What decisions were you able to make at 5:07PM that you were not able to make at midnight? How did the midnight release change your life, your ability to make decisions, and your outcome from the process?
“Why do I care? As a parent I don’t like the lack of maturity and consideration that I have seen from Michigan admissions. It makes me question how this school will treat its students. As someone who volunteers to help others with admissions (at my kids school) it makes me wary of how much trust to put in to U Michigan’s admission office.”
UM’s 97% freshman retention rate should tell you a lot about how the university operates. It may be that the other 3% is driven by immature parents who passed along immaturity to their children. The university did what it said it would and you are complaining? As I note in another post, I don’t see how, given the evening timeframe, this would have changed your life or the life of other applicants. It is also not clear how the university living up to its expressed course of action equates to immaturity.
“Based on what happened at our school this was clearly a large batch release at midnight. I don’t understand why Michigan would say that there would be no release when they had to know a major release was coming in just a few hours. There something about them claiming that it was not that feels dishonest disingenuous and like it’s toying with the students.”
You have probably never worked for a large organization with a lot of moving parts. In such organizations, communication can be a bit haphazard. If your child is in, you need to take a breath and stop being a helicopter parent. I feel good for your child knowing that they will be able to breathe free air in the near future.
@Jara123 -Which time zone do you live in? That can make a huge difference in this situation…
Jara123, this is clearly bothering you very much. As others have pointed out, this is likely the result of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, which happens often in college admissions. You have an office with 30 people attempting to evaluate 60,000 applicants (most of them qualified) in order to enroll a class of roughly 6,000 freshmen that make sense intellectually, socially, demographically etc…Mistates will happen. Carnegie Mellon sent acceptances in error to 800 applicants earlier this year and had to recant on them afterwards.
And that’s CMU, which receives fewer than 20,000 applications. It only gets harder with 60,000 applications.
That being said, you really seem very disturbed by this. If you consider Michigan’s admissions inconsistancies to be an irrevocable breach of trust, perhaps you are better off sending your daughter to another university that you consider more trustworthy.
Jara123 hasn’t commented in three days. Perhaps she realizes now that her initial remarks were a bit excessive.
I think Michigan (and many other colleges) are being insensitive when they know students have no leverage. Rolling (unpredictable) decisions causes anxiety among students, albeit completely self-inflicted.
Many colleges use other methods of notification which also causes anxiety (some use us-mail, some use mail, but leak clues through partial portal updates, some put decisions in mail and go off on winter break or spring break with no one to answer at admissions office, etc. etc). Besides notification methods, colleges engage in aggressive marketing to increase the number of applications and lure candidates who have no shot at their college, this is probably a more egregious offense.
A student cannot (and should not) make a decision to attend based on the behavior of the front office. But, I see the OP’s point in that a university that condones such behavior from the front office may not always behave with a student-first attitude (not that is always necessary). But I still believe in the quote “Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance” and hope that Michigan and other colleges alter their behavior to be more sensitive, especially when it does not cost them anything.
I agree calipapa. I hope Michigan changes its admissions approach from rolling to single day response. Michigan should announce the EA/RD response dates a little ahead of time and stick to them.
They have already changed the EA from rolling to pretty much the end before Christmas. I am not surprised if they will make change in the RD too. However, I am not sure that would be any advantage to the students. Basically, instead of most students need to wait till the end of March, it would be all students need to wait till late March or early April. There will be more deferred students from EA crying out loud. 
The benefit of a firm date is that there will be no anxiety induced by constantly checking everyday and seeing if you got in. Only a serene monk masquerading as a teen would submit all apps in December and open the mail on Mar 31 to see where they got in 
I been away,on vacation a few days. But to answer Alexadare.
Do I consider the fact that Michigan said it wasn’t releasing decisions " tonight" only to release them a few hours later to be a irrevocable breach of trust? No. Do I consider it a sign that either there was a failure to be as professional and/or sensitive as possible. Yes. Do other schools and organizations make mistakes? Of course. But they are still mistakes. When they are made I think their should he at least an " we are sorry we shouldn’t have done that…we will try not to do it again.
This isn’t a " love it or leave it" situation though.
Come on. They said there was no admission release on 3/26 night but it came out right after midnight on 3/27. It does not matter which time zone you are in, it always refers to the time zone of the school. It may be nicer if they could tell you the exact time, however, there is absolutely no mistake that they made.
Perhaps Michigan should have an ED option like many other elite colleges. Those students with stellar stats couldn’t complain if they were not initially admitted since it would be very unlikely many of then would take this route.
No. That’s incorrect. The original post clearly indicated that the UM admissions office said no decision “tonight.” After midnight would qualify so they actually gave incorrect information. Not sure why so many people are trying to twist this to protect the admissions office. They either were purposely misleading/dishonest or they made a mistake (most likely the latter).
So OP, I understand why you’re frustrated and if I were in your shoes I’d be even more frustrated by people trying to twist the facts. Of course, advice such as telling you in a condescending way that maybe its not the school for your family should certainly be ignored.
To me, its a very minor black eye for the school, consistent with other negatives you get when you attend (or apply to) a very large school. Those negatives have to be weighed against the many positives.
This is just one instance of them not being completely forthright and insensitive. The whole idea of sporadic release of admissions with no correlation to application submission means students constantly keep wondering if they are still in the game. I am not even sure that it serves the university any good since the accepted students don’t have to respond by May 1 anyway. If yield prediction is their problem they can manage it better with wait-lists or ED.
^ Rolling admission does not mean first in first out. It just means they would start the reviewing process sooner for earlier submitted applications. The timing of admission notice would depends on their decision using their criteria. For outsiders, admission process is always a blackbox. I would not call it sporadic release as it is the nature of rolling admission. Results would come out in batches, large and small. It will remain like that until they drop the rolling admission.
I feel like this is the epitome of first world problems…
well @romanigigypsyeyes - this is what parents do; they worry about, support and defend their children; children that have worked hard (at least in their eyes) and deserve good things (in their eyes).