<p>Thanks for all the replies. This is my first child attending college. It was an innocent question. Of course, we will comply (if accepted) and withdraw all applications. The school he applied ED is his very top choice and he would be thrilled to go there. My choices for college (back in the olden days) did not have ED and I was just trying to find out more. I do think it is funny how many people felt the need to rip me to shreds! Everybody…good luck!</p>
<p>^ Sigh. If you hang around, you’ll see patterns. There is a useful tool, the “Ignore List” in “My Control Panel” where you can put posters who routinely post in a hateful manner. It works well!</p>
<p>aside from financial aid, what if I applied ED and got accepted but had a bad grade my senior year. Do I still have to withdraw all apps even with the risk of rescinding?</p>
<p>Wutheringgc: Yes. you still have to withdraw all of your applications. My advice is to study hard. You do know that all colleges’ acceptances are conditional upon your end of year transcript’s being acceptable? If you get bad grades, even safety schools probably wouldn’t want you.</p>
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<p>You are completely missing the point. It’s not that Dartmouth gains anything by forcing you to withdraw your apps if you’ve committed to Dartmouth. It’s that it’s not a very nice thing to do to “hold up” spots at other universities that could go to other people who are open to them at this point, which you aren’t. Doesn’t the impact on other people mean anything to you? It’s not all about your trophy-hunting. If you want to trophy-hunt, you shouldn’t go ED, because an ED candidate should love his choice so much that he’s content to get in there, and whether he would have gotten in elsewhere is not a burning question for him unless he gets rejected from the ED.</p>
<p>You’re wrong, Pizzagirl. Schools accept more students than can attend the university because they know some will decline. By leaving my apps active I am not talking anyone’s spot. I am just one of those in the decline pile. And if my RD schools really want me to withdraw my apps in order to uphold the integrity of the process, why don’t they refund my fee?</p>
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<p>You’re missing the point, Old College Try. If College X has a 50% yield rate on admitted students and is trying to fill 1,000 places in its entering class, it will accept exactly 2,000 applicants. If you’re one of those 2,000 even though there’s no chance you’ll attend because you’ve already been accepted ED someplace else, then you most certainly are keeping that acceptance from going to the 2001st applicant—the “next in line” whom they’d have accepted but for your standing in the way. If College Y has a 33% yield rate, they’ll accept 3,000 to fill 1,000 places, and you’ll be blocking the 3001st. And so on. These are real live people with real hopes and dreams tied up in their college applications. They may get in elsewhere, or not; these may be their dream colleges, or not. But why be a jackass and deny them the chance at a school they may want to attend if given the chance?</p>
<p>You may think the impact of your decision is trivial given the large numbers of acceptances going out. But think about it. What if all ED applicants kept their applications alive at other schools after their ED acceptances? They could easily comprise 10% or more of the admits at some school there’s no chance they’ll attend, potentially denying dozens or hundreds of applicants the opportunity to attend the college of their choice. Sure, over time colleges would need to adjust their yield rates downward and accept more applicants to fill their entering class. But in the meantime, since they expect everyone to abide by the agreed-upon rules, you really would be taking an opportunity away from someone, for no purpose other than to gratify your own ego.</p>
<p>That’s true, by the way, not only for ED acceptances, but for anyone who is accepted under rolling admissions, non-binding EA, or RD and KNOWS where they’re going to go but doesn’t bother to withdraw their applications from other schools before the admission decisions are made. Someone else is next in line. Give them a chance.</p>
<p>Old College Try, you leaving in your RD applications won’t hurt anyone in the aggregate. But any of your RD acceptances means that someone else in that RD pile isn’t getting an acceptance letter. That person might be someone who would have declined the RD offer…or it might be someone who would have leapt at the chance to attend that RD school. Your RD applications, when you have an ED acceptance in hand, may very well deny a handful of people acceptance at what might be their dream school. </p>
<p>A few EDers trying this might get away with it. If the number snowballs because ED applicants feel that they have some sort of “right” to have their RD applications considered, then many more people’s spots get taken. You might argue that schools will then just admit more people, knowing that they will lose some ED applicants who are just trophy-hunting. More likely is that schools will start fine-combing the ED lists, and immediately rejecting any applicants that have an ED acceptance. </p>
<p>RD schools want you to withdraw your app because it is the right thing to do. When you apply, you pay your money. There’s no refund policy where you get 80% of your fee back if you withdraw your application before january 1, 50% back if withdrawn before Feb 1, etc. The RD school is agreeing to fairly evaluate you, based on the assumption that you might end up attending. That’s the entire deal. Your idea that you should get a refund is especially unfair when considering schools which don’t have ED or EA. UCLA and Cal don’t have ED, so why should they refund your money, after your application has used up some of the UC system’s resources, to support the ED system?</p>
