<p>S is accepted at one school he would very much like to go to but financial aid status not available for several weeks. S also accepted at another school he doesn't like as much but we can afford without aid. Both warn that he needs to get deposits in ASAP or else he may end up in a forced triple or with no housing etc...and I think he may be accepted at another school high on his list soon but again, financial aid status won't be available yet. It won't be a problem to get the deposits refunded before May 1, and I'm sure he will have all the facts to make a decision by April, but it is so annoying to tie over $1,000 up! I wish the colleges would cooperate a little on this, like not penalize you for housing if you get the deposit in by early April.</p>
<p>Some of the deposits are NOT refundable. Make sure yours are before counting on getting them back. Personally, I would ignore the “warnings” as I see them being like the car dealer who says “you need to hurry, I have someone else interested in this very car”.</p>
<p>That happened to me as well with D2. I just chalked it up to “one of those things”. Fortunately ours didn’t total $1000!!! Sorry, OP. :(</p>
<p>You also need to be careful that these are only HOUSING deposits and not ENROLLMENT deposits if you are making more than one. If they are common app schools, your son has specifically agreed not to make more than one enrollment deposit at a time. My D has an EA acceptance from a college where it is also a first-deposited - first-in-line-for-housing-choices. As she is not sure it is her first choice college until we hear back from her RD acceptances, she is not depositing at this time.</p>
<p>It seems many schools base housing choices on when the housing deposit is received, I would not ignore them, though it is a pain to have multiple ones! My kids have not applied to those types of schools, we are still waiting on most acceptance decisions for our last kid.</p>
<p>intparent, I think it is OK to deposit at one school, then tell them you are not coming and deposit at another, but I don’t know if that deposit would be refundable. You’re right about not having multiple enrollment deposits at once though. We did not deposit at D’s EA school either.</p>
<p>If you don’t have the money, you don’t do it, and the kid gets the triple or lives in outer Siberia. I was too stingy and stupid to do it with my kids. My cousin didn’t have the money. </p>
<p>Nothing wrong with depositing at a school and then changing your mind and withdrawing before depositing at another.</p>
<p>At least yours are refundable. Two of the schools my D applied to advised sending in the NON-refundable housing deposit as soon as she filed the application to guarantee that she would get on campus housing as there is not guaranteed housing for all freshmen. And she wasn’t even accepted at either of those schoosl, what a racket! Fortunately they were only $25 or $30 each but still…</p>
<p>@mum2 - that is a racket if they want you to put down a housing deposit before your kid is even accepted.</p>
<p>the language is that they are definitely refundable by may 1 “if you change your mind and decide not to go to xxxx”. so the schools are absolutely counting on people putting down the deposit and then asking for it back. Maybe hoping some forget. One has a housing deposit and a tuition deposit and you need BOTH in to request housing. If you want to go to xxxx college because you liked that they had, for example, substance-free dorms, and then you can’t live in those dorms because you didn’t deposit fast enough, what’s the point of getting in?</p>
<p>I think it’s a crappy pressure-filled technique. I didn’t do it with S1, but I spent the winter wondering if I should have. There’s more than enough stress Sr. year the way it is.</p>
<p>Yes, some require the enrollment deposit before you can get information to put down the housing deposit. Many schools that don’t use the common app also contain similar language where the applicant agrees not to make more then one enrollment deposit. Make sure you check the fine print. If any of the schools the student applied to contain this agreement it is considered unethical for that student to make more then one enrollment deposit at a time. </p>
<p>I really, really dislike that some schools pressure students to secure housing this way.</p>
<p>There are a couple schools on DS’s list the have refundable housing deposits. We chose not to send them in. They are lower down on the list and unless they surprise us with a scholarship that is not mentioned anywhere in any of their literature, his other options are much better. The rest of his schools all freshman live on campus so we are not worried about housing–he just might not get his first choice. I have to agree, if you have limited housing options they should at least refund PART of a deposit if you choose not to attend. Some schools on his list view the housing deposit as your acceptance to attend so watch that too.</p>
<p>My daughter just made a deposit on her # 2 grad school choice which is non-refundable. Since she hasn’t been called for an interview at #1, it’s looking like she won’t regret it</p>
<p>I must say that I would regard inability to guarantee housing to all freshmen a major detriment when considering applying to any school. It’s one thing for older, established students to find a place to live on their own. But for 17- and 18-yr-olds, a bit much.</p>
<p>At some colleges, the freshmen getting their deposit in last might be housed at the “other campus” that’s several miles from the main campus, so annoying to have to bus to main campus for all classes and activities etc. </p>
<p>My older child went to a school where the “other campus” was actually near to a lot of shopping and restaurants and lots of off campus apartments where all the drinking parties took place but it wasn’t really a “freshman experience” to live there, a small number of freshmen scattered among older students who all had their social circle already.</p>
