<p>If you are accepted to HYPS and going to enroll, are you willing to withdraw your application from other colleges?</p>
<p>I’ve actually been mulling over this question for a while…on one hand, my parents want me to compare financial aid packages, but I don’t know if this is worth it.</p>
<p>Left completely to myself, I would withdraw. But my parents have ruled otherwise 
Can someone provide me with a compelling reason to withdraw that I can present to my parents?</p>
<p>If you are not sure, by all means do not withdraw your application. You’ve worked hard and having an HYPS acceptance in the bag is your achievement and you don’t owe anything to the rest of us. However, if you’re 100% sure, it would be very kind of you to. You likely will be admitted to other schools you have no intention of attending, and perhaps people who would otherwise have been admitted willl end up on a wait list.</p>
<p>ojodeltigre: The ability to dole out financial aid is directly related to the strength of a college’s endowment. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have the highest endowments of any college in the US. It’s highly unlikely that any private college will be able to match, or even beat, the financial aid given by those schools. See: [List</a> of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment]List”>List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>As a fellow parent, I felt the same way as your parents. Our family wanted to compare FA offers; we had paid the application fees and wanted to know the results. Between my two kids, our family received FA offers from 17 separate colleges including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, Vanderbilt, William and Mary, Northwestern, Boston College, Wesleyan, Binghamton, University of Vermont, and Drew University. Harvard and Yale’s financial aid beat out everyone on the list – including our state school (Binghamton). </p>
<p>I’m not sure that will convince your parents to withdraw your other applications, but please share the above information with them.</p>
<p>ojodeltigre: I vaguely remember reading a post where you said you were unsure you would fit in at Harvard. If you are not 100% sure then do not withdraw. Also, I feel like this is an unfair request. I agree that withdrawing from schools you would never take over HYP (the boards the OP posted on) is fair, but asking us not to apply anywhere else is unfair. I’m not saying that is the OP’s intention, it is what I have encountered personally. We have worked hard for four years and we have a right to see what our full range of options are. Also, I think your parents have a right to compare packages, even if Harvard ends up giving you the best package they will not know that for sure until they see the other offers. If they aren’t happy with Harvard’s package, and they are the ones paying the bill, then I think you should respect their request. As far as taking spots from other applicants, the colleges accept more applicants then will matriculate and have a WL. They understand that applicants may decide to enroll elsewhere and plan for that. I don’t think we are stealing anyone’s spot by weighing our options.</p>
<p>@gibby- Thanks for that info. I actually only ended up completing applications to HYPS + my state school (no use in withdrawing that one since it was auto-admission).
@UM32194 and mathgirl- You are right about all of this. And yes, I do still have my doubts about the social environment at H.</p>
<p>This thread is really helpful for me. I’ve been dealing with some ‘guilt’ issues because of my concern that I might potentially be taking up slots for kids at other schools, but I really do feel that I still need keep my options open. Yeah, there is probably an 80-90% chance that I will matriculate at H, but I don’t think I’m ready to decide just yet.</p>
<p>As you can see, I’m quite ambivalent about all of this.</p>
<p>Being ambivalent is a great reason not to withdraw. I am in the same position, I love Princeton but I’m not sure I want to commit right now. I also left my apps in at HY and MIT and have already been accepted with a full ride to my state school. Best of luck!</p>
<p>As a parent I would not ask my kids to withdraw all there other applications … but I would ask them of their orginal list of 10-14 schools how many are still in the hunt now that you have this acceptance? Or are a lot of the schools now out of the mix? Personally, I think one of the biggest bennies of a EA acceptance is the ability to substantially shrink the number of applications (dropping off some less desired schools) … for example, certain EA acceptances would have allowed SecondToGo to chop his list in half. The more important FA or merit aid is the longer I’d expect the final list of schools to be.</p>
<p>Edit: HYPS have by far the largest endowments in the world. Harvard’s is #1 in education endowments worldwide with over $33 billion. NYU has $2.4b, CalTech has $1.4b, Ohio State (huge Big10 school constantly on ESPN) is $0.28 billion… 95% of all colleges have endowments less than 1% of Harvard’s. </p>
