College Early Decision Option Decreases Student Diversity: Negatively Impacts Asians And Hispanics

A recent research paper, "The Early Decision Option in College Admission and its Impact on Student Diversity" by Heather Antecol, Claremont McKenna College and Janet Kiholm Smith, Claremont McKenna College, (free download) finds that the early decision application process for college admission favor the wealthy and whites and negatively impacts the diversity of the college student body, particularly Asian and Hispanic enrollment.

From the paper's abstract:

Many schools rely on early decision (ED) as an admission practice. Schools that adopt ED are able to generate additional resources by attracting wealthier students who, upon admission, make binding commitments to attend and to forego shopping for competing aid offers. An unanswered question is whether the resources generated from this price discrimination practice are used by schools during the regular admission process to attract more diverse students. We document the admission practices for private national universities and liberal arts colleges and analyze how the choice to use ED, and how varying levels of reliance on it for enrollment, affect racial and geographic diversity. While, in theory, it is possible for ED to enable greater diversity over some range of early enrollment percentages, we find that the overall heterogeneity of the students falls monotonically as schools enroll larger percentages of their students through ED. Higher ED enrollment percentages appear to strongly and negatively affect Asian American and Hispanic students and positively affect white students. [Emphasis added].

How can colleges justify the continued existence of using early decision application processes when the resulting student body negatively affects two major ethnic groups, Hispanics and Asian Americans?