Harvard Early Admissions Applications Drop Nearly 20 Percent Year over Year

By Ari Blaff

Saturday, December 16, 2023

 

The number of early admission applicants to Harvard University fell by nearly 20 percent compared to the previous academic year.

 

Some have cited growing concerns over the administration’s handling of antisemitism on campus, highlighted by President Claudine Gay’s testimony before Congress earlier this month.

 

“That’s possibly one of several reasons, about the concern of safety on the campus,” Bob Sweeney, a veteran college counselor from a New York high school told Bloomberg. “There might be other factors as well as students are being more realistic about their expectations and chances for acceptance.”

 

By comparison, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania reported modest gains in annual early admissions. The latter’s president, Liz Magill, stepped down recently following her testimony in front of the House Committee on Education alongside Gay.

 

Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumnus and school donor, who has been a vocal critical of the administration’s handling of antisemitism, applauded the news. “Harvard College Early Applications Drop 17% From Last Year. It takes 400 years to build a reputation and only a few months to destroy it,” the hedge fund executive wrote.

 

Harvard has generated successive controversies since the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas. Shortly after the Palestinian terror group invaded southern Israel, student groups on campus released a joint statement trying to contextualize and justify the massacres. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the letter explained. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

 

The blowback — including a billboard truck circling campus highlighting signatories’ faces and names under the banner, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” — led at least ten student groups to walk back their endorsement of the statement.

 

“The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” the school’s former president Larry Summers said following the joint student declaration.

 

“Israel is the victim of a terrorist attack. Hamas is the perpetrator. It’s as simple as that. There are no ‘both sides,’” Representative Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) wrote following the Harvard statement.

 

“Yet here you have 30+ student organizations from Harvard University, blaming the victims, Israelis, for their own murder, rape, and abduction, rather than blaming the perpetrator, Hamas, for murdering, raping, and abducting them. Demonizing Israel — to the point of denying the humanity of Israeli victims and the inhumanity of their perpetrators — is moral confusion masquerading as moral clarity.”

 

In late October, the school announced the creation of a task force aimed to “disrupt and dismantle” antisemitism at the Ivy League school. “Antisemitism has a very long and shameful history at Harvard,” Gay said at a Hillel Shabbat dinner announcing the body’s creation. “For years, this University has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.”

 

“They will help us to identify all the places — from our orientations and trainings to how we teach — where we can intervene to disrupt and dismantle this ideology, and where we can educate our community so that they can recognize and confront antisemitism wherever they see it.”

 

The eight-member panel includes journalist Dara Horn as well as Rabbi David Wolpe, the Harvard Crimson reported. “In the weeks ahead, these advisors,” Gay elaborated in transcripts that were posted online, “will help us to think expansively and concretely about all the ways that antisemitism shows up on our campus and in our campus culture.”

 

Rabbi Wolpe resigned in early December, citing Gay’s poor performance before Congress waffling responses to Harvard’s position on the genocide of Jews. “The system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” Wolpe explained on X announcing his decision.