<p>If you accept Harvard’s offer, then you should withdraw, but call the office before hand. If not, feel free to wait for your other acceptances, but do remember that you will be responsible for one person on the waiting list at any other school you’re accepted to (probably most), at which point that person may not go to a school they otherwise would have.</p>
<p>Re: compare financial aid programs. Forget it. You should choose a school first and foremost in your interest, love for the school and degree. Do you honestly believe you’ll never be able to pay off one college education in your life? If your parents get mad at money, grill them, it is ridiculous to be bringing a checkbook into the equation when there are literary people killing themselves to get in to a school you’re accepted to.</p>
<p>{{literary people killing themselves to get in to a school you’re accepted to}}</p>
<p>surely not well-read lit majors are killers . . . well, maybe some are.</p>
<p>Gordon: That is some of the absolute worst advice I’ve ever heard anyone give on CC! </p>
<p>First off, a student should not be applying to a college that they would not agree to attend, so every college on their list should be one they love! </p>
<p>Secondly, every college calculates a student’s financial need differently based upon their own institutional formula. Oftentimes there is a huge disparity between what some colleges offer in Financial Aid. For example, my son who is attending Yale, was also accepted to Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown and Boston College. Although all of them are wonderful schools – schools that my son could have been happy at – the cost of attendance at all of them was more than DOUBLE the cost of Yale. Are those schools worth the cost, even if my son would have been happier at one of them instead? I think not!</p>
<p>Parents and students need to be educated shoppers and wisely take out their checkbook when deciding upon colleges. Otherwise they will end up like the girl from NYU: <a href=“Another Debt Crisis Is Brewing, This One in Student Loans - The New York Times”>Another Debt Crisis Is Brewing, This One in Student Loans - The New York Times;
<p>Tigereye - Even though I think you’ll find HYPS to be pretty comparable (and generous) when it comes to your FA award, I don’t see any good reason to withdraw your aps from YPS until you get some hard data to compare. I believe HYP will match FA offers - but don’t quote me on that.</p>
<p>As for taking someone’s spot - if you end up being accepted at Stanford, for example, but choose not to attend - that just means they’ll take someone off the waitlist.</p>
<p>^^ Having one child at Harvard and one at Yale, I can attest that each WILL NOT match FA offers – believe me, I’ve tried to get them to do it and have been politely rebuffed.</p>
<p>gibby, You just proved Gordon’s point. Financial aid from HYPS are comparable, give or take a thousand dollars. It is not comparable to Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia etc. We are talking about HYPS specifically, since they have SCEA. Will you turn down your dream school for a thousand dollars?</p>
<p>Gordon did not mention HYP. It was more of a generalized statement and that was what I objected to.</p>
<p>Given my family’s experience with HY, the financial aid offered is about 6K apart per year. For some families that might be a deal breaker, it was not for ours.</p>
<p>If anyone who got in the SCEA round and withdrawing your application from YPS, please post. This is just to get an idea of how many slots will be opening up at YPS during RD round.</p>
<p>Mac, I don’t understand what you mean by ‘slots opening up’. The number of available RD openings at YPS is the total number of applicants each school plans to admit, less the number that were admitted EA/ED. If a Harvard EA admit withdraws his ap at Yale, all that means is that there is one less competitive applicant in the pool. Getting into one (HYPS) hardly means you’re a shoo-in at the rest.</p>
<p>dans: If a number of HYPS EA admits withdraw their applications from the other schools, there will be a significant reduction in the number of competitive applicants for the RD round. That will definitley make a difference for the RD applicant.</p>
<p>maybe I just dont understand, but SCEA is allowing you to apply to only 1 college early. Why would you have applied SCEA (single choice early action) to multiple schools?</p>
<p>Don’t mean to speak for you, Mac, but I think the premise is that if each kid that was accepted EA to either HYP or S withdraws their RD ap to the remaining schools, the pool of RD applicants will be less competitive.</p>
<p>But if Stanford, for example, accepts a kid in the RD round who has already been accepted EA by Harvard - they (Stanford) will just take someone off the waitlist to fill their enrollment.</p>