We are working on final decisions/options with our DD and suspect the decision may closer to May 1 than I’d like.
A couple of questions for those who have been through this before (our first time):
Should DD be contacting schools where she was accepted but knows she will not attend?
It looks like as long as our decision is communicated to school on/by May 1 we are set. Has anyone experienced any flexibility with a school extending the date a few days (not that I want to prolong the uncertainty!) or issues with waiting until the day of 5/1 to notify?
I assume it gets more difficult to contact Admissions/Fin.Aid folks as 5/1 approaches?
Anything else to know?
Thanks in advance. The more I have poked around the forums here the more impressed I am with the thoughtful responses and knowledge sharing, wish I came across it sooner in our journey.
If your D knows for sure (absolutely no question) that she is not going to go to a school that she’s been accepted to, it’s best to let them know ASAP. They appreciate that feedback as early as possible so they can get a sense of how their freshman class is shaping up numbers wise, and so they can offer her spot to someone on the waiting list, if they have one, or to the next person, if they do rolling admissions. Some schools will allow the student to do this through the same online portal they use to get their admission decision. There might be a box to click for attending or not attending. But if that’s not an option, she can just send an email to the admissions department thanking them for the offer of admission and for taking the time to evaluate her application, and telling them that after much consideration, she has decided to attend another school. Make sure she includes her temporary ID # so that they can find her easily among the hundreds or thousands of admitted students.
Also, on the school she chooses to attend, I would submit her deposit at least by April 30, in case she runs into some type of technical error. I made my D16 do this, and it’s a good thing we did because there was something wrong with her account and she had to go back and forth a couple of times with their IT department to get it fixed so that I could submit the deposit. She was in school while this was happening, and couldn’t call them. And since she was already 18, they wouldn’t work with me to fix her account. If it had been May 1 and approaching the end of the business day, where there wouldn’t have been anyone on their end to help, we would have panicked.
As far as extending the deadline beyond May 1, unless there is some sort of unusual circumstance, I would not ask them for this. If her mind is not made up by May 1, a couple of extra days Is unlikely to help. I think she just has to bite the bullet and choose (or in our case, we had to choose for D16, but that’s a whole other story!!)
Good luck
What is holding up a decision prior to May 1 that would require a couple more days? If there are questions about something I agree to get them answered right away.
Free advice. My DD made her decision April 30, which would have been fine if everything online had been spinning like a top. It wasn’t.
I could not pay online for the deposit for some reason…and ended up at the post office spending a LOT of money to overnight the deposit to the school.
Came back home…and tried again…and son of a gun…it worked…so JUST in case, I sent in a second deposit.
DO NOT WAIT until the last day. You just don’t know what snafus might take place when you do so. I would strongly urge you to set an earlier deadline with your kiddo. Don’t rely on expecting all the servers to be working on May 1.
@momofthreeboys decision held up a bit as we did not hear from the final application until 4/3. It was a yes from Reed, a college on the other side of the country from us (that we did not visit before applications). Oberlin was a yes as well, and we are trying to visit both now.
DD did very well in the process leaving too many options (Paradox of Choice). So we own much of the blame (too many apps and some key schools unvisited) but it also seems 27 days to make such a significant decision is a bit of a rush for teens and families. If the trend of 10+ apps continues it’s only going to get worse.
We are “last minute” family too and not because we want to be. One of the schools that my D is accepted released financial aid very late in the season (everything was sent on time). This school is far away and not known of being generous with fin aid so we made a decision not to visit before acceptance which was a reach. Well surprisingly she got excellent financial aid but she needs to visit before she says yes and accepted students day is next week. Not sure why this school is doing everything so late but it is one of the best deals she has. If that schools was not affordable she would have committed already.
My advice would be to have her pick a first choice from the colleges she was accepted and squeeze those 2 visits in and compare the last two to the first choice. Unfortunately that is the problem with not tightening up the list prior to applying. 2 last minute trips is never an inexpensive proposition so I feel for you and seniors are busy this time of year. Hopefully your D is a quick decision maker and your wallet can withstand the hit! Good luck!
My daughter has two schools who haven’t given financial aid info yet. One has said it won’t be out until mid May though housing has to be done by May 1st. It is a shame that we are eliminating those schools. They are schools that were applied to in October and FAFSA was done it October so nothing was late. The good thing is dd loves a different school which is affordable after financial aid (Merit) so it doesn’t really matter in the long run.
Do not wait until May 1. You don’t want any issues with server congestion etc. Have it done by the last week so if there are any issues you have time during the week to contact the school.
Once you accept, go to the other schools and decline admission. If it is difficult to do, don’t worry about it.
