doctorjohn

dd1986:

That's a really good question, and it forced me to think about it. I don't work at UM or CCM or Ithaca, so I don't know what their thought process is. But I can guess. They want the best students they can get. Making an early offer to a very talented candidate gives the school a competitive advantage. If UM, for example, makes you an offer in January, and it's one of your top three schools, are you going to put them off to see if you can get a better offer from your other two top choices, who may not be able to notify you for another two months? Not likely. As Ben Franklin once observed, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I know from reading cc.com that it's not unusual for a student to cancel auditions once they've been accepted at one of their top choices. I'd do the same if I was auditioning. So you can see that rolling admissions is a good thing for the schools that do it.

Is it fair to the students who are scheduled to audition later in the season? Perhaps not completely. But it isn't inherently unfair either. Look at it this way. Suppose a school uses a 6 point rating system, and they want a class of 20 (10 men, 10 women). Suppose over the course of the entire audition season, they see 10 kids they rate as 6's and 30 kids they rate as 5's. That's 40 they're considering for 20 places. They're going to make offers to their 10 top prospects no matter when they do it. If you're one of those 6's, you're getting an offer whether the school does rolling admissions or not. If you're a 5, you're probably going to be deferred, and considered later along with the other 29 in your group. The school will build a class around the 6's that commit to them early.

The only problem for students auditioning later is if the school (unwisely) makes too many offers too early, and its capture rate is high. Then they may not have enough wiggle room for top students who audition later. But my guess is that UM and CCM have this reasonably well refined to take that into account. So I'm not sure that your individual chances are terribly diminished by auditioning later.

Looking at it another way, however, your sanity is enhanced significantly by having an early offer in hand or even, if it should work out, having your college decision made by December or January. That's why many of the posters to these boards have urged others to take fall auditions.

Finally, the great disadvantage is not to you, but to schools like mine which wait until we've seen everyone to make our offers. This is why many Ivies (the real ones, not the metaphorical ones) starting going to early admission a couple of decades ago. Once one school did it, they all had to, for competitive reasons. It's also why the NCAA created a single national signing day, to prevent boosters from OSU going after boosters from UM with Uzi's. There's been a lot of talk on cc.com about early admission/early decision, etc. and I have read that some schools are starting to go away from it. Perhaps.

I admit that what I've just written is making me wonder about the wisdom of our approach. Have we lost top prospects to schools who've made earlier offers? I'm sure we have. But given that we take such a small class, I still think it's ultimately fairer to everyone to wait and look at the whole picture. If we took larger numbers, or if we needed to take larger numbers to make a quota, we might not have that luxury. I can only hope that students who are auditioning for us can afford to wait, at least until late March, to hear their status with us.

Does this help?