Harvard just announced it would abolish early admission, and with Yana going away next year to college, this question has in any case been on my mind.
Marriage, of course, is run on an "early admissions" basis. You ask one woman (man), get an answer, and you are then more or less bound to go through with it.
In my Mexican village, they run marriage more like we run college admissions. Marriage-ready males propose to several women in one "season," and eligible women court more than one proposal. At the magical moment, some of the prime candidates accept best offers and the rest of the market scrambles to clear. But some men can, and do, propose "early admission" to their preferred females on an exclusive basis.
The musical chairs method makes sense if a) people definitely want to marry at a certain age, b) there is greater interchangeability of partners, and c) "being engaged" gives you an excuse to have sex with the person in the meantime or otherwise try them out.
Now let us say that one woman in the village is prettier than the others and also a harder worker. She may wish to rule out "early admission" marriage proposals, out of fear she will have to turn down her second choice before having sounded out the interest level of her first choice. (One question is whether a woman is a more populous community still might have enough market power to enforce such a policy with profit.)
Harvard says that early admission hurts diversity and the chances of minorities. But, thinking about the marriage analogy, I wonder whether banning early admission a sign of Harvard’s growing desirability and market power…
Addendum: Greg Mankiw is happy about the change, Arnold Kling is not. Here is another economic analysis, based on matching theory.
Harvard did early action, not early decision, so it was not binding like marriage:
I think you nailed it. The early action programs (both binding and non-binding) are a way for schools to identify applicats who are most likely to come if admitted. Harvard is (almost) every applicant’s first choice. So Harvard gets no benefit from an early action program.
Moreover, by couching the reason for a change in terms of diversity, they might be able to shame other schools into abolishing their programs. That would be a win for Harvard–enabling them to cherry-pick the pool of students who otherwise might have ben admitted to Penn or Dartmouth through binding Early Decision programs.
Given that most college applicants are minors, what does it mean to say that they are bound to accept an admission? Such a contract would not be enforceable.
I wonder how far away we are from a med-school style matching process (which, as I understand it, benefits the schools to the detreiment of the students)?
Herr Cowen,
Universities prefer to have complete information before making their decisions. In the cutthroat world of college admissions, that includes the few spots currently reserved for early admissions. A school like Harvard has nothing to lose by waiting until later in the process.
As for marriage: The contract is too binding, too restrictive and too risky, even with the engagement escape clause.
I always felt that EA/ED was very much self-selecting and so made applicants generally better off by their own lights than the seemingly random outcomes of the regular round. On the other hand, does this issue really matter if college is just a sorting mechanism and general outcomes are already determined?
And Prof. Cowen, you should definitely read the Wiki entry on the Marriage Problem. It will answer the questions posed in your post. It’s better to be the asker than the askee. The most attractive and hardest working woman should simply turn the tables and ask the man to marry her.
I think the biggest problem with the Marriage Proposal analogy is that it doesn’t do a very good job of dealing with student differentiation associated with what are in fact multiple selections.
Perhaps this is just the liberal arts college fuddy-duddy in me, but it seems to me that colleges are not choosing one highly qualified individual, or even a random selection of highly qualified individuals, but a class. Schools have many different “roles” that need to be filled, some of which are highly specialized and which have rapidly diminishing returns to scale (what would a small college do with 10 star bassoon players?) Early decision programs allow them to “lock in” the proverbial bassoon players of the applicant pool in order to ensure that those roles are filled, while avoiding inefficiencies associated with overenrolling these positions at the expense of others.
There clearly remains some sort of “second best” problem in spite of this roles argument, since there are still quite a few bassoon players applying to college each year. However, schools are basically risk-averse about their student selection and so they are willing to accept some loss in expected student quality in exchange for the certainty associated with knowing that the band will have a bassoon.
The level of risk is inversely associated with the size of the applicant pool and the size of the admitted class, so smaller schools tend to be more risk-averse than large ones. That’s why many of the top larger universities have switched to early action, or why they may abandon early admissions entirely, while top small schools are far more likely to cling tightly to their early decision programs and admit a high percentage of students through them.
As far as conferring an advantage to students that are already advantaged, I think that the misinformation problems noted by a previous commenter are enhanced by what is perhaps a greater “student marketing” problem. Since schools are looking for students in the early admissions process that fill unique niches in the incoming class, the students that benefit the most from early admissions are the students that market these qualities effectively. However this doesn’t come naturally to most students, and so students from privileged backgrounds with the greatest access to counselors tend to come out way ahead.
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