You were waitlisted at every “Mini Harvard and Yale” or BS in the top five, but a wonderful “Sparkling Gem” came through and offered you an amazing package/acceptance M10. By A10, you signed a contract and you’re officially committed to Sparking Gem! Woot! On A11, you called all the Mini Ivy WL schools and removed your name.
But wait…… No, you decided to keep your name on all the WLs and then suddenly (3-4 months later ) a spot opens up at Mini Harvard! Do you disclose the Sparkling Gem commitment to Mini Harvard and honor your commitment to the school that loved you first? Or, do you not disclose your commitment and ditch Sparkling Gem without looking back?
Remember: If you commit to a school A10, you are required to remove your name from all WLs. Otherwise, the WL school will look like it’s out there poaching students who are committed at other schools and that reflects as poorly on them as it does on you.
Boy, I must have missed that part of the contract where it said I had to remove my kid’s name from other waitlists. Seems to me that the contract I signed contained a financial penalty if we later changed our minds and attended a different school instead. It’s essentially what lawyers call “liquidated damages.” The reason they include those clauses is because it happens all the time. Is it unethical to change your mind after accepting and have your kid attend a different school? I don’t know, it doesn’t strike me as hugely unethical, frankly, and I think all the schools know that this is something that can and does happen. The school that got “jilted” just turns around and gives the spot (and any FA) to another candidate who they’re perfectly happy to admit, so I have a hard time seeing who’s harmed here. And the kid who ends up getting to go to the “jilted” school as a result is pretty darn happy.
Many factors go into making a decision about a school, and the fact that the final choice was closer to home may have had a part in it. These are just kids, after all, who are willing to take risks for better opportunities. Try to support them.
*Whether this was sparked by the situation of a particular student or not is irrelevant. Lots of hypotheticals are based on real life events, and this is hardly an event unique to one person here on CC. It comes up a lot, not just for BS but also, as the hypothetical states, for college wait lists. Kids forfeit deposits to School X to take a late spot at Harvard or Duke or wherever all the time. It even has a name, known as “summer melt”. Well, one major component of summer melt anyway.
As long as that person or any other real person is not mentioned in this thread against their wishes (unless it is public information like in a newspaper. Public does not mean elsewhere on CC), there is nothing wrong with the thread. Likewise, nothing that results from this thread should be used to harass another member of CC.*
Why is everyone so hung up on this stuff on this board? This stuff happens in all facets of life right? College, jobs, competing for real estate, and the list goes on. Use those extra brain cells on your own or your student’s future… I’m new here and these conversations are so unproductive.
I would have to really see if there is a formal requirement that a person take their name off wait lists, or rather if it is a “request”, or even if it is just considered tradition and good manners. If it isn’t the first, then I would say it is anything but a simple matter, but based on the analogy to college “summer melt” I would say it is most likely not even unethical.
An old principle of law is deciding who suffers the most harm in a situation such as this where both sides have valid claims as to what is “right”. At first blush, it seems to me the student suffers more harm in being required to take their name out of the pool for a school that suits them better and maybe much better, just because there are traditional yet arbitrary deadlines. The first school suffers little in losing that student to the “better” school, especially since they are usually easily replaced. Yes, the spurned school is entitled to costs involved in such a late change, but apparently that is virtually always anticipated in the contracts.
Really, even if the academic term had started in each school and 2-3 days into it the student said they were unhappy and wanted to quit, who can stop them? If it also so happened, or even if known when the decision was made, that the other school suddenly had an opening, who is anyone to limit the free choice of that person to attend what has been made available to them? This isn’t like pro athletics and the drafts.
I brought this up at a family gathering recently and we had a very interesting ( and lively ) discussion about ethics and disclosure.
Disclosure is key : Would you commit to Sparkling Gem and tell the AO : Hey- I’ll sign this contract and you can start planning for my arrival in fall but I’m keeping my name on all the Mini Ivy WLs? No. Because Sparkling Gem school would immediately pull the amazing package and give it to someone else.
So I genuinely want to know. Is there an explicit contract point signed by students or parents that says you can’t stay on waitlists if you accept another school’s offer? What does aid/scholarships have to do with it? I assume there is a financial penalty from the first school if the student takes a waitlist spot at another school, and that is reasonable.
If students who have deposited at another school aren’t supposed to take WL spots, then who is the waitlist for? Students who were completely shut out of admissions? I also don’t see what aid has to do with it. The school is then free to offer the money to someone else. Heck, it is harder on school #1 to lose a full pay kid to a waitlist than one they have given a discount to,
The logic of calling it a breach of ethics really isn’t clear to me. College waitlists work like this, and it is a normal part of doing business.
