What college options would be left? Can there be long-term complications (like with grad school)?
(I’m already a college student, so this is hypothetical!)
You can get lucky and get out due to aid, but basically your held by a contract. If you don’t go basically your only option would be community college.
You jack up your HS and future applicants can expect rejections for many years. Schools don’t have to play fair. Black listing does occur
Usually there is a bad mark on the student’s high school. If your reason to decline is affordability that is probably OK.
If an applicant is not 100% sure that one school is his/her top choice and/or if a person wants the opportunity to compare financial offers then one should not apply anywhere ED. The only legal out is if the finances don’t work.
Couldn’t the applicant say the school was unaffordable even if it weren’t?
Sounds like you are considering gaming the system which is always dangerous. Admissions and college admin who deal with thousands of apps annually always know more than the kid applying for the one and only time in their life. Be careful you don’t get yourself into a pickle…
I promise I’m just morbidly curious! I applied to colleges three years ago and have thousands of posts about it! O:-)
Breaking the agreement can and should have severe consequences for someone whose intention was to game the system. What I don’t understand is whether those consequences extend to someone who honestly underestimated the aid they would get. People say that it’s more permissible to break the contract because the financial aid isn’t enough, but the student is the one who determines if the financial aid is enough. So what stops the system-gamers from giving that excuse and avoiding consequences?
If for some reason you truly can’t afford it, that’s your out. Examples: parents own a business, the NPC doesn’t predict aid reliably, but the kid is a great candidate. Or something happens to family finances in the interim. The family decides if aid is enough. Why do you think it’s just the student?
Not sure why everyone says it dooms the high school. Black listing (I’d call it grey, some muted enthusiasm for the school’s products) might be more when there’s a continuing record of kids who don’t matriculate in any round. Or kids who have issues with academics, behaviors, or a record of transferring out. Not just because some kid can’t afford it.
I know that the family is usually involved. The point is that it’s not the college (for good reasons), so right now it seems like the student and family can avoid repercussions by saying that the college didn’t provide enough aid.
There is no contract; nothing legal is involved. The HS won’t be blacklisted (HS’s get blacklisted when the counselor breaks the rules; it happened years ago at our HS). Some college adcoms talk with each other, especially at peer schools; a frivolous full payer backing out might be seen as dishonest by another school.
That makes sense. I guess I thought the student would be directly asked for an explanation and that would determine the consequences, but it looks like it’s just a matter of whether the claim of unaffordability looks genuine to other schools.
I don’t think we know some adcoms talk to each other. Among some schools, it’s verboten. And who has time to reach down to little Susie’s app, call up another school and ask another adcom to talk about her?
Of course, that is still no penalty for the ED breaker, but a dishonorable practice to future students at the high school who have done nothing wrong. If the college does put the high school on an auto-reject list, it should at least do so openly (informing the high school of such), rather than accepting applications and their fees from students at the high school who may not know about the ED breaker in a past class.
If the colleges really want to penalize ED breakers, they should require ED applicants to pay the enrollment deposit upon application, and also force a net price calculator run that saves the input parameters and the net price with the application. Enrollment deposit is refunded if the applicant is not admitted ED, or the college’s actual financial aid is worse than the net price calculator result and the same input parameters were used for the actual financial aid application.
@vonlost black listing does occur. I can speak from experience at my school, when an ED applicant broke the contract (and not for affordability reasons), no student of ours gets admitted ED or RD (and we’re a high performing school). Even a legacy who was top of his class was rejected this year. Another triple legacy whose family is a major donor to the institution was rejected. Every student applying from my school gets outright rejected or waitlisted.
And this isn’t just speculation- our guidance counselor has asked the regional rep at Brown that handles our area, and he told her “off-the-record” that Brown takes breaking an ED contract very seriously and that essentially they don’t want to waste admits on our school, since they don’t trust the students to come.
I think we forget that getting into an elite is more than stats matching and the kids at the hs across town or further out in that area might also be great. And they can’t take them all.
If no kid matriculates, early or RD, I’m not sure I’d call the result blacklisting by the college. Sounds equally like kids and the hs aren’t “showing the love.”
And while an official position can be that turning down ED is serious, it doesn’t mean a legit financial hurdle kills the high school. There’s more to it.
Since your high school is on Brown’s auto-reject list, shouldn’t your high school put Brown on the advise-students-not-to-apply list, so that students will not waste their time and money applying?
Do colleges really have auto-reject lists for certain high schools? Just wondering.
No.
Sometimes, I wonder why some make this seem so brittle. Not auto rejects, at least not for top holistics. They’ll look at your app. But how they’ll weigh depends on various factors, sure.
Bottom line is still to be on your game. Think. Explore. Know what you’re doing. And be open minded, resilient, because you don’t know if you’ll get exactly what you “want.”