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_______________DARWINIAN ADMISSIONS BY MEGAN OLDEN (01/18/99)
	As a "need sensitive" graduate of Haverford College (1986), the brother school to Bryn Mawr College cited in Megan Olden's article, I would like to draw attention to the federal role in this phenomenon. In 1990 or 1991, the Ivy League universities settled a major case regarding alleged price fixing with the federal government. It was little known at the time that Harvard, Yale, MIT, Penn and other schools would meet around college admission time to review those candidates with multiple acceptances and coordinate their financial aid policies. This was the so-called "Overlap Group" of college administrators. Their stated goal was to allow students to choose the school, not the financial aid package, that best suited their needs. This also had the effect of minimizing bidding wars for prize students between the various Ivies, allowing them to fund a greater number of scholarships. The government sued the Ivies, and won on grounds of price fixing. Fast forward to 1999: Top candidates routinely shop around, threatening to attend the competition for a better financial aid package. Financial aid is a finite pool, so every extra scholarship dollar awarded to a top candidate is one less to spread to less stellar, but perhaps more needy, applicants. As your author so aptly noted, it is not the concert pianist/Concorde pilot/astrophysics predoctoral candidate who is hurt, but the struggling student with equal potential who has not yet reached his stride. I know. I was that student 15 years ago. There was a year -- 1985 to 1986 -- when the combined college tuitions for my brother and me were twice my mother's annual income. I'm not sure that we would have been admitted in 1999. -- Frederic J. Curlin, M.D. Claremont, Calif. Megan Olden's recent article did not go far enough in examining the issue. The admissions process known as "early decision" can easily work against students who require financial aid to attend college. "Early decision" allows students to apply in the autumn and hear from a college/university by mid-December. Students are honor-bound to apply to only one school for "early decision" and, if accepted, the student agrees to attend that school and withdraw any and all applications to other schools. Selective colleges and universities are receiving more and more of these early decision applications, though still fewer than the number applying in the "regular decision" category, and filling greater percentages of their freshman class (some over 50 percent) from this smaller pool of applicants. Students applying for "regular decision" are competing against greater numbers of applicants for a much smaller number of available spaces. It is my understanding that if insufficient financial aid is provided to a student under the early decision program, the student is allowed out of the agreement to attend the school. However, the cost of college being what it is, especially at the more selective private schools, many students and their families need to be able to compare the financial aid packages they receive from schools, and factor that into the decision on which school is best for the student. Early decision programs preclude a family's ability to weigh different financial aid packages, and for those students who must comparison shop and thus must apply "regular decision," these programs decrease their chances of being admitted. -- Robbie Walker SALON | Jan. 21, 1999

R E C E N T L Y+| AMERICAN GERONTOCRACY BY CHRISTOPHER SHEA

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