Need to withdraw from Early decision. help!

Applying to College
21

<p>vonlost, in case you haven’t noticed, people’s financial situations do change. An ED that looked like it would work with estimated financial aid may be absolutely unworkable when the final aid package appears in April. An application to a rolling admission institution that does offer the aid needed (or that is just plain inexpensive to begin with) and that doesn’t give a rip about other institutions’ ED means that the student can go to school in the fall.</p>

<p>I expect that the OP’s intended college/university is one that doesn’t give a rip about the ED institution in question. </p>

<p>There are many threads on this issue here at CC. No college or university can require that you attend. Period. They also can’t require that you don’t attend any others for X amount of time. Period. They also know full well that a number of the students who pay their deposits will not show up the first day of class.</p>

<p>It is a kindness to let an institution know that you will not be attending after all. Not strictly necessary of course as you could just not show up.</p>

22

<p>It is reasonable to assume that you dishonestly kept in applications while holding an ED acceptance. It should be pretty easy for the ED school to contact your guidance office and get the name of your newly admitted school of choice and have your admission withdrawn there for your dishonesty. Whether explicitly said or not, your guidance office knows that its efforts to protect you by some collusion in this effort risks the school’s standing in future application years.</p>

<p>OP - what was unclear about your ED acceptance where you agreed to take the offered spot unless you immediately turned down the spot because of an insufficient FA offer?</p>

23

<p>Happymom:</p>

<p>Of course you can’t be forced to attend the ED school but that school has the incentive and means to have you blacklisted elsewhere. I would think that many schools would be happy to cooperate in rescinding an acceptance if told about moral or academic dishonesty.</p>

24

<p>The truth of the matter is that unless the school that the OP wants to attend is a school participating in the Early Decisions commitment, there won’t be any problems. A lot of schools, state school in particular ignore the whole ED scene most of the time. The other issue could be the high school where the Op attends. If it has stated policies and penalties for those who break ED agreements without going through the process, such as appealing the financial aid estimate if considered inadequate at time of receipt, the OP can have problems and have to sit out a year. </p>

<p>Those are the risks the OP runs, and others too, as those who may remember this may be people with whom he wants to do business with in the future. The world is a small one in many ways, and there are a lot of coincidences in life. Not a good way to start out adulthood, breaking a contract like this one.</p>

25

<p>happymomof1 - I am shocked by your advice on this thread. OP had the right to decline ED after he/she received the FA. If his/her financial situation had changed after admittance, he/she could have contacted the ED school. What OP did was to keep his RD applications in place, hoping he could get a better deal. It is dishonest.</p>

26

<p>people’s financial situations do change. An ED that looked like it would work with estimated financial aid may be absolutely unworkable when the final aid package appears in April. An application to a rolling admission institution that does offer the aid needed (or that is just plain inexpensive to begin with) and that doesn’t give a rip about other institutions’ ED means that the student can go to school in the fall.</p>

<p>I wish the OP would come back and clarify…</p>

<p>1) Was the estimated FA offer that you received months ago much better than the actual final FA pkg? If so, was it because your family underestimated income or something?</p>

<p>2) Was the estimated FA offer inadequate and during this entire time have you been appealing the pkg to get more aid?</p>

<p>3) Did you ever ACCEPT your ED offer and therefore were supposed to cancel your other applications?</p>

<p>4) did you accept your ED offer, but then keep your other apps so that you could compare offers?</p>

<p>5) Did you apply ED II?</p>

<p>6) Did you really mean that you applied EA and not ED?</p>

<p>While I completely agree that if the OP accepted the ED offer and then also waited to see what the RD offers were, that is dishonest, the supposed threats that we used to hear about a few years ago don’t seem to actually happen. So, some are keeping their RD apps open knowing that no one is really policing these things…especially if the RD apps are to state schools and mid level privates.</p>

27

<p>“vonlost, in case you haven’t noticed, people’s financial situations do change. An ED that looked like it would work with estimated financial aid may be absolutely unworkable when the final aid package appears in April.”</p>

