Submit EA/ ED before Nov 1. , wait 10-12 weeks for the notification: Accepted, deferred or rejected. Why 10-12 weeks?
We are in the new era with Internet, big data and AI. A new game plan should be invented for the college admission.
Here I put some of my ideas for your more inputs:
(1) A database should be built up to give the priority review for the students who have the decent GPA and SAT/ACT score.
(2) During the EA/ED reviewing time frame, do the rolling admission. Start sending out the admission letter or email from the third week after the EA/ED deadline.
(3) Encourage the admitted students to enroll as soon as they can, give the early birds some discounts for fee, in campus living, etc.
(4) Allow the early bird to select the courses right after they enroll.
Anyway, 10-12 weeks waiting is unacceptable! Why we pay for the application fee and buy the concerns and worries.
Let us polish the game plan, benefit our kids, college and ourselves.
I’m not sure I follow. Typically EA/ED deadlines are Nov 1, and decisions are released in mid-December, which is only about 6 weeks, including the Thanksgiving holiday. So you’d only really be saving about 3 weeks.
I’m quite glad humans and not machines are still deciding on our admissions.
Kids are going to be waiting on important decisions for weeks or months for the rest of their lives. They can wait 10 weeks (though most don’t wait that long). It’s not going to hurt them. Chill.
The reason most schools that do EA or ED don’t do rolling admissions is that they want to be able to compare entire pools to each other, rather than admitting students with little information about who else is going to apply. The problem with rolling admissions is that the students who apply earlier have a better chance of getting in, but for the admissions team, they may deny students later on in the pool that they would’ve accepted - and maybe even have to deny students they’d rather have than some of the students they accepted earlier.
Big data and AI doesn’t really help much because actual humans review most of the applications at the elite schools that actually do EA/ED - because they consider more than GPA and test scores.
They also can’t select classes right after they enroll, because let’s even say they are admitted in early February - the class schedule for the following year may not even be set yet! Professors and administrators have to plan that out. It certainly won’t be ready if they are enrolling in December; the students who are already there may not even have fully registered for their spring semester yet, much less be ready to enroll for the next fall.
Patience is a virtue - there’s no rush. Doing these things super early isn’t necessarily a benefit.
I don’t know of any EA colleges who release their admissions results beyond late January, and even that’s quite late. Can you point to some examples?
Some schools are even test-optional, and that means “holistic” of course. And top schools don’t really go by stats once benchmarks are reached. Lots of problems with this, including the need to look at the whole pool.
The answer here is to address your own anxieties. Realize you are not waiting for the results of a cancer test, for instance. Use distraction. Realize that the ultimate outcome will be fine regardless of early results. Don’t get fixed on any one school or set of schools.
Apart from its negatives to college admissions offices, the OP’s method would work fine for ED applicants who are prepared to commit to one college without comparing actual price offers. But it would be terrible for applicants whose families need or want to compare prices, and who are likely to receive offers that are meaningfully different. That’s a category into which a whole lot of educationally ambitious kids fall.
I do think there are plenty of colleges – perfectly respectable ones – that do rolling admissions that way, at least for strong applicants. Over a decade ago, one of my kids got an admission offer from Pitt three business days after submitting the application.
What doesn’t happen anymore is what happened to my wife 40-something years ago. She had somewhat unique circumstances, and decided fairly late in the season to apply to college as an 11th grader at a terrible semi-rural public school. She had interviews at three colleges, and essentially got substantive admissions decisions at the end of each interview (one yes, one yes-but, and one no).
My DDs have auditioned for ballet intensives that operate like what the OP is suggesting. Honestly, what happens is that a disproportionate number of the kids end up being waitlisted/deferred until the very end of the audition season, which really just prolongs the agony even more. We’ve known kids to give up spots to their second or third choices hoping to get off waitlists for their dream school. Or, they accept a second or third choice, put down deposits, and then get off the waitlists but can’t afford to invest more money. It isn’t pretty.
Bingo! One of the best things about senior year was getting the college apps out the door, so the teen can get back to being a senior (and having some fun amidst all those APs/IBs).
Were quite satisfied with our D’s college admission experience. After visiting her top three choice colleges, she applied ED to her top choice by November 1 and was notified of her acceptance the week before Christmas. It was quite a memorable Christmas for her and our family. I don’t know what else could have been done to make the process speedier, but it really wouldn’t have made a difference to us.
While we were waiting for her ED college’s notification, she also received a few EA acceptances which she declined after she received her ED acceptance.
It may not be that smooth at colleges that receive huge amounts of applications. As other CC threads have discussed, there is a disturbing trend of some colleges enticing students to apply that don’t have a realistic chance of being accepted, which lowers their admission rates, makes the colleges look more selective, and receive more application fees, but also increasing the burden on their admissions offices as they process and evaluate all of those applications (and additional rejection or deferral letters).
