I agree that they should if they 100% know they won’t attend. But I think there is a time lag between who accepts/declines offers of admissions and how they pattern their acceptance/rejection decisions. Admissions may adjust those decisions next year based on this year’s cycle, but they won’t necessarily adjust in real time. If they do, their decisions might even be counterintuitive. For example, if EA applicants decline, they might tighten up their offers in RD to protect yield. On the other hand, declining very well might open up a scholarship or other financial opportunity to another candidate.
All that said, there is no point in hanging onto an acceptance if the student is certain that they won’t accept. I guess we’re in an uncertain space at my house, which is influencing my perspective. My D has acceptance she probably won’t accept, but can’t reasonably rule them out until she sees other acceptances and financial packages. The one way down on the list might move up because of their aid package. In her case, she’s pretty sure she’s going to say no to one, but I wouldn’t want her to decline just yet. Too much uncertainty at this point to risk it.
This probably applies to TE. If my child get offered TE somewhere we know she won’t go, she’ll decline so that someone on the TE waitlist gets a chance. In that case, I would not want her to hold onto it when that could affect someone else’s decision.
I think more kids should get the recommendation to apply early to a rolling admission school that they would happily go to. My D this year was applying for nursing with a reach heavy list, so it was hard to figure out what she’d get into even though she was high stats. She applied early to Pitt and got an offer in October and that took the pressure off because it was a school she would have very happily gone to. She later got into Case Western and Penn, where she’ll attend, but she truly liked Pitt and I think it made the process much less stressful.
While I agree that it’s the school’s responsibility to manage the process and not the students, doesn’t the bold in the statement below (UofA) imply that more funding will actually be available if some current students with merit awards decline their spots?
“For non-resident (domestic, out-of-state) students, maximum scholarship consideration, pending availability of funds, is given to applicants who apply by the priority date of December 2, 2024.”
“Availability of funds” likely depends on many things - students accepting merit may be one of them but so too might be the endowment payout that year, the amount of need-based aid being given that year, the amount of money graduate students will be getting paid under their new contract (obviously only relevant to some institutions) and on and on.
This is exactly our situation. Until merit awards come in, the list is still so fluid that who knows what we’ll happen. We likely won’t be declining anything until late March or early April.
As the parent of a c25 who was SO SURE they wanted one specific school and if they got in, their life would be perfect…only to abruptly change their mind as soon as they were actually admitted, I am absolutely not asking my child to pull applications. My kid keeps bouncing around what they want, I swear it changes by the day (or maybe even by the hour.)
Others have already explained, the schools do predictive modeling for their yield and turning down your EA spot or scholarship does NOT mean the school will now pull someone off the waitlist or pass on your allotted scholarship funds. It just doesn’t work that way. There may be specific programs/examples where it does work that way but for those you’ll have a specified deadline to accept that is before May 1.
What I do have a big problem with are those kids with ED admits who haven’t pulled their other applications yet. You signed a binding contract saying you would pull your other apps and schools have had enough time to get out financial packages by now, unless the family missed a filing deadline.
I don’t think it’s right to make anyone feel impolite for not withdrawing from schools where they have non-binding offers of admission. If they want to hold until May 1, that’s their perogative. While I realize schools are desperately trying to predict their yield, and they do get a small amount of data from withdrawals trickling in over time, my guess is that deposits are the more important statistic that they track. Colleges pay enrollment management consultants for their expertise in this area.
I guess a rule of thumb might be to withdraw no earlier than when you deposit elsewhere, and only if there is no hint of uncertainty about desires, plans, or finances, and all results are in. Seniors may get surprisingly cold feet after depositing, as well, so consider allowing time for that. Or may feel differently when their RD results roll in or even their friends’ RD results.
I suppose I’d say to maximize flexibility until you are fully mentally and emotionally ready to clear the slate.
I don’t think this necessarily means they add back to the “pot” of funds in real -time. it means at time of application there may or may not be funds available still.
I would guess most re-assess after May 1 what they have left (doing it real time would be very confusing IMO)!.
It does open up a spot/merit aid…except when it doesn’t.
Whether it does or not will vary by institution, and there is generally no way of knowing which ones are which.
(Though if there’s no option to decline an acceptance/withdraw an application in the portal, only to accept, that’s kind of a signal that it probably won’t change things for anyone else.)