<p>That’s clearly not the case here, and is unlikely anyway. When a school accepts an ED applicant with financial aid, the school really wants the student, so much so that it is willing to take a financial “loss” for four years. If unusual circumstances hit the family, the aid will likely be adjusted, just as if the problem were known when the app was submitted. The school knows the applicant’s other apps have been withdrawn; another destination is not possible at this point. In fact, just as one example (not proving anything broadly), in has NEVER happened at our DD’s LAC that a family’s deteriorating financial situation has prevented attendance in such a case (at least in the memory of the current staff when I asked this exact question), and it makes sense that it wouldn’t. But that’s not the case here anyway, according to the OP’s presentation.</p>

28

<p>This is what I have personally seen, not just on these boards, but personally. Kid applies ED, gets accepted and gets a financial aid package that is not that great but doable and everyone is so happy and relieved with the acceptance, that the family decides to work it out. Maybe they appeal or ask for more and are told no go or given just a bit more. The kid may or may not withdraw all of the apps. Maybe s/he forgets, maybe some schools don’t get the withdrawal info, and some schools don’t care. I know a number of state school, my own state system one of them that just ignores the withdrawals of apps.</p>

<p>So once, the ED acceptance is old news and a given, buyer’s remorse and other thoughts come into play. Other life circumstances may come into play too. When one person I know had his taxes done, and told his accountant about the ED deal for his kid, the accountant flat out told him he was crazy and could not afford the school even with the financial aid package. Other kids’ acceptances and packages start rolling in and some of them start looking pretty good. Honors college at the state school at less than half the cost or a full ride to some school are suddenly real things, not just what you read about. And that Big fat amount that has to be paid every single year starts looking even bigger and more difficult to do.</p>

<p>Then, lo and behold, State U comes up with a great deal, honors college and it looks like a lot of the kids’ friends are going there, and the kid says she would just as soon go there. Or another school comes up with a package because the kid did not do the withdrawal or something happened so the school is not advised. </p>

<p>So there is a change of heart. THere could also be a change in fiancial situation as Happymom brings up, or a change in perception and the kid and parents want out of the ED commitment. If the other school of choice is a school that honors other ED commitments that just didn’t get the info or it wasn’t sent and they did not catch it, the kid is very likely to have a big problem because such schools will drop the kid and offer like hot potatoes. THey are not going to be at all sympathetic and just tell the family to reapply next year, sit it out this year, if they truly cannot afford their ED choice due to change of circumstances unless it is truly some earth shaking situation like a life threatening condition making going a way from home a heavy liability. Even then, schools will say to give it a year, so strongly do some of them hold that commitment.</p>

<p>If the kid’s high school gets wind of the break in contract, they can refuse to send out the final transcript and let the accepting colleges know why, if the high school has this written into their rules. THe larger schools and/or schools not as focused on getting a lot of kids into selective colleges won’t bother with this sort of thing, but you had better believe that those small privates and other schools that are so concerned will. It hurts the integrity of the school and future acceptances when this happens. At very least, such counselors will contact the schools involved. Many ED contracts require a signature of the school counselor as well, so that name is literally on the line.</p>

<p>But in the case of a high school that does not care or follow up and/or a college accetping a kid that doesn’t t care or have any mechanism to deal with this, the consequences are not there. The kid may not even bother to tell the ED school, and just not show up so s/he doesn’t have to deal with unpleasantries of this kind.</p>

<p>I’m not saying what is right or wrong here, but what the course of events often are. </p>

<p>Also, the way ED works, is that you get the early read and accept taking the risk that things can change between the acceptance date and going to college or earlier,such as the date other schools respond. You are not supposed to be keeping those options afloat just in case this should happen, and you specifically sign a contract that says you won’t do this. If things go south after the ED contract, then you sit out a year. THat is the risk taken. Or you contact the ED school and ask out of the commitment for that reason, and reapply to other schools closer to home or cheaper or sit out a year. But what a student should do and what s/he can do with impunity in a lot of cases are different things.</p>