Harvard Accepts First Students to Class of 2029 but Releases No Admissions Data

Harvard College released its first offers of admission to the Class of 2029 on Thursday evening but little else as the Admissions and Financial Aid Office withheld information about the number of applicants and admitted students for the first time in decades.

Students applying under the College’s Restrictive Early Action program received their admissions decisions at 7 p.m., according to the admissions office’s website. Though the College did not announce how many applicants were accepted, in the past few years between 690 and 750 applicants were offered early admission.

The admissions office quietly announced in October that it would not share any information about the Class of 2029 — including demographic data, yield, and geographic data — until the fall of 2025, when it is obligated to submit information to the Department of Education.

The decision to wait until the fall for one centralized data release marked a shift away from nearly 70 years of precedent of sharing data about the admitted class on decision days.

A College spokesperson declined to respond to a detailed series of questions about the number of students accepted to the College through its restrictive early action application cycle. A spokesperson also did not respond to repeated requests for an interview with Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67.

In recent years, Fitzsimmons has sat down with The Crimson for an interview on days when the College released admission decisions.

The admissions office’s decision to stop releasing information about the admitted class on its two decision days comes as the latest in a series of policy changes made in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Harvard’s use of race-conscious admissions.

Though the College used to release information on the students admitted under both Early Action and Regular Decision separately, timed with the release of admissions decisions, it did not reveal the racial demographics of the Class of 2028 — the first admitted since the ruling on affirmative action — until earlier this semester.

Harvard’s announcement of the racial demographics of its Class of 2028 in September was marred by confusion over changes that the College quietly made, and then clarified, to how it calculated the data. Less than two months later, the admissions office announced it would stop releasing information on decision days.

The deadline to apply to Harvard’s regular decision pool is Jan. 1. Applicants who are deferred from the early decision pool or apply for regular decision will receive a response from Harvard in late March.

—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves.

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.