Harvard early admission applications drop 17% compared to last year

Applications for early admission at Harvard dropped 17 percent from a year earlier, as the US university is undergoing notable turmoil.

According to figures from the Harvard Gazette, 7,921 people applied early this year to the prestigious university, which had a deadline of November 1 for its nonbinding early action program.

There were 9,553 early action applications last year, marking a 17% drop in 2023. However, the figures have vacillated from year to year with no clear evidence regarding contributing factors.

In 2021, there were 9,406 applications for early admission, compared to 10,087 a year earlier, according to the Harvard Gazette. In 2019, the university received 6,424 early action applications, lower than this year’s number, and a slight drop from a year earlier, which saw 6,958 apply. In 2017, just 6,630 students applied for early consideration to the university.

This year’s dip comes after the university has struggled to publicly address accusations of antisemitism on campus, and also after a bombshell US Supreme Court ruling earlier this year rejecting the use of affirmative action — considering the race of the applicant — in college admissions.

There is no indication if either of those issues directly contributed to the decline in early action applications this year. College applications spiked during the COVID pandemic, with experts suggesting it was driven by those applying during a time when traditional metrics like grades and standardized test scores were given less weight after students had spent much of the year at home.

The November 1 deadline for early admission this year came about three weeks after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which set off a series of demonstrations and a debate about antisemitism on US college campuses linked to pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The university came under fire in mid-October over its failure to condemn the Hamas assault, in which the terror group killed around 1,200 people and took another 240 hostage. That silence led the Wexner Foundation to cut its ties with the university, saying its fellows “feel abandoned” by the institution’s “dismal failure.”

The university later faced backlash after its president, Claudine Gay, appeared in front of Congress earlier this month — after the early application deadline had already passed — and declined to say that calls for violence against Jews were considered harassment, answering rather that “when speech crosses into conduct, we take action.”

Gay later apologized for her comments, saying that she should have instead said “that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

Despite calls for her to be ousted from the job, Harvard announced last week that she would remain in the role.