<p>A poorly-designed voicemail or the absence of water bottles on a hot day aren’t deliberately designed to offend. They are oversights. They aren’t abusive or deliberately meant to provoke the way that “go to hell, you @#$#$!” or “you’ll be hearing from my lawyer, you piece of @#$(*” are. </p>
<p>A college may deserve to be “marked down” because its voicemail or website or visitors’ lounge aren’t as customer-friendly as they maybe could be. Those are specific areas of improvement that can be made, if the college is made aware. The college can improve the voicemail, the website, the accommodations at the visitors’ lounge. But an adcom doesn’t deserve to be cursed at because some entitled parent thinks that he can now get his kid into a school by threatening to call the lawyer or the president or the senator. The “improvement” that these parents want is simply - my kid gets guaranteed admission. And it doesn’t work that way.</p>
<p>^^^^The private schools in my city do the letter send-out right before spring break. </p>
<p>The admissions director at my school always spent weeks after school resumed in meetings with parents of rejected students. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in some of those meetings.</p>
<p>I’ve never understood the point of those meetings. Do the parents just want someone to acknowledge that their kid is great, even if the school is not accepting them? I can’t imagine that a school would ever reverse a decision based on a meeting with angry parents.</p>
<p>Sometimes they’re looking for some insights as to the weaknesses in their child’s application. That can be useful to families on the waiting list or who will reapply in later years. Sometimes the information is less than instructive:
“Your child is a strong candidates but we had many more strong candidates than we had spaces for.”
Sometimes the information can change a family’s approach:
“In the end we felt your child was young for the grade. We would consider him a strong candidate as a repeat 9th grader next year.” or
“Even though we have a wonderful learning center and study skills program we really don’t think this is the right place for a child with dyslexia.”</p>
<p>Mirabiledictu-
Does your school do revisit days? Where I am (New England) the letters go out around March 10 and kids have a month to make a decision. They usually revisit schools in the first week of April.</p>
<p>At our school (lots of applications for few spots), it may be that they think they could persuade the admissions director to come up with one more spot, some may be angry and want to hear how in the heck their brilliant, darling child could possibly have been rejected, but I think most meet with her in order to figure out if they have a shot for next year and how they could go about increasing their chances for admissions. It’s a k-12 school and they have certain years where they add to the class, so these meetings could be helpful for a child on the cusp who just got edged out.</p>
<p>Our notifications take place at the same time as yours, but our timetable is radically compressed. Families have one week to commit. Some re-visit during that week, but these visits are shorter and less formal than the shadow visits earlier in the year. We definitely get a few.</p>