<p>Maybe. But if there is a chance a withdrawal from an Early Action school would open a spot, I think that it’s a courtesy. And as for kids having a lot to do and priorities? I think honoring an ED contract should be high on the priority list and that a few withdrawal emails would take all of 15 minutes.</p>
<p>@wrenwu, if a selective college plans to bring in, say, 2000 kids, 2000 kids will have spots in the autumn, so no spot is being taken.</p>
<p>The harm that is being done is to the colleges (and other kids indirectly).</p>
<p>Also, NPCs may not be accurate if you have slightly non-vanilla circumstances (like a family business, divoced parents, etc.).</p>
<p>@purpletitan - when I said a spot opening up, I did not mean an additional spot, I meant there would be room for someone who might have otherwise been deferred.</p>
<p>"…there’s a kid on the Essay forum boasting his credentials as a capable essay reader on the basis of being deferred by Stanford but admitted to Yale."</p>
<p>See, I would assume that kid is lying. There is a lot of BS flying around CC.</p>
<p>@wrenwu, colleges generally have a good grasp on their yield and even how many kids who, even though they ED, do not actually attend, and they take that all in to account when issuing admits, so no, unless there is a change in the overall behavior of the pool of applicants year over year, another spot would not open up. The kids who dawdle in withdrawing their apps have already been accounted for and the number of EA/ED sent out had already been adjusted accordingly. That’s why you see some schools admit more kids EA than there are places at that college.</p>
<p>I don’t think that schools are doing admissions for EA at this point. Though I agree the kids who know that they are going to their ED Schools should notify their other schools where apps have been sent out, it may not be an immediate thing. You want to digest the acceptance first and make sure it is real, yes, schools make mistakes on these things at times. I don’t think it hurts to give it some time. Some ED agreements include an attachement for student, parent and GC to sign that the other schools have been all notified and it’s due about the time of the enrollment deposit.</p>
<p>There are families still grappling with the fin aid issues from the ED school. Whatever anyone thinks should be the process for ED, that 's fine, but the reality is that it’s not all that clear what a financial out for ED requires. There is no requirement to fill out the NPC, no specifics on what constitutes an undoable fin aid offer. No guidelines there. What if a student gets a great merit award from an EA school, nothing from the ED school, because he did not file for fin aid or did and did not qualify? Most schools will give wide berth to those who don’t want to go there.</p>
<p>Still the overall yield for ED is high enough that colleges don’t feel a need to monitor the situation further. It takes time, resources and money to monitor. It’s when abuses come their attention that might get someone to look into the situation.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus re #14: As @PurpleTitan indicates, because the GC (and in a larger sense, the secondary school) has the near-fiduciary responsibility to guide and to police seniors’ ED/EA decisions. After all, the GC has the ability to monitor his ED/EA recommendations and, therefore, generally can easily detect when a student has violated the applicable regulations. While I agree that “future innocent students” may unfortunately be penalized, I would suggest that the culprit is the indolence and/or malfeasance of the high school, not the university(ies).</p>
<p>Blacklisting a school, particularly if they let the HS know about it, may be a signal to the HS by the college - as long as YOU continue to employ this person as a GC, WE will have nothing to do with you. Then the HS has a choice, remove the person as GC and get off the blacklist or continue to employ them and stay on. Students may get caught in the crossfire, but the HS has made their choice in that instance.</p>
<p>The other side to this that I think kids need to know is that schools really appreciate the courtesy of the prompt withdrawal. My son got some very personalized and wonderful emails thanking him for letting them know about his ED and that they would love for him to consider them down the road for grad school. I think he feels that he didn’t burn any bridges by waiting to see if perhaps he was accepted and then ultimately having to turn them down.</p>
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<p>However, if a student at the HS applies ED to one college and then backs out after ED admission (as opposed to applying ED/SCEA to more than one college at the same time), how is the GC supposed to police that? Especially if the GC is an overburdened one at a large public high school that can afford the bare-minimum number of GCs for the number of students, and where the GCs have lots of other things to do besides supporting college applications.</p>
<p>Of course, high schools could turn it around and maintain a list of colleges where students have ever backed out of ED admissions, presumably putting the high school on an auto-reject list. Such do-not-bother-to-apply lists can be made public to all seniors, so that they will not waste any time or money applying to colleges that will auto-reject them.</p>
<p>If colleges really wanted to make such penalties effective against the high schools (as opposed to just causing collateral damage to innocent students in following classes), they would make public any auto-reject lists that they have (at least for private and charter/magnet public schools where students have the option of attending), so that the high schools will share the penalty (in that they will be less able to attract new students).</p>
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<p>If ethically challenged students lose no sleep over playing fast & loose w the colleges, do u really think they lose any sleep over screwing over future graduates of their HS?</p>
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<p>Whether or not the applicant needs FA, putting up the enrollment deposit along with the application fee for ED shows that the applicant puts his/her money where his/her mouth is. If the ED school is his/her clear first choice, s/he will be spending that enrollment deposit there anyway if admitted, so s/he should have no issue with paying the enrollment deposit up front. Of course, such deposit must be refunded if not admitted ED, or the school fails to meet the FA numbers from the required NPC run with the same parameters as the actual FA application (in either case, this should indicate that the applicant is allowed to back out with no penalty).</p>
