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Our response to Harvard’s half-hearted nod to diversity in admissions is a quiet yawn. Several schools have joined Harvard in eliminating their early admission programs, but none of them will have any significant effect on a problem that is far larger than that.

Diversity in admissions is one of the most hotly debated issues in higher education today. Many top-tier universities across the country have found their minority admits decreasing over the years and many are looking to change that.

Elite eastern universities – Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia – have jumped on the admissions bandwagon and revised their procedures in the hope that it will help out low-income students who rarely apply for early decision.

Proponents of the revision say low-income students are left behind by the early applications because they must wait to compare how much financial aid they may receive from other schools, arguing that this makes early applications impractical or impossible.

But that’s not true in every case. Many universities have an early admissions option that is nonbinding – they will admit or defer a student early, but the student is free to wait to respond or simply choose another school. Most of these applications give students time to hear back from other schools before they have to commit. This does not disadvantage for low-income applicants who apply for nonbinding early applications.

Other schools have adopted the binding early decision process in which the prospective student agrees to attend a specific school if accepted. This is the case in which low-income students face a real problem.

It’s a noble goal to save low-income applicants from this conundrum, but it’s hardly the most important consideration colleges should be addressing. It’s simply too small an effort for such a large and looming problem within higher education.

In the context of such a vastly mangled educational landscape, early admissions isn’t even a drop in the bucket.

We’re in a situation where university tuition is ballooning, K-12 education in many places is abysmal, and teachers in low-income areas simply don’t get the resources they need to be good educators and prepare students for college. It looks like we have much more to deal with when it comes to who gets into which school.

Related Links

• Application review may be restructured
• The changing face of UCLA diversity
• School to adopt UC Berkeley’s ‘holistic’ approach

A commission charged by U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings that assesses the current state of higher education recently finalized its report. The commission brings to light a prohibitively expensive school system that is geared toward the privileged and does not hold itself accountable for student performance.

UCLA has approved a new model for admissions termed the “holistic” approach. This differs from the current process by requiring administrators to score each application as a whole rather than in separate parts.

In reassessing its admissions process, UCLA cannot overstep the bounds of Proposition 209, which forbids the use of race in admissions decisions.

The policies being implemented by the likes of UCLA, Harvard and others show how much concern universities have for changing the quality of higher education.

It’s too bad the problem really isn’t in their hands.