Deferring Acceptances?

Prep School Admissions
1

Background:
I applied to four schools as an incoming junior and was accepted to one (Kent School) and waitlisted at the other three (Choate, Andover, Taft.)

While I would love to attend any of these schools, I also applied to a study abroad scholarship program that had its decisions come out in late February and required me to confirm my acceptance by March 7th.

I have a few questions about what to do and if possibly deferring acceptances/reapplying next year is even worth it.

Questions:

  1. If a school allows me to defer an acceptance do I just email the admissions office and explain the situation?
  2. My FA was not nearly enough to allow me to attend. Can I somehow ask for more?
  3. Should I try to get off waiting lists by supplementing recent things like test scores? (I recently scored a 1420 SAT as a Sophomore)
  4. Should I reapply next year and see if I have a better chance of admission?
  5. Is it even worth attending boarding school this late in my high school career? (I am from a very rural area where the median SAT is around 1000. I really am looking towards attending an Ivy League and I’ve already secured research internships for this summer in Boston. Since colleges view applications in perspective to their respective schools, will attending a boarding school actually negate these statistics? I feel like virtually everyone from boarding schools are impressive students in some form and I won’t stand out as much)

I know these questions are a lot :sob:. Please let me know if you have any advice because I have been thinking about this for the past two-ish weeks.

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This isn’t college admissions. If you don’t want to attend this Fall, but want to attend the following Fall, you’d need to reapply. But if you reapply, it would most likely be as a repeat junior.

The financial piece is a conversation your parent can have with the FA office. Without knowing specifics, nobody here can determine whether an appeal will be successful.

In terms of the schools you were waitlisted from, you can look at the waitlist thread, but the tl;Dr version is don’t count on getting off the WL.

As for the value of BS in admissions, every graduate goes to a good university. Not all go to hypsm, so that’s really not a method of choosing a BS. Good luck

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You have some great opportunities available to you; sometimes it’s tough that you can’t walk through two doors at the same time. If you’re passionate and excited about doing the year abroad, and you received the financial assistance to make it possible, then maybe that’s the better choice for you. As skieurope said, there’s no real ability to defer your boarding school admission; you’d have to reapply and likely repeat your junior year.

I wouldn’t make a decision about boarding school based on Ivy matriculation (not to mention, Ivy’s differ from one another and there are a huge number of good schools that aren’t part of the Ivy League). There are a lot of good reasons to go to a BS (my daughters go to one) but an “edge” in super-elite college admissions is not one I buy into.

Instead, build a story for yourself that will be attractive to the types of universities you want to attend and reflects your personal interests. That may include attending a BS but an alternative could be taking advantage of every opportunity you could find to extend yourself beyond your rural high school - junior year abroad, research internship in Boston, etc.

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