Basically the title. Say a school’s application due date is November 1st: would sending your application on October 1st give you an advantage over lets say, October 25th? Or does it vary from school to school?
Currently finalizing my apps, but I don’t want to be penalized for submitting it closer to the due date over rushing it in now. And I know at the end of the day you can be like “it should’ve been done by now”; I don’t want to make excuses for myself but I work a job, play a sport and am otherwise bouncing between responsibilities that prevented me from taking a full day to work on college apps
The answer is…it depends. Schools with rolling admissions start processing applications the day their applications open in most cases.
If you are hoping to get certain kinds of need based aid (SEOG, federal work study) and you have financial need, these are allocated per college and are usually awarded on a first come first served basis.
Some colleges have early deadlines for those wanting to be considered for merit aid.
Just get your application done as quickly as you can.
Remember too, there can be computer and servicer glitches so waiting until the last day or two can be a problem.
You won’t be penalized, but as with anything else…deadlines matter for a reason. So be very careful to adhere to them.
I would not worry submission date for non-rolling colleges when it comes to admission (obviously you need to independently look for priority deadlines as to scholarships and such).
That said, a few times I saw stray remarks about AOs being able to see when you STARTED working on your College App application. And the idea was if you started it right at the deadline, that might indicate it as a throw-in app.
But even if true, that doesn’t apply to the submission date. Colleges understand you may still be tweaking your applications until the last minute, and that is fine.
Yes, this is correct. Schools receive a set amount of funding from the government, based on a number of factors (reported on annual FISAP reports). That pot of money is divvied up based on parameters set by the school. SEOG is supposed to be awarded to the neediest students - schools report on how much they award based on SAI categories. When schools award this money, they have to overaward, based on estimates of yield. It’s typically awarded at a particular point in time, which is why the financial aid priority deadline a school sets is important. Someone who applies after that is not guaranteed to receive all of the aid that they would have received had they applied by the priority deadline. FWS works the same way, although it’s not as strictly targeted to the neediest students. Schools have to kick in a matching amount for FWS (25% of total FWS spending). Schools will typically overaward, based on priority deadline … but they might also require that the student accept or reject the award by another, later deadline. And of course, the fact that a student receives and accepts a FWS award doesn’t mean that they will actually get a job … and if they do, there’s no guarantee that they will earn their full award.
I have a bit of a contrarian view here. While there is not a structural advantage if it is not a rolling admissions school, unless the AO’s don’t read apps until after the deadline date, from a practical point of view I would rather have my app being read by AO’s before the flood of apps come in around the deadline while they are still relatively “fresh” and not overwhelmed by having to meet their internal deadlines to get evals submitted.
I would just look at the websites for each school where you are applying for their application timelines. Stick to those dates.
If it’s for schools, like the UCs, their application doesn’t open online until November 1. You couldn’t get in if you tried because it’s not accessible.
I know that at some schools they “timestamp” the application.
I know from a friend, who is a retired admissions rep, that they do check to see who follows directions. They realize that the students are anxious, but there is such a thing as “following rules” and a number of the schools can’t even begin to look at applications until a certain date.
My understanding is that is often true at deadline colleges, that they wait until all the apps are in before they start doing serious consideration. Among other reasons, they want a sense of what the applicant pool looks like that year before making individual decisions, and there may be practical decisions like exactly who gets which applications that depend on volumes.
That said, that is based just on things I have picked up, so I don’t really know.
So just for my understanding - a student who applies on the day of the early application deadline (typically Nov 1), may not receive financial aid because it was all awarded to students who applied earlier?
Typically, if there is an early application deadline for financial aid, everyone applying on or before the deadline is equally considered for aid. Note that application deadlines and financial aid deadlines may not be the same - it’s really important to check both deadlines to be sure what they are. For example, a school with ED will have pools to award for each group (early & regular), and it’s likely that the deadline for ED is earlier than for RD. For rolling admissions, they most likely have a way to award that treats financial aid applicants equally before whatever deadline they publish - then again, it’s important to check to find out for sure.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Several AO’s have said they tire reading a deluge of essays. If you love your essays and want them to be remembered/stand out, get them in before the AP’s are fried from all that reading.
For schools that meet full need for all accepted students, this doesn’t apply at all.
But there are some colleges that do award things like merit aid on a first come basis. Pitt is well known as a college where early applicants are more likely to get merit aid…and better merit aid than later applicants.
But Pitt is a rolling admissions school and that’s how such schools operate. But we are discussing the benefits of applying early to non-rolling admissions schools. My understanding is that apps aren’t even read at all before the application deadline. Perhaps @Mwfan1921 can opine.
That’s my understanding as well, realizing it may vary by university.
But at my alma mater, applications are not read before the deadline. And after the deadline, they’re grouped together before reading, not read FIFO or random order
I don’t remember which now, but I remember a couple of the colleges we visited with D19 explicitly said that applications are read with others from the same school, and anecdotally that seems not uncommon. If that’s the case, they wouldn’t start reading them before the deadline as they might not have all the comparators in yet.
Agree with those who have said this varies by school.
Some schools definitely read before the deadline, and some of those read by HS. You do not need all the HS apps in to know some applicants aren’t going to be competitive.
Once shaping starts right before decisions are released, there can be significant changes wrt the buckets that apps are in at the end of that process vs where they started.
To answer OP’s question, I doubt there is a benefit to applying early in terms of admission likelihood but would be interested if any school had data on that. I think it’s just as easy to say AOs start out by being tough reviewers as saying they get tired later in the season. Lots of factors at play to be sure.