<p>We took a similar path to @corinthian. When my son got his ED acceptance in the mail, he withdrew all of his pending applications. Most schools sent acknowledgement emails, a few schools wrote very nice personalized emails and one school (although he sent the withdrawal request last Monday) obviously didn’t get it and admitted him to their University yesterday. This brings up a question I had that maybe someone could answer for me. My feeling is that in terms of potential future dealings with colleges (siblings applying in the near future, graduate school, etc) it is better to withdraw your application promptly with a polite and heart-felt email then waiting for an acceptance and then turning that college down. Do you think it makes any difference? </p>
<p>I know someone who applied SCEA to Harvard (deffered) and ED to Penn (reject). I don’t think that SCEA gives you an advantage at all tough. On Harvard’s page it says you’ll get the same decision irregardless of when you apply. No point in trying to cheat the system and face any potential repercussions if it won’t help you lol 
(or at all, obviously)</p>
<p>Pressure on the High School is necessary. The GC should be explicitly discussing ED choices and ramifications with the student as they apply. I know in our HS, this is the case. The counselor would not hit their approval form until the student was present, in the room and both understood what it meant. </p>
<p>@PurpleTitan (re #66): I certainly understand your points in #66, however, I want to spend a moment to elaborate regarding the Vital (in my opinion) issue of “calling and profession” versus “job or occupation.” During 1985 and 1986, I was (then) a navy commander attending a one-year, joint senior war college course at Fort McNair in DC.</p>
<p>A major part of the curriculum was resource/financial planning (of all germane types) for mobilizations (of all sizes), and it also included analyses of the necessary prerequisite conditions/resource allocations (e.g., you can’t build ships if you don’t have adequate numbers of trained welders, you can’t develop apprentice welders if you don’t have technical training, you can’t have this sort of technical training without both classroom and hands-on components, you can’t conduct hands-on instruction without enough journeymen and masters who can be reallocated from war production work, and so forth). This obviously led to the vital question of compensation for wartime workers (including uniformed personnel), and (especially in a general mobilization scenario) to overall national wage levels during war(s), wage-price controls, concomitant inflationary pressures, and the means to address such crucial economic destabilization. </p>
<p>That, in turn, raised the issue of “jobs” (which are normally compensated at market-based levels) versus callings (which are not). As an crucial side-note, another principal difference was – and is – jobs/occupations generally do not have defined and enforceable (often, internally self-developed and self-enforced) “professional performance/ethical strictures,” whereas calling/professions do (e.g., bar associations and medical boards impose and administer professional standards, in addition to traditional legal remedies). However, after much reading, debate, study, listening to distinguished outside speakers, and analysis we concluded that the basic difference between callings/professions and jobs/occupations was SERVICE (to larger – non-personal – objectives and groups).</p>
<p>Now, none of this was defined with exacting specificity, but it does tend to have considerable application to this thread’s reflections regarding of the current – and the optimal – roles for GCs, because one MUST determine if a GC (and every other publicly-related worker, for that matter) is SERVING (as a military personnel clearly do) or is simply a public employee . . . and the differences (some described above) are substantial. Our analysis mandated that individuals be designated into either category – no hybrids – because so much that is essential emanated from that decision. </p>
<p>Well, one can say a Kmart cashier is “serving the public,” but – realistically – he’s clearly an employee earning a market-base wage. However, what about a GC, who: (a) works for government; (b) must meet stipulated educational and experiential requirements and also must be state-certified (like a physician, an attorney, a CPA, etc.); and © serves indispensable “larger” objectives (young peoples’ futures)? However, the GC does NOT have either self-developed-and self-policed ethical/performance standards (as doctors, lawyers, military officers, clergy, etc. generally have) nor does he have non-market-based compensation (as military officers, some clergy, and some lawyers/doctors in their pro bono work have).</p>
<p>Unfortunately, GCs (and teachers) are hybrids, as documented in the foregoing paragraphs. With this said, I believe it is extremely important for our society to determine if they are “called to their profession,” or are simply occupational workers, because so many key parameters – including market based pay versus service based compensation and largely self-developed and -enforced ethical and professional standards or legislatively-developed and litigationally-enforced regulations – will result from that designation. </p>
<p>Finally – and for lack of this fundamental decision – I’m not at all certain that the status quo for teachers and GCs is viable in the long term. If they are professionals and their goal is to serve larger objectives, then their pay probably should not be market based (similar to military personnel). On the other hand, if they are simply public employees – and remembering that unionization of and strikes by public employees are not always legal – than the employer normally has the right to impose performance and compensation rules and they (GCs and teachers) have the right to quit and to seek more-favorable conditions. </p>
<p>@PurpleTitan (in #79): “It should be shamed.”</p>
<p>Therefore, you suggest that an important admissions system’s (ED/EA) operational viability must necessarily – and always – be subordinate to a handful of individuals’ alleged and transient welfare. I respectfully remind you that private institutions have the right, and some would suggest the duty, to establish policies that optimally serve their overall constituencies. </p>
<p>@TopTier: If you want to get quality people, in a capitalist economy, all jobs have to be market-based to a degree.</p>
<p>And no, I don’t believe that GC’s should be held to the same standards as jobs critical to the war effort when a country is on a war footing.</p>
<p>Finally, the operational viability of ED/SCEA is deemed important by colleges almost solely because admit rate is part of college rankings that people consider important. If people stopped judging colleges by their admit rate, this whole system likely falls away, so I don’t consider the ED/SCEA system to be particularly sacrosanct.</p>
