<p>Wall Street Journal article by Sue Shellenbarger discusses good, bad, and ugly rejection letters based in part on CC member comments:</p>
<p>wow, Bates is rough.</p>
<p>Wow… I always liked that thread. :)</p>
<p>Some of those are seriously rough. I really like Duke’s approach to rejections. Harvard’s is pretty good as well.</p>
<p>I still think CMC’s is the absolute worst. It’s not very nice to read that the committee literally voted to reject you.</p>
<p>Yesss! CC in the news. We rock :)</p>
<p>Doesn’t appear many colleges are too broken up over the way their poorly worded rejection letters are percieved. However, it’s good to know there are at least a few that make the effort to be a little more sensitive.</p>
<p>Ms. Shellenbarger asked me some questions for this article. I told her I actually liked Stanford’s :P</p>
<p>Wow thanks for the posts. Very interesting.</p>
<p>Bates really does send out the worst rejections. I still remember the one they sent me…enough to make me carry a grudge a year later.</p>
<p>yeda iono !!!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`</p>
<p>Bates rejection was horrid. It should make everybody who is thinking of applying there think twice. S didn’t even want to go there but still applied. Wonder what their acceptance letter is like.</p>
<p>If you think this is bad, you should see what happened with grad school PhD admissions this year. The area I am familiar with is CS/Math. GA Tech has notoriously sent, not just a denial letter, but a form letter actually saying that you were not academically qualified for their program. They sent it to undergrads, Masters students, and all…</p>
<p>My daughter did not apply there, but many people at thegradcafe mentioned getting this letter, and many got into other equivalent programs, though some did not.</p>
<p>And can you imagine not hearing from any schools at all? My daughter did not hear from 5 grad schools near deadline. No decline, no accept, no waitlist. She had to write them and withdraw her application, because she had decided on her actual acceptances, one which was a top choice from the begining.</p>
<p>She very specifically only applied to schools she would like to attend and would attend given the mix of acceptance and funding.</p>
<p>unlike the person above, Iamsoconfused:
“S didn’t even want to go there but still applied.”</p>
<p>That is very wrong thinking (I originally said trashy) to me, if you didn’t want to go, don’t apply. Turnaround is fair play.</p>
<p>Bates is pretty cruel but I think that Penn State’s rejection letter inside “the fat envolope” is the worst.</p>
<p>lol bates’ WAS really awful. it was bordering on just plain impolite.</p>
<p>…on their college rejection (“denial”) letters!</p>
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<p>A good measure of how successful this “sensitivity” that BU claims is how the affected families’ loyalty and contributions change. Do they change? Of course in this economic climate it would be tough to figure out which reason was paramount in decreased (or stopped) giving.</p>
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<p>While deceptive, I see other schools doing this, too.</p>
<p>If I were the President of Bates, the Dean of Admissions would be having a very uncomfortable meeting with me, in which we would discuss the simple concepts of good PR and bad PR.</p>
<p>A few years ago Bates was known to reject applicants who had either not completed their applications or who had withdrawn their applications. I do not know if they still engage in this practice. It appeared the school was trying to manipulate their acceptance and yield statistics. The school’s marketing message (test optional and all the rest) does not match its actions. </p>
<p>I think Bates is in the middle of a identity crisis.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago the weirdest and most confusing acceptance/rejection my DS received was the one from Carnegie Mellon. He got a fat envelope and he was accepted BUT not to the major of his choice and it said don’t even think about transferring. </p>
<p>After emphasizing how much he loved actual programming they put him in the Information systems dept, which doesn’t focus at all on programming. As an IT recruiter I don’t think that is a good major anyway. It’s hard to come right out of school as an analyst without having a solid knowledge of programming first. I would never have let him accept. We read that another person on CC that year, had the same thing happen to them.
He ended up having a very successful college career as a comp sci major at Rice and is now working at Microsoft.
I think we all agree in our family he made the best choice and went to a far better school for him anyway.</p>
<p>Funny that Bates has a nasty letter. When we looked, someone commented that students must arrive by helicopter. We didn’t even get out of the car. I hope someone has sent Bates admissions a link.</p>