decline an early decision acceptance offer?

<p>I don’t know that they WILL. They well may. It’s a risk an applicant takes. It sounds from what someone posted that Harvard does not try to find out if an applicant is breaching ED. I remember reading that a Harvard dean said: “we operate on trust.” Of course, it does not prevent another college from notifying Harvard. Maybe the same applies to other colleges, too.</p>

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<p>Yup. Our income is such that our EFC is basically zero using all calculators. Yet several schools expected us to pay about $25K per year. </p>

<p>The reason for this is that one of us inherited a 1/3 share in a piece of real estate, and that share is considered to be worth $100K. They thought that we should liquidate it–which in fact we would do if we could. But the people who own the other 2/3 refuse to sell, or to buy our share. (They are in fact willing to see us have to sell our home without bending on this.) We have not been able to sell our share to an outside party (for obvious reasons, such a situation is not attractive to buyers.). We cannot borrow against our share, and the owners as a whole cannot borrow against the property. (It’s been tried.) So there is literally no way for us to touch this asset at this time. We do not have the income to borrow $24K and we are already tapping our home equity for living expenses.</p>

<p>But the one school where we appealed this said too bad. End of story. Luckily my S chose to attend another school that gave him basically a full ride.</p>

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<p>The college takes on plenty of risk. By filling up the class early, they might be forced to decline a lot of wonderful applicants, better than the ones they accepted early.</p>

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Yes, so no violations of ED at this point. So, assume she is admitted to MIT. What if she then decides to turn down Penn for financial reasons? She then has a full-ride offer on the table from the state school and can wait for the FA award to arrive from MIT in the spring. If MIT FA is even slightly better than Penn’s… will she be permitted to enroll at MIT? I don’t believe that a great moral crime is being committed here, nor do I care to guess about her true intent. I just think the issue of ED violation is debatable if the MIT FA offer is even somewhat better. It’s not clear-cut at all if she would technically be breaching the ED contract.</p>

<p>Also, count me as one who is surprised at the level of parental tracking of the OP going on here.</p>

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“In compliance” with what? And “in order to be” or in order to APPEAR to be? So suddenly she is not actually anticipating Dec 16 to find out the fate of her MIT EA application?</p>

<p>At this point, assuming she is still appealing Penn FA, she is doing nothing wrong by waiting for an MIT acceptance.</p>

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<p>I speculated on that question back in post #245.</p>

<p>My thinking is that there is no way MIT will allow a blatant violation of Penn’s ED, but under the settlement of the antitrust suit in 1993, MIT and Penn can’t share financial information about a particular student. If MIT were to independently come up with a much high level of need than PENN did, and PENN refused to match the offer, then I don’t think any violation is being committed. It would be far easier for MIT to just jettison the whole application.</p>

<p>If she is doing nothing wrong, then why were her posts removed? Plenty of students post more identifying information than she did. Names, schools, addresses, phone numbers should of course be removed, but the OP posted none of that information.</p>

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<p>Recently there was a video chat with the deans of admissions at several top schools. I wish I could remember exactly which school responded this way, but the woman said that they receive ED notices from other schools and they do not review the info at all. The narrator then asked something like ‘well since you do rescind some offers, how are you notified?’ The woman said that information may come from alums, trustees and the like. That said, unless anyone can cite specific information as to the standard operating procedures at M.I.T. … it’s merely opinion.</p>

<p>"I don’t know that they WILL. They well may. It’s a risk an applicant takes. It sounds from what someone posted that Harvard does not try to find out if an applicant is breaching ED. "</p>

<p>I know that if Harvard finds out, they will rescind admissions, something that some students found out the hard way a few years ago when Harvard still had EA and let students apply EA who had also applied ED. When Harvard learned that students were trying to back out of ED in order to accept Harvard, Harvard rescinded their decisions.</p>

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<p>I can’t seem to find my source (though I thought I had one). Consider it opinion until I do</p>

<p>"MIT and Penn can’t share financial information about a particular student. "</p>

<p>But students can show institutions competing offers, and often top schools will match competing need-based offers. The top schools won’t, however, match merit-aid offers.</p>

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<p>Interesting. It’s an invitation to snitch. I’d rather the schools either looked at the information provided by the ED colleges or disregarded it altogether but not rely on information from “alums, etc…” for this purpose.</p>

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But would this actually be a blatant violation? Remember, by the time MIT’s FA rolls in, it will be spring and this student will have months earlier already turned down Penn. Then, if MIT offers FA that is even slightly better and she accepts, is she technically in violation? And would anyone even check to compare these FA offers? The Penn option will be long gone by then.</p>

<p>You’re right, anneroku.</p>

<p>“Interesting. It’s an invitation to snitch. I’d rather the schools either looked at the information provided by the ED colleges or disregarded it altogether but not rely on information from “alums, etc…” for this purpose.”</p>

<p>I think that if there’s a question about an applicants’ integrity, the universities should look at info provided by all reputable sources. Anonymous sources, though, should be ignored.</p>

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<p>Isn’t that based on an ASSUMPTION that Penn will indeed “negotiate” the terms of their financial aid package. Couldn’t there be another assumption that Penn might simply insist that they gave an acceptable package and that “Those admitted must respond to us by January 1, since there is a commitment involved.” and ask for the deposit and the confirmation of the commitment to attend? </p>

<p>It seems that, while there might some grey area about the impact of the financial aid on making the contract “binding,” this period ends when a student sends a deposit and confirms his or her decision to attend. It also seems that the expectation is that students who accept an ED offer have to withdraw all other applications. </p>

<p>Or perhaps, it might be true after all that both schools and students are allowed to play the game, and comply or reject rules they do not like too much. </p>

<p>The only victims in this game appear to be people who value honesty, integrity, and … transparency.</p>

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<p>I see your point. It did come across as a fuzzy process, at best.</p>

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<p>Ah, but in this scenario she will have made the decision to decline Penn ONLY AFTER getting an EA acceptance from MIT. </p>

<p>As I stated 400 or so posts ago, I think that the first thing she should have done is appeal her FA award with the people at Penn. Subsequently discovering that she applied to MIT EA, I’d add a second thing: call MIT and immediately convert her application to RD. (I have no idea if it’s too late for this now.)</p>

<p>If Penn will not put together a financial package that she and her parents can live with, then she can decline the ED acceptance and submit more RD applications. She can go to the state school with the full ride, or accept an offer from an RD school.</p>

<p>If she declines Penn all on its own because the FA wasn’t enough she would be in the clear, ethically. But declining Penn only because you have one or two other offers from peer schools in your pocket is simply unethical when you’ve signed an ED agreement. </p>

<p>But given what she has said and done, I’m afraid that she would appear to be tempted to try to game the system, rather than charting an ethical course of action.</p>

<p>Tranparency is difficult because there isn’t a precise number that works for everybody when it comes to the cost of college.</p>