\n<\/p>\n
Tulane University\u2019s admissions office has banned students from four high schools from applying to Tulane through early decision this fall, according to reporting from The New York Times<\/em>. Though three of the schools have not been publicly identified, the one-year ban (or \u201csuspension\u201d) for Colorado Academy comes after a student from that school backed out of the early-decision agreement they signed when they applied to Tulane last year. <\/p>\n For those who aren\u2019t card-carrying college admission geeks like I am, early decision is an application option and enrollment management strategy in which students apply earlier and promise to enroll if admitted, in exchange for receiving an earlier decision offer. The binding nature of early decision means that a student can apply to only one college through early decision.<\/p>\n In most cases students applying through early decision are asked, along with a parent and their school counselor, to sign an early-decision agreement attesting to their understanding of the commitment to enroll if admitted. Early decision is in no way legally binding, but colleges take the early-decision commitment seriously and are appalled and disgusted when students back out of the commitment. The one agreed-upon reason for backing out of an early-decision commitment is when an institution can\u2019t meet a student\u2019s financial need (as determined by the college\u2019s financial aid formula, not what a family thinks it can pay). <\/p>\n I have had admission deans tell me that they would hold it against a school whose students did not follow through on the early-decision commitment, but Tulane is the first college I\u2019ve seen publicly penalize schools. The Tulane ban raises some interesting and thorny ethical questions.<\/p>\n The most obvious is whether it is permissible to punish students in the Class of 2026 for offenses committed by students in the Class of 2025. Retribution may be fashionable these days, but punishing the innocent because you have no way to punish the guilty is not retribution, just wrong. <\/p>\n But that may be just me. The National Association for College Admission Counseling has an \u201cEthical Dilemmas in College Admission\u201d page on its website that includes a hypothetical case study in which a student wants to back out of an early-decision commitment. Among the suggested advice for counselors is to caution the student and parents that withdrawing could have negative consequences for future applicants from the school. Even if that might be the case, that\u2019s terrible advice from NACAC, making it seem like colleges punishing future applicants is acceptable and normal.<\/p>\n At least Tulane is being transparent with its early-decision ban for the schools. As bad as that is, there is a scenario that would be worse, if Tulane ostensibly welcomed early-decision applications from the four schools when it had no intention of admitting any of them.<\/p>\n The Times <\/em>article didn\u2019t provide any details about the circumstances leading up to the ban for the four schools, but Tulane\u2019s position seems to be, as the Times<\/em> paraphrased it, that the schools \u201cfailed to uphold the expectations of the early decision agreement.\u201d Let\u2019s examine that claim a little more closely.<\/p>\n What is a school\u2019s responsibility in advising students wanting to apply early decision? As a counselor, I always advised students and parents that it was a binding commitment, not to be taken lightly. I don\u2019t remember any of my students backing out of an early-decision commitment, but on several occasions I had students who told me on Friday they planned to apply early decision to one college and then a different college on Monday. My response was that they were not ready to apply early decision at all if their thinking was that fluid. <\/p>\n It\u2019s hard for me to imagine how the schools would have failed in their responsibilities. The counselor part of the early-decision agreement states, \u201cI have advised the student to abide by the early decision commitment outlined above.\u201d As long as they have done that, are they responsible for policing the student\u2019s actions? The school could withhold sending transcripts to other colleges, but in today\u2019s litigious environment, it could face legal action from parents for doing so. I have learned that parents who are lawyers are especially skeptical of the early-decision commitment. If the student wanted to renege on early decision, I would require the student to inform the college. An applicant owes the college that courtesy. Beyond that, schools can\u2019t be expected to enforce early decision.<\/p>\n There are several other issues that deserve scrutiny. One is Tulane\u2019s claim in a statement to the Times <\/em>that \u201cA last-minute withdrawal without explanation unfairly impacts other applicants who may have missed opportunities due to the limited number of early-decision offers a university can make.\u201d Excuse me, my BS detector is going off. Tulane has no restriction that I am aware of in the number of students it can admit through early decision, as suggested by the fact that, in recent years, it\u2019s admitted more than 60\u00a0percent of its freshman class using early decision, and it has other opportunities to make up for any loss through early decision 2, early action and regular decision.