<p>Schools need to have mandatory school and housing deposits. They also need to have deadlines to accommodate those waiting for an answer that is dependent on other students’ decisions. Otherwise many students won’t bother to let schools they are accepted at but have no intention of attending know this. Needing to pay any money, even if refundable, makes a student seriously consider options. Colleges can free up spaces for students waiting for an acceptance when deadlines are given. Some schools do assign dorms on a “first come, first served” basis, it is worth assuring a spot. Others have a housing deadline and refundable deposit but do a housing lottery to determine getting highest ranked choices.</p>
<p>Think of it this way- all part of the application process. A cost of going to college. It would have been nice to only apply to the school of choice then only have to pay more application fees if the first choice didn’t work out for any reasons. Think of the deposit as an insurance policy for going to a college of choice. Better to have spent some deposit money and be assured of a spot instead of gambling on only one choice working out financially. How many students spend money on their state U with no intention of going there unless nothing else pans out?</p>
<p>Not “forced” to make multiple deposits- you choose to in order to keep options open. You could always just pick the most affordable regardless of fin aid unknowns.</p>
<p>They don’t need to have these deposits due prior to May 1. That’s simply my opinion. Many, many other schools manage their housing, yield, etc, with a standard May 1 deposit. There are some that have decided to do the early pressure deposit knowing students more then likely haven’t received all admissions, scholarship, or financial aid responses necessary to make a final selection. Even if they are selecting between the possibility of affording the school pressuring for early housing deposits and community college they may have to wait until later spring for departmental scholarships to be announced, or finaid, to see if they can really afford it. It’s not always a matter of students applying to multiple schools. </p>
<p>Deposits are necessary to get everyone moving, I totally agree. Deposits before everyone has information to make informed decisions just seems unnecessary and unfair to the students. I don’t know of a single public school that does it in our state and they seem to manage fine.</p>
<p>My son’s school uses a lottery for room assignments after everyone’s May 1 deadline depostits and contracts are received. So it doesn’t matter if you committed back in November or not till the last minute as to what your assignment will be. I like that methodology better, because people who can afford it won’t think a whit about dropping deposits all over the place to keep options open, whereas it may not be possible or terrilby hurt those who are counting every dollar, and to put such students at a disadvantage in this sort of situation which is totally unnecessary is unconscionable, IMO. What the heck advantage are the schools getting by asking for these deposits early? Seems to me they are just confusing matters as there will be a significant number of those depositing that will change their minds.</p>
<p>It all may have started with schools doing this for those who are bound by ED, giving them extra consideration in terms of living choices as part of the ED benefit package, but now schools are doing this with earlier accepances, rolling acceptances, etc, where there is no commitment on the part of the student. To return the deposits is another admiinstrative step; not to do so isn’t going to encourage letting a college know such students are not coming. I don’t get it.</p>
<p>I don’t think planning for housing is as simple as you all make it out to be. You’ve got a U with- let’s start small- 10,000 undergrads. So 2500 Freshman. Most but not all upperclassman live off campus. Some kids go abroad junior year; some go for one semester only. A portion of the class starts in September and then drops out, gets asked to leave, takes a medical withdrawal. Forget about kids who transfer in since the University can control that portion.</p>
<p>You have neighbors who whine when a house gets rented out to a gang of students-- so maybe you have local housing ordinances which control the number of non-related people who can live together in a single family dwelling. Makes sense. Then you have local landlords who LOVE the housing crunch on campus, since they make out like bandits by renting apartments to students, but you have other landlords who hate it because it reduces their property values once a neighborhood or street is known for renting to students. More ordinances. Makes it harder for the university to predict exactly how many students can realistically be housed in local privately owned units.</p>
<p>If the U over-enrolls, everyone is livid that their kid is in a triple or stuck in a motel for the first few months of class. If the U under-enrolls, revenue goes down and everyone is livid that the U wasn’t smarter about reaching its financial targets. Plus kids who were denied or ended up waitlisted but not admitted who don’t understand why they couldn’t enroll seeing as how there are empty dorm rooms.</p>
<p>Seems to me that the only capacity constraint for most residential universities are dorm rooms and beds. And given that many kids (not most, but many) want to hedge their bets on as many possible colleges as they can realistically handle, if the U’s didn’t ask for a housing deposit it would be chaos come August.</p>
<p>Agree it stinks for the kids who follow the rules, have no intention of multiple deposits, and whose families can’t afford the extra expense. But in my neighborhood alone I knew three kids last year who were bragging about how they didn’t need to decide where they were attending “until the last minute”. How is that fair? And how does a university plan for beds or figure out dorm capacity with so many kids committing to a college like they’re making dinner reservations?</p>
<p>Freshman housing deposits are part of a data feed into the enrollment algorithm (yield calculation) that my universiy uses, they can’t wait until May to run this data. They need it in Feb and March so they can figure out…how many apartment buildings do we need to lease now for extra dorm space? How many more sections of Econ 101 might we need to add in March so we are ready for summer frosh registration? What about freshman comp? </p>
<p>A jump in deposits can signal a jump in yield and they need to plan for that in Feb and March, not May and June.</p>