<p>Slithely and bcclintonk, you’re missing the point. I applied ED to one school and EA to one school. Those are the only applications I wanted to submit before hearing from my ED decision. But it wasn’t my choice. The UC system required me to submit my RD applications in November. USC required me to submit my RD app in late November in order to qualify for merit aid. A number of other schools required that I submit my RD apps in early December in order to qualify for interviews, scholarships, etc. I am sitting on seven other RD apps that I’ve worked on for months, but I won’t send in those in because I have already been accepted to my ED school and don’t want to waste my mother’s money. How can you criticize my decision to leave my submitted RD apps alive when the timing of my RD apps was determined by the school, not me? The way I see it, those schools mentioned above require RD apps before ED decisions come out simply to make money from saps like me. They won’t spend 10 cents on my app before December 15th, but they took $65 to $75 of my mother’s money per app (over $400 total). It’s virtually all profit for them. They created the system, not me, and I want them to work for the money they forced me to send them before December 15th. Why should I reward them?</p>
<p>Old College Try, schools choose their deadlines based on what is best for their institutions. Interviews, assessing students for merit aid, and sending out UC applications to multiple campuses all require significant lead time. Of course they’re looking at when peer schools set their deadlines, and at the big deadline in May when RD students commit. They are not going to move deadlines later, and cause a huge pile-up in their workload, just to accomodate a relative handful of students who are waiting for ED decisions. Most ED applicants are either going to be so deliriously happy about being accepted that they don’t care about the RD app fees already paid, or they’re going to be ED deferrals/rejects who end up needing those RD apps. </p>
<p>You were the one who opted to apply ED. That was your choice. With ED’s benefits (knowing early, getting an admissions boost) come some drawbacks (needing to work on and submit some other apps). Think of these other applications and their fees as insurance. Your first choice was your ED school, so you were hoping that you wouldn’t need to rely on your RD schools. Or, consider this an additional cost to applying ED. If ED were structured so that you could withdraw your RD applications and get a full refund, but the ED application cost $500, would you have still pursued ED? Would you be willing to pay an additional $400 to boost your chances of getting in to your top choice school? </p>
<p>I notice that you’re no longer telling me and bcclintonk that keeping your RD applications won’t hurt anyone. It’s clear that keeping your RD apps live will hurt someone. For their sake, you need to withdraw your applications. I can assure you that your mother would agree. The application money is spent. You’re going to your top choice school. Allow someone else to benefit from your good fortune.</p>
<p>Slithe, you’re comfortable with the idea that schools make decisions “based on what is best for their institutions,” so why not give students that same pass?</p>
<p>I do not believe schools have a hard cap on who they admitted, defer, etc. The “2001st student will be deprived” comment is complete bs. There is no 2001st student out there. Schools have a rough idea of how many students they will accept, and that number goes up and down each year depending on the quality of apps received. Schools also waitlist a ton of students each year. Whether I withdraw now or in May is irrelevant to the applicant pool. </p>
<p>Only a handful of schools force applicants to send in RD apps before ED decisions are made. The vast majority of schools don’t do this. Why are Yale and Princeton able to handle the “huge workload” but UC, USC, Duke, etc. are not?</p>
<p>Don’t forget the practical issue that when the ED school sends its admit list to other schools, another school will see that the corresponding RD app has not been withdrawn, creating the risk of both schools rejecting the applicant for the attempt at gaming the system.</p>
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<p>Well, I’d criticize you on several grounds. Most importantly, it’s dishonorable. You signed an ED agreement when you submitted your ED application in which you promised to withdraw all your other applications if you’re accepted ED. You’ve been accepted. You’re violating the agreement. It’s as simple as that. It’s grounds for your ED school to rescind their acceptance if they catch wind of the fact that you’re violating the agreement. It’s grounds for the other schools to which you’ve applied to deny your admission now or later, or even to rescind an acceptance after the fact, if they catch wind of it—and it’s rumored some schools do send around their lists of ED acceptances, so if the other schools bother to cross-check you could be toast. It could harm future applicants from your HS if word gets around that applicants from your HS (namely you) are not trustworthy and don’t honor their commitments. It could get your GC really mad at you and cause the GC to send in a supplement to the GC rec—or a mid-year report or final report–stating that you’re dishonoest and not to be trusted because you flagrantly violated your ED agreement, in which case the best you can ever hope for may be a community college or some other school with an open admissions policy. In short, it’s not only dishonest, it’s just really, really dumb and potentially self-destructive. And for what? To gratify your ego or give you bragging rights if you notch a few more acceptances? That’s ridiculous.</p>
