My son applied Early Decision to his first choice school on Nov. 1. He applied to another school that day, and two more on Nov. 15, all early action. A week later he was notified of his admission to the school he applied to ED. He has not applied to any further schools and notified the 3 EA schools to which he applied that he was withdrawing his applications from them. We sent a deposit into the ED school. To our surprise, two of those other schools sent my son acceptance letters in late December, despite his notifying them that he was withdrawing his applications. Both were borderline low match/safety schools which offered blockbuster merit aid (the 2 offers were $1,000 apart). Is this how schools typically behave? We certainly dont want our son to take away an acceptance and financial aid package from someone else’s deserving child. Do we need to notify them again, or is this is an attempt to lure our son away from the school to which he has committed?
I would guess that the EA schools simply continued to process applications and were far enough along that the process could not be stopped internally. It is highly unlikely that they are encouraging your kid to break an ED contract.
I would recommend sending a brief note of thanks with a reminder that on x date, you had advised that will be attending X, where you applied ED, and that you cannot accept their offer.
And you’re not taking a seat from someone else. Colleges know from years of experience how often this happens.
I think it happens quite often. A friend got 2-3 acceptances last year after notifying them she’d accepted an ED offer.
Happened to my kid last year. I just assumed the withdrawal wasn’t properly processed. She declined as soon as she got the offer.
I wonder if that’s a result of the NACAC rules allowing continued competition among colleges thanks to some DOJ activity.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-settlement-will-change-how-colleges-can-recruit-students-11576175687 (I was able to view this article on my phone so hopefully not behind paywall; there are likely other articles out there)
Could be. Would be interesting to know if acceptances of ‘pulled’ apps increases this year…because it always has happened to some extent as demonstrated by some posters above. Unfortunately, we will never know the relative frequency of this happening at the macro level .
Actually, if an admit declines an early admission offer early, the college then changes the expected yield for that admit from some fraction of the student to zero (e.g. if it estimated that the particular admit had a 15% chance of matriculating, that admit counted 0.15 student toward the class, but if s/he declines early, s/he now counts as 0 student toward the class; obviously, if s/he matriculates, s/he now counts as 1 student toward the class), which can allow the college to adjust its final admit numbers accordingly.