The Atlantic Monthly’s September issue has an interesting, lengthy article on the early admissions process for college and how it has placed top schools at a disadvantage to … Harvard. Because Harvard is typically the top choice for a student applying to the top notch colleges, the early acceptance and early decision processes have made life difficult for the other top schools. Also, the article supplies data to show how early acceptance has made the admissions process unfair for students and colleges (that aren’t Harvard), and claims that some colleges are depending more on SATs instead of less so that their rankings and reputation can go up. I can’t begin to try to explain it all here, but it was an interesting, if somewhat scary, look into the college admissions process. The Atlantic has also republished an article from 1892, The Present Requirements for Admission to Harvard, which was meant to assure people that Harvard’s shift from memorized knowledge to assessment of reasoning ability in their admission criteria did not mean that the college had lowered its standards. I hope they didn’t have to write something similar when they started finally giving women diplomas with Harvard on them instead of Radcliffe.