<\/p>\n There is also an interesting philosophical question about the nature of the early-decision binding commitment. At what point does the binding commitment kick in? Or, more to the point, when does Tulane believe that the commitment is binding?<\/p>\n The common understanding across the world of college admission is that students take on the binding commitment either as soon as they sign the early-decision agreement, or at least as soon as they are accepted. Tulane\u2019s application instructions state that early decision is binding and that students are expected to withdraw all other applications once accepted and issued a financial aid offer, but there are two other points in the same instructions that bring into question whether Tulane really believes that students are committed as soon as accepted. <\/p>\n The first bullet point in Tulane\u2019s instructions for early decision defines it as an \u201capplication timeline for students whose first choice is Tulane and who are prepared to enroll soon after<\/em> (italics mine) being admitted and receiving a financial aid offer.\u201d The use of the phrase \u201csoon after\u201d suggests that there is a period of time after acceptance when the student is not yet committed. <\/p>\n In addition, Tulane expects accepted early-decision applicants to submit a $1,000 enrollment deposit by Jan.\u00a015. Asking for a deposit is not unique to Tulane, but if the student is committed to attend Tulane as soon as they sign the early-decision agreement or upon acceptance, why require an enrollment deposit? If a student is accepted early decision but doesn\u2019t then make the deposit, have they broken the commitment or does that commitment only kick in with the deposit? Am I the only one who sees a contradiction here? (The answer may well be yes, and it wouldn\u2019t be the first time.)<\/p>\n The broader issue here has to do with early decision itself. Early decision has been around since the 1950s, and it\u2019s controversial. The early-decision \u201cbargain\u201d can be argued to benefit both colleges and students, but it is far more beneficial to institutions as a way to manage enrollment. It doesn\u2019t work well for students for whom financial aid is essential or those who come from schools without savvy college counselors who understand the early-decision game.<\/p>\n Tulane is the poster child for how colleges and universities use early decision to manage both enrollment and prestige. Its admit rate has declined precipitously in recent years largely through strategic use of early decision. According to its most recent Common Data Set, about 63\u00a0percent of the freshman class was admitted through early decision (that\u2019s assuming a 100\u00a0percent yield rate for early-decision admits).<\/p>\n That may actually understate the impact of early decision. Another 20\u00a0percent of the class was admitted off the wait list (the CDS shows the number of students admitted off the wait list but does not break it down in terms of enrollments, but there are universities that only admit students off the wait list if they know they will enroll, almost a form of \u201cearly decision 3\u201d).<\/p>\n The heavy use of early decision means that there is a huge variance in the admit rates for early decision and other admissions plans at Tulane (it also has nonbinding early action). According to the Common Data Set, the admit rate for early decision was 59\u00a0percent, compared with 11\u00a0percent for all other options. That\u2019s not new. A 2022 Inside Higher Ed <\/em>article reported that Tulane had admitted only 106 students in regular admission. In any case, the numbers suggest that not applying early decision is hugely disadvantageous at Tulane, which makes the ban even more punitive.<\/p>\n I am trying to be sympathetic to Tulane\u2019s hurt feelings over being dissed by students they admitted in early decision, but I would hope the university\u2019s admissions office will take to heart the wisdom of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as the Ramones, and let the punishment fit the crime.<\/p>\n Jim Jump recently retired after 33 years as the academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher\u2019s School in Richmond, Va. He previously served as an admissions officer, philosophy instructor and women\u2019s basketball coach at the college level and is a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He is the 2024 recipient of NACAC\u2019s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tulane University\u2019s admissions office has banned students from four high schools from applying to Tulane through early decision this fall, according to reporting from The New York Times. Though three of the schools have not been publicly identified, the one-year ban (or \u201csuspension\u201d) for Colorado Academy comes after a student from that school backed out<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[14438,83,442,993,440,10303],"class_list":{"0":"post-32142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-collective","9":"tag-decision","10":"tag-early","11":"tag-edition","12":"tag-opinion","13":"tag-punishment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}