D got a really nice email from UD a couple days after the audition that said they’re working on everything and will let her know soon. It even mentioned something specific she talked about in her interview. This morning she got an email from UPS saying the financial aid package is now in the portal but it’s not there. There’s links for the merit and acceptance letters and nothing else. She emailed the admissions counselor to inquire and I’m just here PATIENTLY waiting for the response. So far I got the dishes done, part of dinner prepped, coffee pods organized, ground up some peppercorns and am about to sweep up the wayward peppercorns. I’m definitely not checking the portal or thinking about the portal at all! (That last part is snark I’m trying to keep my hands busy lol)
I wish I knew that there was a school on S25’s list that he was sure he didn’t want. But although we need him to decide in ~3 months, he doesn’t seem to have a strong defined set of preferences yet and it’s hard to have an informed conversation about it because his current information is so…flawed. Hence the need to go visit. Every time I think “oh no, he can just read what the internet says about a school” I remember the difference in his responses to Carleton and Oberlin (which I somewhat reluctantly added onto our trip last winter because we were basically already there, but was sure, based on my own internet perusing, would be a bust.)
Hence Tour de Blizzard…and what I anticipate will be a bunch of frenzied weekend trips in the next couple of months.
Don’t judge me for hoping that most of his spring admissions options (aside from the ones where I’ve already booked hotels) end up being a bust…
Is it dumb to sally forth to these places, looking for chemistry? The truth is, they are all great schools and in this case, money isn’t going to be the deciding factor (although I think I might be annoyed about paying full price for Boulder given some of the sweet offers that he’s gotten from smaller private schools.) In the end it’s going to come down to vibes and imperfect research and every option has trade-offs. Right now I’m detecting a bias in two directions: a) schools he’s properly visited (e.g. WPI, St. Olaf, Macalaster, but not Minnesota, which we didn’t actually tour), and b) (insert eye-roll) schools he hasn’t seen that are higher ranked/peer-approved (and yet still not Minnesota.)
(okay, inserting in here a disclaimer: there are probably a couple of schools he might reject sight unseen if pressed to do so but I want him to see them and properly consider them first. Ergo Pitt and Minnesota.)
Speaking of rankings…can we talk for a minute about how goofy the USNWR national university rankings seem? and how FUBAR it is that a kid might look at them and think “well, I got into Purdue for engineering but I also got into NYU and they are higher ranked so I should probably go there.”
We have, no joke, signed up for 8 admitted students days (!)
'25 can’t rule out any right now..still waiting on the school that is probably their favorite too (!) so possibly 9 (!).
Luckily I love weekend trips and 4 we can go to for the day w/o a hassle…one is near in-laws (we have to see anyway) and one is in a favorite destination…
3. You set a good precedent with the school for the future (just in case).
Who knows what your post-undergrad future holds? Should you apply to graduate studies or a job opportunity at a college you declined for undergrad studies, it will only help your case to demonstrate respect and courtesy at this stage.
Plus, you never know if you may reencounter someone who reviewed your application and could help you down the road in your career. Even if your news isn’t what they want to hear, it will still leave things on a positive note.
The rest of the article is reasonable, but this one betrays a lack of understanding of the way college admissions works at all sorts of levels.
First, graduate and professional admissions work materially differently from undergrad admissions—they’re done principally at the level of the department or school, and mostly (especially for grad school) reviewed by faculty as opposed to the staff members that make up most undergrad admissions committees. (And even when graduate/professional admissions are done by staff committees, it’s going to be a different staff committee reviewing for different things.
And the idea that a member of the admissions committee is going to remember a specific undergraduate applicant and whether they explicitly declined an offer of admission or not is kind of silly, and arguably speaks to an overly inflated sense of self-importance—even at the level of a small LAC, an individual applicant is not going to be that memorable, given the number of applications any given adcom member has to sift through.
We are signed up for one admitted student day which we might be about to un-sign-up for, as that school has suddenly plummeted to the bottom of her list for reasons that I don’t want to get into here. I need to be looking at the other schools’ schedules. As things stand today, I would say that by the end of this week our decision might be pretty easy. (But who knows how things will stand tomorrow?)
No question we are visiting before C25 is allowed to commit. The visits last year completely determined which schools to apply even when they looked the same on paper. As you know we are going BACK to Union because we visited last year over spring break when no students were there so we don’t trust that vibe (even though it was extremely positive). This is where you will be living for 4 years…the community has to be right…and yes, the monetary differences are an added challenge. C25 has “eliminated” 4 of the 10 schools with 2 more on the “I don’t think I’m interested”, but we have not officially declined any yet until at least after the mid Feb trip to the top 4.
I think there IS a small chance we cancel some of the ones we signed up for, maybe, possibly as we go, but wanted to get them on books and to get hotels (when needed). It felt like a logic puzzle to fit them all in, since SO many overlapping dates.
Totally agree that rolling admissions can be a wonderful confidence boost/ease of mind. But my son applied to Pitt in mid October (his portal showed that everything had been uploaded by the end of October) and didn’t get his acceptance until 3 days ago! That was surprising.