith found that this was often not the case. "[Early decision] is a useful tool for enrollment management, but for most schools, it does not appear to be used as a means to furthering goals they may have to improve student diversity," Antecol and Smith wrote. "Instead, any additional revenue generated by ED programs appears to be serving other institutional goals." Staff Writer Benjamin Stein can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow them on Twitter @benjaminpstein. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.