I forgot to mention - OU sent me 5 emails yesterday pestering me to apply and get them as my first choice. 5!
It is certainly cleaner for an ED applicant not to apply anywhere else until after the ED decision. It is perfectly within the letter of the ED agreement to apply elsewhere (according to the other schools individual rules, of course) and withdraw those applications should the ED school offer an acceptance. All ED offers come with financial information and a deadline, and at that deadline either the ED offer should be accepted and all other applications withdrawn or the ED offer should be declined. Given that ED applicants, their parents, and their guidance counselors all sign a statement agreeing to the ED rules, it really is not a gray area. I understand the whole “catch me if you can” mentality, but it’s harmful to kids who come after. (I also understand the “I don’t care about someone else’s kid” attitude, but that doesn’t mean I condone it.)
Similarly, the SCEA schools spell out very clearly on their web sites what is and what is not allowed in terms of other applications where the applicant will get results in the month of December. It’s very straightforward, but it is on a school-by-school basis. SCEA offers are very much more to the benefit of the student than the benefit of the school (of course, there’s some benefit to the school in competing for the most desirable students). In most cases, a school’s admissions web site makes the expectations very, very clear.
FWIW, the College Board doesn’t set any rules in this area. They attempt to put all of the disparate rules in one place to make it easier, but they are usually out of date. NACAC and it’s member schools make the rules, but there really are slight variations from school to school, so you really do have to do your homework.
I understand at this point I’m preaching to the choir. For everyone here whose child is NOT taking a gap year, we’re entirely done with applications. I’m a little surprised that we’re still having this discussion, but apparently it’s still really necessary, and since this is an open forum, it seems reasonable to leave this “word to the wise” here for parents of younger students to find. I do find in various on-line communities and in real life there are some parents who can’t ever seem to wrap their heads around the norms, much less the rules (and in this case, I’m not actually calling out parents participating in this forum, just pondering other people in my life).
@Pepper03 thanks, and your son has a good point, I keep telling her the same things.
I wish I had found these boards earlier, everyone is so knowledgeable. This is my oldest child so all was new to me. Our HS is large and counselors are over worked, I think they assume that we parents know more than we do about all this. We visited 8 schools, we are lucky to have decent state schools so didn’t look far outside of NC and D wanted to stay in state. We applied EA to 6 of the 8 we visited and one private that we visited later after I saw how merit money would fall, D had no interest in going small private but I made her look at some. Honestly, from the start we all thought she wanted our flagship, but they can be fickle with white/females from our county, so in my mind everything else was back-up or safety. The only one we applied to that I couldn’t afford was OOS, and I told D from the start that she couldn’t go if she didn’t get merit, which she did.
Now here we are at safety with HC and she is over the moon. I think (& hope & pray) that she will blossom here, with the opportunities, and small community within a large university. I think looking back I would have applied to fewer, some of these I knew she wasn’t going to attend, but I was so worried something could change between fall and graduation. Thank goodness I have time to recover before my next one graduates, HS’20.
I have a request, when you add your DC to the admitted list, will you please put the school your child chose in a line before the whats become a long list of college choices. That will make it a lot easier to see what the new choice is. Thanks!
When S applied ED to his school, he still started the application process for 2 other schools because, had he been rejected from the ED school, it would have been too late to apply and set up auditions for the other 2 schools. Upon getting his ED acceptance he immediately withdrew his applications to the other 2 schools, contacting the admissions office as well as the music schools so that everyone involved in the admissions process would know.
@HeliMom74 Yes, I’ve had a decision since the beginning of March. I’m near the bottom of the list going to Wichita State University.
I want to add D (East Carolina University - HC) to list but it seems like the list is going to blow up on reposting in the next 10 days! Should I repost it or should we wait and add a few at once??
@ITBgirl, I say post it now. Congratulations on the decision!
I assume I am not as worldly as many of you 
, but does anyone else have to occasionally search the schools that people are mentioning on the boards to get a feel for the type of school they are talking about? And if so, where do you look to get school info?
CC has a board listing; have you looked there? I like the personal-review aspect of them:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/colleges-universities/
Not every school is there, but many are.
@albert69, my son got those OU emails as well, along with a really humorous and clever email today apologizing! He didn’t choose OU, but it reinforces our positive opinion of everything OU.
I will not be putting her on the list due to some concerns I have about violating her privacy. Things are very different around here now CC is very popular!
@Barfly Yeah, I got the apology email as well. I finally clicked unsubscribe - hopefully that does the trick. It is a good school, just not one that would have worked for me. They sure do know how to market!
My girl is excited about OU. She digs their NMS concierge service!
Same as @momsings; he did EA in case his ED didn’t go through. The dates were not favorable, and actually, a small part of the reason he chose ED with that college was that the other college’s ED notified too late to apply ED2 to the college he ended up applying ED to.
(the perfect situation would have been ED to HMFR and then find out waitlisted or rejected, then have one day to submit ED2 for his “second choice” - literally there was no overlap, so he could not have applied ED2 we finally realized.)
However, it was abundantly clear in:
- the Common Application and the forms I had to sign as a parent, and
- the guidance from my son’s ED college, and
- conversations and emails with my son’s GC
that in NO WAY were we violating the ED agreement by comparing FA packages (how else do you know if the college’s FA package is adequate/acceptable, if you have no comparison?). We would have ONLY gone for the EA school if there was a significant difference in FA packages (more than 10K per year) - because honestly, I do not know where we will be in a few years when my next one is graduating HS - he may have fewer choices because his brother’s college costs were high.
We did NOT immediately withdraw all applications because we did NOT determine the FA package was adequate/acceptable for a week (what a stressful week THAT was). He even submitted an RD application a week before the ED result because that was the deadline for scholarships.
I’ve done regulatory work, and rules and regulations and laws are written in a certain way. If someone thinks because the trope is that ED is 100% binding no matter what, that’s fine for them. What we did was perfectly within my moral code.
On that note, we submitted an FA appeal based on a new FAFSA, wish us luck!
(NFN = not for nothing, as in “my son was so together for his ED process, as compared to those who had kids who couldn’t quite make the deadline, that he had to take a day off from school to finish his essays and the rest of the application”. Kind of FWIW (for what it’s worth))
Daughter just texted: “Roommates sorted. Enrollment appointment set.”
YAY for decisions! Going forward feels pretty damn great.
@itbgirl I’m not sure what you mean by “blow up” but some of us have been updating the decisions list here http://■■■■■■■/class2019 so that it survives any problems with character limits which may kick in sooner or later. It is also easy to bookmark and find again so you don’t have to keep scrolling and cutting and pasting! But people want to see the list here and I can’t imagine it is a problem to keep reposting (until the character limit kicks in)
Also, the ■■■■■■■ list also has a listing by student so you can easily check on a specific student.
@itbgirl College Confidential tends to strip out links to other college info services – there are quite a few out there, most pulling from each school’s common data set (search that if you don’t know what it is). Many high schools subscribe to Naviance and you’d have to find out if that’s possible for you. There are also things like Parchment and College Data.