I applied early decision (ED) to Wellesley and I hear back on Saturday! But I also applied early action to UVM (I checked the Wellesley website l and couldn’t find anything that said that I was not allowed to do this) since I wanted to have more applications done just in case. I recently read an article that said that I must withdraw my UVM application as soon as I get accepted to Wellesley. I don’t think that I feel comfortable doing this until I possibly get my financial aid letter from Wellesley. UVM decisions are released next Thursday. Am I allowed to keep my UVM application until I hear back from financial aid or do I have to rescind my application immediately upon acceptance?
You can and should wait until after you receive your financial aid notice.
Wait until you have an ED admission with affordable financial aid offer.
For the present, you wait and continue your process as though you had not been admitted. (Congratulations by the way from this 7-sister grad!) When you have received your aid package and determined that it is adequate, that is when you accept the offer of admission and drop all of the others. This can be a long time in the future. Some ED students with tricky financial situations don’t have finalized and affordable aid packages from their ED institutions until the spring.
Thank you for the information!
I can’t imagine a school waiting until spring to release the financial aid package for ED students. Can you supply some actual examples of schools that do this?
I’m not understanding this. Is it ok to apply ED but then not accept if the financial aid package isn’t acceptable?
If that is the case then I would have had my son apply ED. Instead he applied RD because it wouldn’t have been within our budget if little financial aid was offered.
This thread has changed the application plan for my D’22 but was too late to help my S’20.
The only way you can reject an ED is if the financial aid is not good enough. Other than that its binding and that’s why when I noticed my son not comfortable with the major in his ED application last year we pulled the plug.
As an aside, you should run the NPC on the school website before applying and be comfortable paying that amount. If you are admitted with FA that gets you to that EFC, you do not have a good faith reason for not taking your ED offer and should not be dragging things out to spring.
If you want to compare offers, ED is not for you.
D20 applied ED to a meets full need school. We ran both the NPC and myIntuition calculators, deemed our cost to be affordable, and printed out copies of the results. Our thinking is if the actual aid amount differs substantially from the calculators, we have a starting place for negotiating a better package (yes, we know they aren’t 100% accurate and schools can justify variances but we can be prepared if we have to call).
@diegodavis wrote:
Yes, an applicant admitted in the ED round can back out of the contract if the financial aid package is not adequate. Run the NPCs to see if a school’s costs are likely to be in an affordable range.
@helpingmom40 wrote:
As an ED admitted applicant you won’t have any other packages/offers to use as leverage in a ‘negotiation’ (note: do not refer to it as a negotiation with the fin aid people)…not being able to compare fin aid offers is one of the disadvantages of applying ED. Do keep the NPC result, but the school is not required to meet that. Of course you can back out of the ED contract if the fin aid package is not adequate/affordable.
Happymom1 didn’t say schools will wait to release the fin aid package…they meant that the back and forth wrt the financial aid package can go on for awhile. Other applications and acceptances don’t have to be pulled until the applicant makes a deposit on the ED school.
@gardenstategal Yes, I’ve ran the NPC. I would not have applied ED if I was not confident that the school would not give me a substantial amount of need based financial aid. However, I am certain that I can not afford anything close to the full tuition and I am preparing for a worst case scenario. As long as they give me something close to NPC, I’m happy.