<p>As for the idea that your application fee is “pure profit” for the colleges you’ve applied to, that’s bunk. Colleges set their admissions budgets and peg application fees based not on the person-hours it takes to process each individual application, but on the basis of the total costs of their admissions operation—promotional materials, recruiting travel, college fairs, setting up and maintaining the record-keeping systems they need to handle that much paperwork efficiently, office costs, professional and clerical staff, etc. Most of those costs are fixed, not variable; it will cost them about the same amount whether they get 500 applications this year, or 5,000, or 50,000. Fixed costs include the costs of the adcoms’ salaries and benefits, whether they actually lay eyes on your individual application or not. If they recoup all those direct and indirect costs of recruiting and selecting an entering class through application fees, they’re lucky; I’ll bet most colleges don’t, and I’ve never heard of a college actually viewing applications as a profit center. Bottom line, it’s going to cost the school the same amount of money whether the adcom reads you application or not; they aren’t paid on a piece-rate basis, they earn fixed salaries. The application fees are non-refundable; they keep the money whether you’re accepted or not, and whether or not you withdraw your application because of an ED acceptance at another school or for some other reason or for no reason at all. That much was clear upfront. So the idea that they somehow “owe” you a meaningless answer, or that you’re somehow being cheated out of your (or your mother’s) money if you withdraw before they decide is just nonsense. If you really wanted an answer, then you shouldn’t have applied ED to another school, because by the terms of that ED agreement you’re OBLIGATED to withdraw all your other apps. That’s the risk you took. But you’re not the loser here, you’re the winner, because you got into your ED school, for gosh sakes! Don’t blow it now by standing on some misguided principle.</p>
<p>If you don’t believe me, talk to your GC about it. You’ll get an earful.</p>
<p>OCT, students are told the rules of the ED game. You then agree to those rules. If you don’t like them, then you don’t need to choose ED, or you don’t need to choose to apply to schools that have deadlines prior to ED notification. You made those choices based on what’s best for your own interests. That’s your “pass”. I’m also giving a “pass” to ED, EA, and SCEA schools for setting their decision dates just a few weeks after the UC deadline. That’s what works for them. And the rolling admit schools get a “pass” for giving priority to students who apply early, forcing ED/EA/SCEA applicants to spend money on the rolling application. </p>
<p>Schools may not have hard and fast caps on how many students they admit, but they do have limits. There is always one student who just misses the bright line. Your not wanting to believe this does not make it less true. Yes, there are waitlists, but a student who is brought in from the waitlist already put down a substantial nonrefundable deposit to another school. A student holding an ED acceptance who takes an RD spot is going to cost that waitlisted student a few hundred bucks. There are also your fellow high school classmates to think of. An outstanding student at my D1’s high school was admitted SCEA to Yale, her dream school. She knew without a doubt that she was going to attend Yale, but she still went through with RD apps for the exact reasons you cite. Based on past admissions results for the high school, this student’s decision to collect bragging rights ended up costing other students at the high school acceptances. Since this was SCEA, she wasn’t violating any agreement, though her behavior was selfish. </p>
<p>Yale and Princeton don’t do merit aid and don’t send out applications to as many as 10 campuses. They won’t process anywhere near the number of applicants that the UC system must process. You are comparing cabbages and carrots.</p>
<p>OCT, there’s right and wrong. Go ask your GC if what you’re doing is right. Go ask your parent(s). Go ask your teachers. If you’re religious, go ask your religious leader. Post on the Parents Forum and see if any parent who has paid for RD applications and an ED application agrees with you.</p>
<p>northstar:
yes i am aware of that. I guess my biggest fear is my grade in AP Calculus. i’m taking a pretty rigourous course load and Calc is the only grade i have a C in 
everything else is high As. Is one C bad enough for rescinding-assuming I get accepted? (I applied ED to Vandy) Also, on the worst case scenario that I do get rescinded, what happens to all of the colleges that I withdrawed from? do i start a new app?</p>
<p>Hey bclintonk and slithey, wutheringgc was accepted ED and is now worried that a C in calculus could result in her ED school withdrawing admission. Can you please explain that her worries are unfounded. In this Pollyanna world of college admissions we live in, colleges surely wouldn’t be so dishonorable to do something underhanded like that, right? In fact, she should withdraw all her apps ASAP, and if her ED acceptance is pulled after she withdraws all of her apps, so what? She signed an agreement! The honorable thing for her to do would be to let colleges exercise their one-sided power, right? We students aren’t allowed to be strategic minded.</p>
<p>It’s moot, since something so bad that would cause her to be rescinded would likely keep her out of other reach and match schools as well. Safeties might still take her with reopened apps.</p>