<p>The only exception may be for very high need applicants, so if the college allows for a reduced enrollment deposit for such matriculants, the same deposit reduction should be offered to very high need ED applicants under this kind of policy.</p>
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<p>Relying on peoples ethics is the moral high-road but IRL one of the first things we learned in Business Law was that a contract can’t be legally blinding if it isn’t possible to enforce. </p>
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<p>Agreed – that is why the apparent current practice of penalizing future classes from the ED-violator’s high school is ineffective as a deterrent against applicants violating ED agreements. In any case where someone is tempted to disobey the rules, applying the penalty to others whom the someone does not care about is no deterrent at all.</p>
<p>Requiring the ED applicant to put up the enrollment deposit up front, and saving the NPC results to compare with the actual FA application and result should cut down a lot of the ED shenanigans.</p>
<p>For the fullpay applicants, forfeiture of the enrollment deposit is not a deterrent. If u can afford a quarter of a million dollars, the cost of an enrollment deposit is peanuts compared to the promise of enhanced admission chances at multiple elite schools.</p>
<p>To police the multiple simultaneous ED application situation, ED colleges could just have a clearinghouse of ED admissions – any college that admits someone ED puts that applicant’s information into the clearinghouse. Then, if a second college sees that the same applicant applied ED there, it can notify the first college, so that they can both rescind or reject that applicant.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus re #29: Wouldn’t you agree that the scenario you’ve described is a somewhat contrived “outlier” (this isn’t a “shot;” rather, I only highlight that it is a mighty infrequent occurrence)? The fundamental issue, it seems to me, are schools/GCs who are too indolent, and/or too poorly managed, and/or too disinterested (and so forth) to preclude the obvious, major, and common violations of PRIMARY ED/EA policy.</p>
<p>This shouldn’t be difficult. The key enforcement tool clearly is simple: the GC – through mandatory recommendations – KNOWS precisely what students, have applied to what universities, for what acceptance cycle (RD or EA/ED). A straightforward spreadsheet – even one executed on notebook paper with a pencil – can track this with exactitude. Therefore, GCs can EASILY ascertain potential violations to PRINCIPAL ED/EA policy. GCs are professionals, with advanced degrees, and they have a key responsibility to ensure ethical EA/ED compliance . . . for the good of the system, the secondary schools, the universities, and – most important – the students who “play by the rules.”</p>
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<p>While the schools could develop a system beyond the one that allows them “some” checking (Fafsa lists, Common App, CSS, etc) the fear would be one of collusion. A group of schools was known to exchange admissions’ data for the sake to normalizing financial aid and they ran into problems with the powers to be. </p>
<p>A cyncial way to look at the current situation is that it mostly works on a honor system. The enrollment of ED applicants is in the high 90s and the schools do not perceive as being a big issue when one of their peers poaches one at a later stage. Only Columbia took the time to spell out their own version of the “bite” they might use after :barking" like their peers. All of that was rendered moot by the language of the Common App that made the “no thank you” response to an ED offer all but a formality. </p>
<p>There will always be cheaters – including people who fabricate an entire "portfolio or fake documents. Considering how the schools have reacted to the countless accounts of fake credetials and test scores of dubious origins from Asia, it is pretty evident the school are not wasting time and resources chasing the occasional cheat. If they enroll students who showed almost perfect scores but have a third grade command of English, why would they worry about people who play fast and loose with the terms of the applications? Something that has not escaped the people who have a vastly different sense of ethics than is commonly used in the US. </p>
<p>@TopTier It sounds great in theory, like it wouldn’t be that hard, but I go to one of the large public high schools you guys are talking about, and, if memory serves, each guidance counselor is responsible for 60 members of each class. So 60 seniors to keep track of colleges for, and 240 kids in all that she has to meet with for various things (grade issues, scheduling, dropping into and out of classes, social/domestic problems etc.) That’s a lot to put on one person. In my school district, you have two individual meetings with your GC about college planning, one about how to build a list at the end of junior year, and then one about what schools you are actually applying to in September of your senior year coupled with an interview so she can write a halfway decent rec. You tell her when your first deadline is, she promises to have it uploaded by then, and I haven’t spoken with her since then. I do everything on Naviance or CA, and as far as I’m aware, she never sees it. It really would not be that hard to do, just apply SCEA to Princeton through UCA and then ED or SCEA another school on CA, and she would never see it. </p>
<p>The crazy thing, is that my school district is good. She’s probably only worried about 15 or less of those 240 kids not graduating, and she actually knows how to advise me wrt applying to selective schools. In a bad school district, or where the GC has even more kids, it would be even easier to slip under the radar. </p>
<p>Re: #36</p>
<p>Reply #38 speaks to the reality of a typical GC situation where the GC has many other things to do than to police every student’s ED, SCEA/REA, and EA applications to ensure compliance, particularly when the SCEA/REA and EA schools can have their own special rules, and the colleges do change their early application rules every so often. Other threads about recommendation rationing, overworked GCs, and poor GCs indicate that the GC situation at many high schools is far from ideal.</p>
<p>Also, if the GC is sloppy in policing early application rules, or is unethically complicit in a student’s violation of such, the penalty of quietly putting the high school on the college’s auto-reject list is not a significant penalty for the GC. I.e. it is still a case where a violation brings the penalty not on the violator, but against innocent third parties. That is not a deterrent against breaking the rules.</p>