<p>As a rising senior, I am about to begin the application process. Knowing this, many adults try to give me advice. However, one thing that I have been hearing recently is that the date of the application matters in admissions, or the distribution of major scholarships. One person even told me that I should have all applications submitted by mid-October.</p>
<p>This just seems rather silly to me, so I was not inclined to believe it. I know that some scholarships have an earlier deadline than that of the full application, but I am not sure if the date the applications are submitted bears much weight in either scholarships or admissions. </p>
<p>If anyone could clear this up for me, it would be a great help.</p>
<p>I can say that Cal state applications are due by OCT 30 I think. I know UC applications are due by Nov. 30. It is in your best interest to submit these applications when they’re due. Largely because it will delay your notification and may even lead to being denied (can’t fully attest to it). And it helps to have them in so you can have access to scholarships and their deadlines. So I highly recommend sticking with deadline.</p>
<p>If we exclude colleges with rolling admissions, then consider this:</p>
<p>Top colleges spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of manhours to solicit as many qualified apps as possible. Then just off the line, you impart bias against 2/3 of them because they aren’t in yet? Baloney.</p>
<p>Plus, your file isn’t complete until your school sends in their report and your transcript. You may send in an app on October 20 but the file doesn’t get read until Jan 15 because a school may send all its forms & transcripts out later. </p>
<p>Knowing that this is a constant reality, what good would it do to a school to penalize those people? There’s enough i’s to dot and t’s to cross. Hurrying to beat a self-imposed early deadline is foolishness, IMHO.</p>
<p>^ I agree but just to avoid any penalties I say send em in early that way you have it all done and can focus on other stuff. Like Senior activities and Prom</p>
<p>Oh, I guess I should have been more clear. I was mostly talking about colleges with an admissions deadline of Jan. 1, or some time in November or December. I was definitely going to make the deadlines, but some parents have told me that there is an unofficial October deadline.</p>
<p>I agree with you T62E4, I am pretty skeptical about that idea. Why wouldn’t the college just move the deadline so that it was in October if that was important?</p>
<p>You’re probably right aswell MZGOOFY, better safe than sorry I guess.</p>
<p>I mostly agree with T26E4, but I think it makes sense to aim to beat an institution’s deadline by about 10 days.</p>
<p>As deadlines approach, servers (at universities, at Common App, wherever) get overloaded. Colleges and universities do mostly allow a little grace period for late applications, buy why would you want one of those applications to be yours? In addition, every darn year, there’s a flurry of “Oh, crap, I missed the deadline!” posts on CC. People had technical problems on their end. Or they had technical problems on the other end. Or they just procrastinated. Who needs this stress?</p>
<p>A former student of mine works in admissions at a pretty selective university–not Harvard, but not exactly My Backyard State, either. She said she does notice which applications come in at 11:59:45 p.m. on the day they’re due, or 2:25:30 a.m. on the morning that’s technically after they’re due. She reads them, she acts on them, but she notices. This is only one data point, and I don’t know how much you can extrapolate from it.</p>
<p>Last reason to beat the deadline: it gives you time to make sure your application is complete before the admissions office gets swamped. Last fall, my daughter submitted her app to the state flagship about two weeks before it was due. The weekend before applications were due, we attended an admissions event on campus. She was able to say to an admissions officer, “You know, I’ve submitted everything, but it says you don’t have my standardized test scores. I sent those at the end of August.” He gave he his card and said, “When you get home, email me. I’ll track the scores down on Monday, and put them with your file.” </p>
<p>Obviously, you don’t have to do any of this. You can submit at (or even pretty close to) the deadline, and have everything turn out fine. But being 10-14 days ahead of the deadline can’t look bad, and it can head off some anxiety.</p>
<p>Application deadlines vary but the failure to meet one usually means the difference in being considered for admission and not.</p>
<p>Most colleges have a January, usually early Jan such as Jan 1, deadline for regular admissions. However, many have earlier deadlines, e.g., UCs are Nov 30. Also, many colleges have early action (apply and get a non-binding decison early) or early decision (apply and get a binding decision early) deadlines of Nov 1. However, some of those are earlier or even later. There are are colleges that have Jan regular admission deadlines but require you to apply earlier such as by Oct 1 or Nov 1 if you want to be considered for scholarships or at least certain scholarships, e.g., at Gtech you must apply by Nov 1 to be considered for its President’s Scholarship or for the honors program. Also, there are colleges that have “rolling admissions” meaning they admit students as applications are received. It is to your advantage with such colleges earlier rather than later, and sometimes applying near the final application deadline, even if you are within it, may mean you will be rejected because the program you want is already full. In other words for early admission, early decision,rolling admissions, and some scholarship programs, you really do need to look at it as “October” is the deadline.</p>
<p>Not only do you need to get application sent by deadline but you also need to have other stuff sent by the deadline, such as recomendation letters, official high school transcript, sometimes a Profile finanical aid form, and sometimes test scores (although many will accept test scores sent shortly after a deadline).</p>
<p>It is wise to apply earlier than a deadline and very wise to start any needed secondary items long before the deadlines. For example if you will need recommendation letters, you should be contacting teachers soon and no later than shortly after the beginning of the school year because they need to set aside time to do it, even then it often takes them a month or more to get around to it, and some set limits to number of students for whom they will give recs and thus you don’t want to be last in line in asking. Even ordering high school transcript should be done earlier than deadline since (a) the school may take a while to send it and (b) you do not want to be one of those students who wait until the last week of December just before a Jan 1 deadline to decide to ask for your offical transcript to be sent and learn it cannot be done because your school is closed or the counselor who has to send it is away on vacation. Complying with a deadline is your responsibility and that includes making sure you order things early enough to avoid any problems.</p>
<p>Perhaps, if they are talking about schools with merit scholarship offers. In that case, submitting early may give you an advantage: some schools, like UPittsburgh, only has so many scholarships to give out, so they do so to the first thousands or so qualified applicants. </p>
