<p>Yes. Finances is the reason we awaited all decisions and all offers before deciding. </p>
<p>Our son would have been fine with any of the schools to which he applied. Yes, he had favorites, but he knew that finances would have to be an influence on the final decision. And I discovered that FA offers were not predictable.</p>
<p>noimagination–But if they may need to accept at another school before you withdraw your application, to keep their spot, especially if financial aid is involved.</p>
<p>“Yes. Finances is the reason we awaited all decisions and all offers before deciding.”</p>
<p>Could you not start eliminating schools on a rolling basis instead of waiting until all offers are in? You know that school X is out, becasue you got into school Y with great FA. Let school X know you are no longer interested. Two weeks later, school Z offers admission, and even better aid than school Y—now you let school Y know you are no longer interested? I am not criticizing your approach, I am just asking if this would work?</p>
<p>I agree with illinoisdad. AT $50+ an application plus many hours working on it,the student gets to find out if he is accepted or not. After you are sure that you will not go to that university, you should promptly let them know! I also think somewhere between 3-12 applications is plenty.</p>
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<p>For the parents, this might be a small price to pay for a lifetime of bragging.</p>
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I plan to withdraw by April 4th at the latest. That should leave plenty of time.</p>
<p>More to the point, I can’t say whether one anonymous student is more deserving of admission than another anonymous student. I have to trust the school to handle that.</p>
<p>^^ How about if you just do the decent, courteous, adult thing and take your name off the list as soon as you decide not to attend?</p>
<p>ETA – But hey, thanks for giving us some insight into the thought process of the Ego Applicant. It really IS all about you, just as we suspected.</p>
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Why? If you were accepted at Yale, why would you be waiting to hear back from Oberlin? Would you really choose Oberlin over Yale, if not for financial reason? I know from personal experience and looking at data, by staying on, a top applicant is taking a classmate’s spot.</p>
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I’m guessing you didn’t read any of my other posts in this thread. Again, if I had even the slightest reason to believe that the world would have even one single extra deserving student without a place at the end of the decision process, I would have withdrawn early without question. But that isn’t the situation.</p>
<p>EDIT: Just to be clear, I am uncomfortable with the idea of accepting a place on the waitlist when one doesn’t plan to enroll. I would not do that. My posts are about withdrawing before an initial decision is issued.</p>
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<p>And how do you know this with such certainty?</p>
<p>BTW, I find it amazingly arrogant that you presume to know and judge how “deserving” the WL students are.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. </p>
<p>We had a few backs and forths with schools w/r to the aid package after all the offers were in hand. Nothing shady, just: I (student) am interested in you (school A), but school B has offered $$ based on the same information. What do you think?</p>
<p>The results were surprising to me (positive).</p>
<p>I am all for behaving ethically. I do not think that ethics, in this case, require that an 18-year-old give up options before all the facts are in.</p>
<p>People always need excuse to justify their selfish reasons. For $70 they want to be able to tell their kids some day of all the schools they got into.</p>
<p>^^^ Because none of the schools in question have ever come anywhere remotely close to using their whole waitlist.</p>
<p>So just answer this straight up: If you know 100% that you are not going to XYZ University, why wouldn’t you notify them as soon as you’ve made the decision? Is there another reason besides pure ego?</p>
<p>oldfort, I think you might have been responding to a specific post in #32.</p>
<p>Which one is it? ( forgive me, please, if it so obvious that I missed it)</p>
<p>Oldfort, believe it or not, sometimes people chose other schools even when they get in Ivy’s and if they have applied to a college one would assume they had enough interest in it to want to know if they got in or not.</p>
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Well, it’s impossible to ever know truly 100%. Just 99.99%. So that’s one reason.</p>
<p>But the main issue depends on how you define “pure ego”. I don’t see myself bragging about admission decisions; to be frank, I can’t imagine any scenario in which it wouldn’t be terribly awkward to discuss one’s decisions. At least where I come from, that’s not considered a polite question to ask or to answer unasked.</p>
<p>The main reason is just personal interest. I’ve invested a lot of time - probably too much time - in this process. I want to see it through to the end. Even if I can’t imagine myself choosing X school over Y school, I still applied to X school for a reason and I want to know whether X school considers me a good match. Just to satisfy my personal curiosity.</p>
<p>We notified a school very soon after d1 made the decision not to attend. I say “we” because d1 had received one of 3 tuition exchange awards, but that award was a benefit of my employment at a sister school. Those are only held open until April. We certainly did not want to keep another student from being awarded that benefit because we were sitting on it. I thought it was the most ethical course of action.</p>
<p>Why, if the decision is made, does anybody sit on multiple acceptances? Ego seems the most likely reason. But I’d like to throw out the idea that fear may be playing into this. Students might be afraid to actually make the decision, to move forward.</p>
<p>I think that’s piggish, to be honest. You get into a great school - it’s your first choice – and you “need” to collect more scalps? Without giving a darn that you’re standing in the way of some other kid, who might prefer to get a decision in regular time versus being waitlisted?</p>
<p>My kids got in ED on a Friday evening – and by Monday, they had contacted the other places where they had also applied and withdrawn their apps. Now, of course, they were bound to by ED – but if it had only been EA, it still would have been the right thing to do.</p>
<p>I don’t at all get treating EA as something different than ED. If my kids’ top schools had been EA schools instead of the ED schools they were, and they’d gotten in EA, I still would think “great, game over.” I think it’s stressful enough to wait til April / May; it’s ridiculous to have to wait longer, and play a waitlist game, because someone who already got into his / her top school EA wanted to collect a few more acceptances.</p>
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<p>You don’t really care about wasting other people’s time - like the adcoms who are sitting and discussing you in good faith when you won’t ever show? Yuck. I dislike people who are cavalier about wasting my time.</p>