<p>Deans Honors Scholarship: Important Change for 2011-2012</p>
<p>I just spoke with Faye Tydlaska, a director in admissions, and she confirmed that starting for this year's admissions process, only Early Action or Single Choice Early Action students may apply for the Deans Honors Scholarship. She apologized that this isn't yet updated to their website. This new restriction is mentioned in fine print in a single sentence at the top of the first page of the DHS form.</p>
<p>This new restriction does impact a student's application strategy and it would make it impossible to apply SCEA elsewhere and still have a Regular Decision application at Tulane and apply for the DHS.</p>
<p>In the big picture, this isn’t, IMO, really a huge change. Many students get their application in early anyway, and as long as the college app is in by Nov 15, they will be able to apply for the DHS, whose deadline has been Dec 15, IIRC. Doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense to offer a huge scholarship to a student who hasnt completed their application, or hasn’t been accepted to the school. Makes better sense to be sure the student has completed their application to the school and has been accepted to Tulane before being considered for the DHS. Since the deadline for the DHS has been a few weeks before the deadline for regular admissions, its possible some DHS applications were being read from students who ultimately didnt even finish their appliation to Tulane. that woudl be a waste of time.</p>
<p>I disagree. The new restriction that a DHS applicant must be an EA or SCEA applicant means that a student must forfeit the right to be a SCEA at another school. This is a game-changer for some students.</p>
<p>I agree it is a fairly significant change, but a logical one. Given the strong enrollment and other factors in Tulane’s favor recently, it makes sense to focus on students that show a stronger than average interest in Tulane. I rather suspect most of the applicants in the past have been at least EA, but certainly some were not.</p>
<p>To me the most interesting part is how much this would mean an increase in the number of DHS winners that actually enroll.</p>
<p>If a student applied SCEA to another school, then they wouldnt be applying to Tulane or any other school at this point anyway. I do see that a few students might be affected if they apply SCEA elsewhere and get deferred, but, IMO, this is a wise decision for Tulane, to make the students applying for the DHS more committed to the school. Agree with FC, this should increase the percent of students who accept the DHS. </p>
<p>Any update on the Weatherhead and what the requirements will be for that scholarship?</p>
<p>I disagree. The ideal would be a student can apply SCEA to one school and RD to a handful of other schools. Frequently, schools offer merit scholarships (like Tulane’s DHS) to attract top students that they might lose to another school. By imposing this new restriction, a student must now make a Hobson’s choice to apply SCEA at a school OR Tulane’s DHS. Tulane thus loses some possible applicants (perhaps high-qualified tippy-top applicants) to ensure a higher yield when they offer the DHS to students.</p>
<p>There are plenty of other merit scholarships at Tulane. Tulane is very generous with merit aid. All they are saying is, if you want to be considered for this one, apply EA or SCEA. They are not binding.</p>
<p>I’ll throw this out for open discussion. Yale has SCEA, so does Stanford. I think of the very top schools, those are the only ones. Most ED apps allow a student to apply EA, I think. So other than students applying to these two schools and maybe a few others, I don’t think it will have much effect, at least as it pertains to the situation described by Lavender Tulips. Correct? Incorrect?</p>
<p>Off the top of my head, I think Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and perhaps a few others offer SCEA, the mild about-face after canning ED. I agree with you, FC, as I said earlier. In the big picture, I don’t think it will have a big effect. Will likely affect the strategy of a few applicants, yes, but not a lot, IMO.</p>
<p>I am assuming that Tulane will continue to notify applicants quickly once their applications are complete (an informal “rolling” admissions of sorts) yes? So the only difference that could be seen is for those students who get their regular application in early, hear back quickly with, say one of the nice Merit scholarships, and Tulane rises in their list. They could not then, if they hadn’t selected the EA option, apply for the DHS, even if their Tulane acceptance was received in October.</p>
<p>OK, I thought Harvard and Princeton had gone ED, but you are correct they went SCEA. Certainly the more schools that do it, the more it affects Tulane’s strategy of “stealing” kids from those schools through great scholarships. I guess time will tell.</p>
<p>It will be interesting. Maybe it would have been smarter just to say anyone applying for DHS has to have their complete college application in by Nov 15 (without requiring that it be EA or SCEA) but heck, nobody asked us :)</p>
<p>I think Tulane is figuring they can be a bit more “aggressive” in this sense given the increased enrollments. It’s an experiment. If it bombs, they can quickly go back to the other criteria.</p>
<p>Makes sense, at some level. But if as LavenderTulips suggests, this will mean many top students who might have seriously considered Tulane, especially after getting an early merit scholarship, would then want to go for the bigger ring but can’t, that would be a shame. Feel kinda bad for this year’s applicant guinea pigs :(</p>