It does seem more common this year. Here’s another one from today: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1852324-help-need-to-make-important-decision-today.html#latest
Am I correct that for adults (parents, applicants over 18, GCs) the ED commitment is a binding legal contract? I know that colleges don’t take reneging applicants to court, but they could, couldn’t they?
@Cardinal Fang
I guess they can take them to court.
But the school’s counsel probably just tells them to let it go. There’s bigger fish to fry on their plate than to go after some kid who doesn’t want/can’t go to their school anyway. I mean, why would a school want to drag a screaming and kicking kid to their school anyway? (Wait a minute…that was literally me the first day of kindergarten…but I digress).
What I would like to happen is for schools to go after a year’s tuition if a kid backs out for other than financial or medical reason. I haven’t thought of the 2nd and 3rd order effects of that COA so don’t know if it’s feasible or reasonable.
Even then, the lawyers may say that getting $48k tuition (example) out of the kid and the family may not be worth the trouble to go after - and that’s for a
private school. For a state school, the tuition may only be $9k-15k so going after that as a punitive measure may definitely not be worth it to the school and lawyers.
I’m not saying the school should take the renegers to court. Rather, I wanted to know whether the renegers had made a legally binding contract that could be enforced by a court, if the school took the reneger to court.
There are some contracts that are not legally binding. For example, a surrogate mother can sign a contract to surrender the baby she gives birth to, but that contract is not legally enforceable.
I would think that grad school at that school or others in consortium would be out of the question. I would have to assume there is a black ball list for these folks that filters around at least at the top schools that take this super seriously. Unless schools fudge their numbers the number of kids who don’t follow through on ED is really small like less than 10 per thousand. I was actually surprised such a large percentage have integrity 
Whether the contract is legally enforceable will depend on how it is written and state law.
To enforce the contract, their options would be to compel the student to attend (not going to be enforceable- you can generally withdraw and lose only deposits through the first week or more of school), compel the student to pay the registration fees and dorm deposits (usually negligible and not worth the legal fees), compel the student to pay a semester’s worth of tuition (again you usually have the option of withdrawing a week or so into the school year).
For the most part schools that offer are ED are highly selective and can fill their seats two and three times over. It would be unlikely that any of these school can argue that they lost money by a candidate backing out. They can easily replace that student with the thousands of qualified applicants they have to turn away each year.
At best, I think they could recover the enrollment deposit. Rather than pursue it after the fact, they should probably ask for that as part of the ED application fee and then not refund it if the candidate backs out. It could be waived for those who cannot afford it.
What would probably reduce the ED shenanigans is for a college offering ED to do the following:
- Require ED applicants to pay the *enrollment* deposit at application time. If the applicant is not admitted in the ED round, the enrollment deposit is refunded.
- Require ED applicants to run the net price calculator, such that the inputs and results are saved with the ED application. If the applicant is admitted ED, then the actual FAFSA (and CSS Profile, if used) inputs are compared to the net price calculator inputs. If they are the same or close enough to the net price calculator inputs, but the school gives a significantly worse net price than what the net price calculator said, the enrollment deposit is refunded and the admitted applicant released from the ED commitment. Otherwise, release from ED would require something like an unplanned change in financial or medical situation.
Note that this also gives the college an incentive to make its net price calculator as accurate as possible.
$250 or whatever is nothing to wealthy people and very difficult for poor people. I don’t see it having any effect except discouraging yet more poor people NOT to apply ED.
(At the best schools for high-need accepted students, the enrollment deposit is deferred even to enroll.)
I like this idea, especially that last part. I wish they’d make a calculator for divorced people too…
Just as application fees can be waived so can enrollment deposits.
ED is probably intended to raise the family income level of the students anyway, since non-full-pay students may hesitate giving up the opportunity to compare financial aid and scholarship offers. Although if a school did not want to discourage poor students from applying early, it could switch to offering EA (perhaps restrictive like HYPS and Tulane, or “no ED” like Georgetown) instead of ED.
The non-custodial parent issue or the inclusion of a step parent’s income is probably the single biggest dilemma in college financial aid. I understand colleges count it because they need to be consistent in considering parental income but the reality of the situation is that most of those students don’t have three or four parents willing to pay.
As a parent who signed an ED application agreement, I will say that I would not have wanted to put down a deposit at that point, and not because we wanted to break the agreement. It just feels like it’s going too far (and my D is happily at her ED school). Forcing us to run the NPC? No problem with that one. SCEA has a big downside, as friends of my D found out when they were rejected or denied in the early round and were restricted from applying to private safety schools in the early round. Not only did they miss out on the first round of merit awards (which tend to be pretty generous) but they had to wait until March to get even one acceptance (our state schools don’t have early admission) and those kids were very stressed until then.
This would be a serious PITA for families who know they have no chance at all of receiving financial aid.
Then those folks would simply have no way to reneg.
@Sue22 You do bring up a good point about it being a PITA. We expected to be full pay for my D’s ED school so the NPC would have been just another form to fill out- and one that would have been useless for us.
OTOH, you only ED once so I would have had to fill out the useless form for one school. Plus, if it is part of the requirement to help my D get into her dream school, then it’s something that I would have been happy to do.
I agree with you, but not really something overly onerous as to have kept my D from applying ED.
I’d be okay with that, but how would schools enforce it? They would have no way of knowing in advance who would qualify for FA, and if someone who would qualify applied but didn’t run the NPC how would the school force them to attend a school they could not possibly pay for?
Thinking this through, I think the only way to make it work would be to allow students to apply for FA in the ED round only if they filled out the NPC in advance (a tweak on ucbalumnus’s idea).
Re: post #63. Is the question from Cardinal Fang whether the ED contract might be ruled “unconscionable”? Is the consideration (in the legal sense) enough to bind the student to attendance?
Regardless the most the school could really recover is the enrollment deposit. They would not waste time pursuing a few hundred dollars in court.
Then they could allow the ED applicant not applying for financial aid to skip the NPC, but then also there is no release from ED due to financial aid not matching the NPC.
With the enrollment deposit paid at application time. Though it may be small change to a full pay family, it is still more than the non-enforcement that exists today.
I think so. Imagine Harvard arguing that they were somehow harmed by losing one ED applicant and asking for 250,000 in damages. @oregon2016.