Hi,
Is anyone thinking of deferring their admittance because of the virus? Pros? Cons?
No one knows yet what any college will be doing this fall. The colleges barely know what they will be doing tomorrow, let alone next week! So if you prefer to wait things out and start college after life has found its new normal, go ahead and ask to defer enrollment. Lots of students will end up doing that.
But note that some of the usual gap semester/year activities like working may be of more limited availability than otherwise.
We’re going through this with our HS senior for the fall who is going D3 in a fall sport that may or may not get cancelled.
He’s coming around on the gap year and, frankly, I can’t think of a better approach to skip 20-21 and enroll as a freshman in 21-22.
Work for a year, save up 10k or so have as a safety net. He’ll just live a better life in 16 months with actual classes and a real first-year experience than going in 4 months if his sport will be cancelled or fall classes will be online only.
I am wondering if colleges will really approve gap years for all the applicants that want them. Also if fall starts online what about current students that want to take a semester off? Hard to see how the numbers work out for colleges. On another note my son did a gap year in Spain and I saw no downside to it. But he was taking classes and learning another language/culture for the year. He is now a first year and does not want to go online in the fall after these last few weeks at home online.
Will arriving freshmen even have dorms to live in by Fall 2020?
I do wonder on the impact of the “glut” of '25 applicants into the system if a bunch of the class of 2024 chooses to sit this out. I imagine merit aid and admissions will be a bit tighter.
In our case, he’s going to a school where his ACT is 9 points above the median… and they also didn’t really cough up the merit aid they said he’d likely get months before all of this. So there really isn’t much of a downside unless this public school decides to not admit a 32 ACT kid where the median is a 23.
I hope not. There isn’t anything worthwhile a person can do during a gap year if colleges can’t allow students on campus yet. They can’t travel, have internships etc…so I doubt many reputable colleges would allow that many incoming students to defer just because they can’t deal with online classes for what would be a small percentage of their college life. I think the waitlists are likely full of students that will happily deal with the small inconvenience of having a semester online for the overall prize of a four-year education from that institution.
Good points, all around.
If it’s an Ivy/elite brand (Vandy, WashU, Chicago, Stanford), then I think the student would have to just deal with it. Perhaps ask if they’d let you defer but, if not and you really want to attend that school, ya gotta go.
I imagine that scale will go down substantially as the schools that aren’t as “elite” come up. They’ll just want bodies.