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<p>In the case of restrictions on early app/decision like SCEA or ED, I think it’s even more relevant to yield.</p>
<p>If you don’t like, or don’t want to follow, the rules for ED or SCEA, then don’t do it.</p>
<p>Clearly, some people are not following the rules, in an effort to gain an advantage over other applicants.</p>
<p>That is wrong on multiple levels.</p>
<p>It seems to me that someone who applies to multiple ED/SCEA scools is simply immoral. I personally hope that anyone that did this would get a straight up rejection from all schools they apply to.</p>
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<p>However, efforts such as blacklisting an entire school are not rational and considerate measures to prevent violations of ED agreements in the future. Even if they “optimally serve” their overall “constituencies”, such lazy blanket reactions to point-source dishonesty is not rendered reasonable simply because it is a private institution.</p>
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<p>And that is exactly the reason why these unruly applicants are applying ED/SCEA. The rules mean nothing to them, or they perceive that violating the rules does not necessitate significant chastisement. Nonetheless, punishment that includes preventing access to the institution through binding early admissions programs to future students is by no means fair.</p>
<p>It should be an easy matter to have an electronic, third-party clearinghouse. If a student wants to apply to a school ED or SCEA, then that student’s name gets added to a list and the application gets submitted to the school only if the applicant’s name doesn’t already appear on the list.</p>
<p>If College Confidential can keep track of our post counts, the schools should be able to figure out how to track ED/SCEA count.</p>
<p>@Ctesiphon (in #89): You – not I – introduced the concepts of rationality and consideration; I never suggested such things applied (in #84). While I strongly believe they should always be important decision-metrics – decency and long-term prudence are obviously critical to any organization’s enduring success – private entities/institutions (educational, or any other, for that matter) have the RIGHT to operate (within the law) principally/exclusively for the benefit of their “stakeholders.” Is this unfailingly wise or public spirited? It is not. However – and in fields far beyond higher education – it is extremely common. As long as our most-selective private LACs and National Research Universities attract near 20X the number of applicants (most, exceedingly qualified and entirely deserving of admission) as they have “freshman seats,” normal competitive forces are unlikely to ameliorate such behaviors. </p>
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<p>That won’t work. People will just run it with fake info and then the later real results will be different.</p>
<p>The family can always run it secretly to get the real numbers.</p>
<p>An acknowledgement can be added to to the ED application that says, “I have run the NPC and this is the expected aid amt $____.”</p>
<p>Yes, @OHMomof2, though yield is tied to admit rate since colleges pretty much never vary from the number they originally decided to admit. So higher yield = lower admit rate.</p>
<p>I can see how backing out of an ED acceptance can raise questions, but how can colleges tell if an applicant applies SCEA/REA to several places since it’s in no way binding? The counselors at our HS would never allow it, but it sounds like others are either uninformed or overworked, allowing some kids to take an unfair advantage in this process. </p>
<p>“Do we have any people here who have gone the ED route and have been accepted who could explain their responsibilities once they receive the acceptance?”</p>
<p>My kids got their ED acceptances on a Friday night. By Monday, they had emailed all the other schools where they had apps pending, and requested an email back to serve as proof that the other college acknowledged the withdrawal. They saved those emails, just in case someone would claim down the road that they hadn’t promptly withdrawn. </p>
<p>I once saw a statistic showing people who were accepted ED had a 97% attendance rate. Putting myself in an admissions director’s shoes, if I accepted 1000 students ED and 30 didn’t attend, I’d be annoyed but I wouldn’t find it disruptive enough to warrant anything beyond over-a-beer grumbling about kids with a character-deficit disorder. Not to mention, I could easily see 1/2 of the 30 having legitimate reasons for not attending–FA didn’t add up or their life circumstances had changed in some fundamental way.</p>
<p>TLDR; it would be an easy thing to do but there’s little payoff beyond assuaging our moral outrage.</p>
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<p>They have the right to do as they please. But that does not exempt them from being shamed for doing something that is both completely ineffective at deterring or punishing unethical behavior (since the penalties do not affect the ED cheater), applies penalties to innocent students who just happen to be in the same high school, and could cause the school to auto-reject applicants it would otherwise find very desirable (i.e. the college is punishing itself as well as innocent other students while not punishing the ED cheater at all).</p>
<p>There is no constituency at a private college which would find putting the ED cheater’s high school on an auto-reject list to be the optimal action. If such a private college really cared about punishing and deterring ED cheating, it would have policies that attach the penalties to the ED cheater, not other innocent students. Examples have been described previously, such as requiring the enrollment deposit with the ED application (refunded if not admitted ED). If they believe, as you apparently do, that the GC must strictly police ED applications (although even then, a student applying to one ED college and backing out later would not be completely preventable), then the college should publish a list of errant GCs whose students will not be admitted ED (i.e. auto-defer to RD unless a clear reject) based it not trusting those GCs to police ED applications.</p>
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<p>It will work if the NPC input and results are saved for comparison with the actual financial aid application. Here are the cases that exist if the student is admitted ED:</p>
<p>(1) NPC input matches FAFSA and CSS Profile (if used) input:
(a) Actual financial aid offer matches NPC output => ED binding, no exception.
(b) Actual financial aid offer falls short of NPC output => “insufficient financial aid” exception allowed to back out of ED.</p>
<p>(2) NPC input does not match FAFSA and CSS Profile (if used) input => ED binding, no exception.</p>
<p>Putting teeth into it means collecting the enrollment deposit along with the application fee for ED applications. The enrollment deposit is refunded if either the applicant is not admitted ED, or case (1)(b) above applies.</p>