After eliminating their early admission programs in 2006, Harvard and Princeton Universities announced in separate press releases Feb. 24 that early action admission options will return this fall.

The two Ivy League schools join Stanford and Yale to offer single-choice early action, which allows students to apply to only one school by Nov. 1 for an early decision. Accepted students don’t have to commit to the school until May 1, unlike early decision where students must attend the school they apply early to if they’re accepted.

Data from the past few years suggests that many students applied to other universities early admission, even if Harvard or Princeton was their first choice, both schools said.

“We looked carefully at trends in Harvard admissions these past years and saw that many highly talented students, including some of the best-prepared low-income and underrepresented minority students, were choosing programs with an early-action option,” said Michael Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in a press release.

Harvard eliminated early action in 2006 because of concerns that the program favored affluent applicants. The school expected other colleges to do the same.

However, only Princeton and the University of Virginia followed. UVA also reinstated its early admissions program last November, giving the class of 2012 early options at all three schools.

Senior Milan Dhar, who applied to Princeton regular decision, said he wouldn’t have used the early admissions option if he had the chance.

“I don’t really like that you can only apply to one school early action,” he said. “I wanted to apply Michigan and Maryland early, and that wouldn’t have been possible.”

From 2003-2007, when Harvard offered early admissions, 34 percent of Whitman students who applied were accepted early. In the past three years, only 11 percent of Whitman students who applied to Harvard were accepted overall, according to Naviance.

Resource counselor Fran Landau said the acceptance rate should remain very low next year, but the change will benefit students whose first-choice school is either Harvard or Princeton.

“Especially in this very competitive school, kids put all their eggs in Yale and Stanford early, and they’re not even really that serious about applying to those schools,” she said. “Now kids can apply where they really want.”

The shift to early action has both positive and negative impacts on the upcoming application process, junior Chandini Jha said.

“Early action means that we’ll apply sooner in the year, so it’s just going to increase an already stressful first semester workload,” she said. “It would be better to get in sooner if I actually had a better chance of getting in early action, but since it’s not, it just makes my life a little bit harder.”