Recently it was reported that Colorado Academy (non-boarding) was banned by Tulane from participating in ED for one year. My impression, in the past, was that colleges had informal means of discouraging boarding schools from allowing students to default on their ED admissions. Have there been explicit bans of boarding schools participating in ED as well? Are colleges having issues with students backing out? Or is this a one-off incident?
From my experience, backing out of ED after acceptance was pretty much unheard of - besides when there were financial issues (and that was extremely rare). I have learned on CC that there is more playing around with ED than I knew about. I know of a real life instance where a student has been penalized, personally, for backing out of an ED - but have only heard rumors about situations like Tulane.
I have not heard of it at BS in my circles. My guess is that there are several things at play.
The CCs make the expectations around ED quite explicit. They explain that the current students are the beneficiaries of those who came before them and followed the rules and that they owe the same to those who come after. These schools are not big, and they have tight communities. It’s pretty unlikely that one could default anonymously.
College counseling is thorough and starts early - more as picking the best courses for emerging interests and evolving from there - so by senior fall, most students have enough clarity around their preferences that they don’t need to ED to a “wrong” school.
Over the years, I have seen some unusual changes of plan by athletes from all types of high schools - from one D3 commitment to another when a coach moves, from a D3 to a D1 when a roster spot opens, etc. I don’t know if the original D3 commitment was ED or if there were caveats to the agreementto attend as athletic recruitment is its own beast.
There is a lengthy discussion of this topic here. https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/an-early-decision-student-backed-out-of-tulane-tulane-punished-the-high-school/
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