<p>Otherwise, for non-rolling schools I’ve never heard of any preference to people who submit their apps early. A good percentage do it just before the midnight deadline, hence occasionally you hear about application server crashing happening right around that time, because so many people are submitting at the same time.</p>
<p>OP, what state are you in? Depending on the colleges you’re applying to, I’m a parent with kids in college so we’ve been down that path before. Applying to private and OOS schools will be different than applying to public in-state schools. You’ll need to go online to each of the private schools or OOS schools to look up their deadlines. For example, in California, UCs and CSUs have the same regular deadline of November 30. If you’re applying for early decision or early action which some schools may offer such as Cal Poly SLO with an October 31 deadline. Private schools will also have their own early decision or early action deadlines, so you’ll need to look them up for their information. For the applicants who haven’t taken the SAT or the ACT usually wait to apply later. For the applicants who have taken the SAT or the ACT generally can apply earlier or take advantage of the early action and merit-scholarships offer.</p>
<p>Out of the Ivies at least, only Princeton officially cares about the application date. It’s due the same time as the others, but they strongly recommend you get it in by December 15th for regular decision. </p>
<p>(And, for what it’s worth, I was somebody who didn’t even start the app until after that date and I didn’t get in. Ho hum.)</p>
<p>OK, so lets look at this from a college’s perspective. I have 2 groups of applicants. Both groups equally qualified. Out of those applications, I have already pulled the most qualified applicants that I REALLY want to be a student at my college. And I have put aside the ones that are going to definately recieve rejection letters. So these are the two groups of students that I have to make the tough decisions on. Group one is of those that got their applications in early (ish). Well before the deadline. This shows a real interest in the college, respect for my time/job, and a committment to their future. It also shows that they are organized, and take the whole process seriously. Group two is of applications that were submitted 24 hours before the deadline, up to say 5 days after the deadline. Remember, a few of those “late” applications they have already moved to the admit pile. So these are just the ones they have to make decisions about.
All other things equal, do you think the college would lean more toward the students that showed interest, organization and committment? Or the one the ones that squeeked in at the last minute. </p>
<p>Same principle for merit aid and other scholarships. </p>
<p>In my humble opinion, unless you have cured cancer, are a natural prodigy at all things academic, and your last name is the same as the school you are appling to (because you are a direct decendent of the schools name sake), it is beneficial to get the applications in as early as possible. Even to your safety schools. </p>
<p>From a parents point of view, no one likes to see their family members running around in a panic during holidays trying to make a deadline that they have known about for years. It makes the whole house chaos.</p>
<p>vlines wrote: "Or the one the ones that squeeked in at the last minute. "</p>
<p>This fails to address the fact that in most modern admissions offices, docs are downloaded, transcripts & rec letters are opened and scanned – by other office workers who prepare electronic files for readers. I can imagine that some work on the early bird completed files is done beforehand – just to get spread the workload about. But like I said before: how about the kid who submits his portion in October but his school or rec letter writers submit their materials on Jan 5th? The kid’s file won’t even be ready to be read until sometime in late January.</p>
<p>There’s enough to be concerned about. This “what if” shouldn’t occupy people’s thoughts IMHO.</p>
<p>Finally, most admitted kids are vetted by conference. Will the presenter impart some “early bird” bias when introducing the applicant to the committee? Sounds unlikely to me – especially in light of my paragraph above.</p>
<p>Getting in your app early has advantages. Most importantly, you can check your status, so if something goes wrong, you have time to fix it. For example, you mistype an SAT code, and the score never gets sent – it happens!!</p>
<p>For some schools that are EA or Rolling, the urban legend is that the early apps have a better shot. It’s really school-to-school though, and unless the admissions office has confirmed this, no one really knows.</p>
<p>Otherwise, it’s best to have a good application. Make sure your essays are the best you can write. This is generally more important than getting ina n app a week or two early.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of the replies everybody. I suppose I will apply early enough to check for mistakes and such, but not ridiculously early. </p>
<p>The main reason I was asking this question was because these same parents also told my mom similar information. She was about to get all worked up and make me start completing applications. Not that I am refusing to work on application materials over the summer, it’s just that if it was important for me to get everything in extremely early, I would have to start working at a much faster rate.</p>
<p>I can tell you that I am encouraging my son to get applications that he can in this summer. Not because I think it will influence an admission decision, but because he has a heavy senior year class schedule. However, I do not think it would be worthwile to hurry, make mistakes on the app, and not turn in your best effort. You need to have a nice balance for your own sanity, and to get things accomplished.</p>
<p>While technically there’s no such thing as submitting too early (as long as the applications are available), I think that in practice there is such a thing as submitting undesirably early.</p>
<p>If you submit your applications the very moment colleges begin accepting them, you run the risk that you’ll have awards, honors or accomplishments later in the fall that won’t be on them. Of course, you can email the admissions offices at the colleges you’re applying to and ask them to add information to your file, but it’s less work for both your and them if you don’t have to do that.</p>
<p>So, working on them now is great, but I wouldn’t encourage you (or anybody) to submit them at the earliest possible moment. Because really, as somebody else said (T26, maybe?), the idea of a secret, early-bird deadline really does strain credulity.</p>
<p>I would argue then that many colleges, including some of the popular ones frequently discussed on CC, don’t really care about demonstrating interest. It depends on the college in question. There’s little point in getting application in at the earliest possible date, but I agree that for schools that are known for placing emphasis on demonstrated interest or rolling decision schools, there is some benefit to submitting early. Otherwise, it’s exactly like T26E4 said: it probably doesn’t make any difference.</p>