<p>Campus visits have an impact, but I can assure you that admissions considers attending a local event equal to a campus visit. I can also assure you that quite a few people that got accepted early or got accepted after being deferred never visited campus.</p>
<p>It neither my job nor my desire to defend or rationalize admissions decisions. I don’t understand them sometimes either, but that is because we can only see the minimum of what an applicant represents to Tulane. It isn’t just about stats and interest, although these are important. They are looking at many factors when putting together a class, and the rest of the applications that are in the pool have a lot to do with it. That is something none of us can know and the applicant has zero control over. They (Tulane) say it all the time, and true as it is, accepting it is a whole 'nuther thing. And then of course there is the unassailable fact that Tulane wants a class size of about 1500 and there are far more than 1500 highly qualified people that want those slots. It is just a frustrating fact that these schools are called highly selective for a reason, or in a dozen or so cases “most selective”.</p>
<p>None of this is to say that there don’t seem to be some cases where communication was lacking or broke down in some way. That’s a separate but contributing fact to the frustration. But to try and determine why Student A got in early, Student B got it after being deferred, Student C got wait listed and Student D got denied even though all 4 seemed to have reasonably similar stats is an exercise in futility.</p>