They probably could tell Sparkling Gem they are staying on wait lists and I doubt they would (or legally could for that reason) pull the package. I would be interested to see them try if I returned a signed contract with a note telling them I was staying on wait lists elsewhere. Again, unless there is explicit language in the contract that forbids it, the family would be perfectly within their legal rights to keep it to themselves, and I would say within their ethical rights. First, this would hardly be news to the Sparkling Gem people. Like in colleges, it no doubt happens on a regular basis. Second, the balance of “power” here rests with the school. As you say, the school can easily replace this family with another, even further down the road. The student, on the other hand, has far more limited options if attending boarding school is the preference. There is so little harm to the school this actually seems like a no brainer.
So you are mixing contract law and ethics. I would be very surprised if they were dong anything illegal that would void the contract, and almost as surprised if any court would find they had violated an ethics clause in the contract by keeping their options open, especially if there is a liquidation clause that involves monetary compensation for cancellation and/or non-appearance. This would settle the matter, per legal standards, that the school anticipated any number of blanket causes for the family not following through on the contract. Staying on a wait list and subsequently accepting another offer from another school would only be one of them. Courtesy is manners, not ethics. If this is a well known phenomenon, I am not sure it even counts as bad manners.
I am still curious about who then is supposed to be on the waitlist, if not students who have accepted another spot in the game of admissions musical chairs?
Yes, of course everyone on a wait list after May 1 (using the traditional college dates. It sounds like BS dates are the same) would presumably have accepted somewhere else unless they decided to not attend college at this time. That, of course, would be a very small number. For the BS crowd I guess you could make an argument they chose public school and so dropped out of the game. I don’t know.
Your point is correct and the hypothetical seems to fall apart since, as you say, the vast majority would take themselves off of wait lists if they followed that line of ethical reasoning and there would be no reason to have them after May 1. It wouldn’t even make sense for April since then everyone would wait until April 30 to sign and no school would know if they had openings or not, making wait lists useless.
No, the question is not simple in the sense you have heavily biased it by the way you framed the title (“compromising yourself”), and in the original post by using terms like “ditching”. which have negative connotations. Who likes to present themselves as compromising their ethics? You have not presented the situation fairly at all. Surely you can see that stating what you think the answer is in the question itself, and beyond that casting judgement on those who would disagree, is no way to get a fair discussion started.
But fine, with the clear statement that IMO (and obviously some others) that you have set up a false hypothetical in both fact and tone, I would keep my name on the wait lists and take the offer from the other school IF AND ONLY IF that school presented a better situation for me (as the student) and my family. That is assuming the other facts as presented above, such as no contractual obligation to leave the wait lists, are true.
It also is not simple that you seem to not want to address these seeming flaws in both presentation and argument.
Now, I couldn’t help but notice how these schools were referred in the OP - “Sparkling Gem” and “Mini Ivy”. Does this outrage have anything to do with what was turned down was a “Sparkling Gem” and for a “Min Ivy” and not the other way around? That a “sparkling gem” with full aid is just not “good enough” seems to be one trigger of OP’s outrage.
I agree that this supports the arguments being made by me and others. But I don’t know why they call it double depositing in a case like this. There is no second deposit, there is only staying on the wait list. To the best of my knowledge, no college or BS requires a deposit to stay on the wait list. It is only after getting an offer from the wait list school that you have to let them know in a very short time if you are going to accept their offer, followed by a deposit pretty quickly. But that is not a double deposit in the same sense as depositing at two schools when you have been accepted to both. That is unethical because you are in fact “stealing” a spot from someone else at one of the schools.
You are not stealing a spot at the Sparkling Gem school because you fully intend to go there unless (and generally the odds are low) you get an offer from the other school off the wait list. The biggest problem with the true double deposit case is that most students never tell the school they eventually do not attend that they are not coming. So they truly do steal a spot. If they told them relatively soon in the process they were not coming, that school could reach out on its wait list and try and fill the spot, mitigating damages.
Are you going to continue to refuse to address the bias in your title and post, and the factual issues involved, not to mention the very persuasive argument that wait lists would have zero meaning under your scenario? It is ludicrous to say “don’t read anything into” a statement like “compromising your ethics”.
@fallenchemist: I think by College Board definition, if one holds a spot by putting down a deposit but does not fully intend to attend, that constitutes a - false deposit (for lack of a better term). Even though one has not (yet) put down another deposit, by staying on another wait list, one has the intention and potential to put down another deposit. So they loosely call it double deposit, I suppose.
To be fair to OP, when she said “don’t read anything into it”, she was probably specifically addressing my question regarding “sparkling gem” and “Mini Ivy” or vice versa.