@3monkeys She was absolutely immobilized by the anxiety of not knowing what she wanted to do with her life or what she wanted to major in, no matter how many times we told her most kids don’t know this at age 18, and of those who go in with a certain major, many will change it at least once. In some cases, it’s better for such a student to take a gap year, or go to CC, but we knew this was not the right path for her. She put us in the position of making the decision, so we picked a mid sized school with lots of majors and the type of social scene we thought she would fit in well with. The first semester was a little bit rough as she struggled with the transition, but at no time did she regret going away to a four year college. Fast forward almost two years and she loves it there, has picked a major, joined clubs, studied abroad, made lots of friends, etc. She jokes that we chose well. I don’t recommend this for everyone, but it worked for us. Good luck!
(and sorry to hijack the thread, but to get back to it somewhat: as soon as she had it narrowed it down to two schools, she let the others know that she would not be coming. Everything-from the applications to the deposits–is done online now, and technical problems do happen. Some schools may be flexible if you contact them on May 2 and tell them you tried to submit the deposit the day before and ran into difficulties, but I would not take that chance.)
OP, this will be water under the bridge if your D is your only, but if you have younger children, a good way to deal with 10+ applications is to do non-binding early action for as many of those schools that offer it. This spreads out the work of the applications, gets you earlier answers, and allows more time to visit during school vacations and holidays, and more time to consider the offers. April 3 isn’t really late for a regular decision–most schools say applicants will have a decision back by the beginning of April.
There is no reason to let anyone know you are not attending prior to May 1st. It may seem courteous, but it is not in your best interest, and may just be a distraction. College is a business, the idea that it frees up anything for anyone else prior to May 1st is a myth. Schools aren’t working off waiting lists till after May 1st and for those doing rolling admissions they process continually, a few days or month isn’t going to make a difference to their process. This is a giant system, you are just a very small piece of a very big puzzle at any school and what you do before May 1st isn’t important, except to you. Most schools are just collecting data till after May 1st happens. Then deal with it. With computers, applicants are just a number, this isn’t 20 years ago when it meant more manual work.When you don’t reply, you name eventually falls out of their system, that is normal and not a big deal.
You can call and ask if you can have an extension on your decision if you are still getting things in order, they could say yes, or not. But you can ask.
If you aren’t getting extensions, plan on committing by April 29th to have leeway. Although one large school told us 2/3 of applicants wait till May 1st. Which is why computers crash.
@Gencmom 2 more kiddos to go, lots learned this time around. DD actually did do 2 EA apps to “safety” school, it was nice to have some early wins, but I dont think I would recomend the approach.
@blueskies2day If you are 100% certain you are not going to attend a particular school, what is the benefit to you to wait until May 1 to tell them? It’s more of a distraction to have to be bothered with sending those “no thanks” emails at the same time you are depositing to your chosen school. Schools may not act upon their waitlist until after May 1, but it helps them to have an idea earlier about whether or not they are going to use it and how much. And schools with rolling admission WILL go on to the next person earlier if they know earlier that an admitted student is not coming. If I were that next person, I would be grateful to hear earlier. No, you don’t “owe” them an earlier reply, but I’ve always taught my kids to never burn bridges if possible. That school may be a H**l no now, but you never know if graduate school may be a possibility there. Not saying they keep track of who doesn’t reply to their offer, but if it’s a small school, who knows? The only time one of my three kids did not give the courtesy of a reply was to our state flagship, which is notoriously terrible about handling the influx of applications every year. She applied RD and had all her materials in by December, well before the deadline. Still hadn’t heard by first week in April. Several phone calls later she got a verbal that she had been admitted, but they still couldn’t get their act together to update her portal, which was necessary to deposit and even to register for admitted students day; still didn’t send her packet in the mail. So, she did not feel very secure in this acceptance. Long story short, they never updated her online account or sent her packet until the middle of May!! She decided that if they can’t even handle the application process, how can they deliver a quality education–she committed somewhere else on April 30 and never bothered to let the state flagship know she wasn’t coming. We didn’t kid ourselves that they were eagerly awaiting her reply–they obviously didn’t care, but she had applied to some smaller schools that really did appreciate knowing whether or not she was coming.
This post is a mixture of accurate observation and inaccurate conclusions/fiction. College is a business of sorts, you are just a small piece of a large puzzle, yes. But colleges do make waitlist offers before May 1; they’re not just sitting there waiting for the computers to tell them what to do. (Or maybe they are, but the computers are on in mid-April as well.) There’s no one-to-one correspondence between Applicant A turning down an offer on April 20 and Applicant B being taken off the waitlist on the 21st. Colleges do their initial admissions based on a projected yield, and they’ll only go to the waitlist when they know they are unlikely to get the yield they projected, but that may be before May 1.
Also, some accepted students fill as specific “slot” the college has, so if the student accepted to fill that spot declines, someone who could also fill that slot may get an offer off the waitlist the next day. A kid in our community (an athlete with specific skills) got an offer from Harvard off the waitlist on April 10 a few years ago on that basis.
