@skieurope My D went to a very large (and good, but underfunded) public school where each counselor has 500+ students to attend to. The guidance counselor probably just clicked a button for every school and didn’t notice (not through any fault of her own, just very overworked).
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Also, it may have been just prudent risk management on the part of the GC (almost robotically). Imagine the potential consequences to the applicant in the event that the GC did not send the mid-year report and should have…
Apparently guidance counselor availability, expertise, and followup is another example of privilege in the application process. Our senior counselor is the best at the school and has done everything my child asks, but has to spend most of her time chasing down students in danger of not graduating or having behavioral issues.
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From my D22’s school, a student was accepted to Williams with ED and also was accepted to MIT thru EA. It will be interesting which school she will be attending.
It was ok for her to apply to both, but unless the Williams FA package was insufficient, they are bound to attend Williams. I would be forever fearful that MIT would find out, if that was the choice that is made.
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Yes, it was fine to apply to both schools, but she didn’t withdraw from MIT EA which was unethical. Obviously, she had applied ED to Williams to boost her chance, but if she had a choice, I am sure that she will take MIT in a heartbeat. Choice was made, but unknown.
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Tough to know and make a judgement when the timing is so close…Williams decisions came out about a week before MIT’s. The deadline to accept Williams offer was probably a couple of weeks after the notification date.
When timing is this close, I don’t think it’s an ethical lapse necessarily…especially if they hadn’t accepted Williams offer. Maybe they were waiting for an FA offer.
It’s also possible that they did withdraw from MIT, but the timing was too close for MIT’s system to flag the withdrawal in the right system. This is not an uncommon occurrence (don’t know about MIT specifically).
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This raises an interesting question. What if the FA offer from Williams isn’t “satisfactory” from the applicant’s perspective and she turns it down and accepts MIT’s offer instead?
Our HS requires the parents to print the NPC and turn it in with the ED agreement. Makes it hard to claim you can’t afford it if the NPC is accurate.
So why don’t colleges require you to submit your NPC docs with the ED agreement? Seems like a very easy solution.
This situation is a lot like why colleges don’t verify ECs or put in checks to be sure the student wrote the essays. It’s so easy to fabricate ECs and pay someone to write the essays, but schools do nothing to limit it.
I’m left to assume the schools are OK with a certain amount of dishonesty.
ETA: my kids have written all of their essays themselves and the ECs were accurate. I’m not advocating dishonesty.
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The world mostly works on trust and honesty. More people than we think do the right thing.
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Yes. We are at a Title I school. Our GC has submitted all of kid’s recs and transcripts on time, and we are grateful for that given the other serious issues she is trying to help some students with.
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Don’t most colleges at this level require a conversation with the FA office, including a review of the NPC results, if trying to get out of ED? While no ED school will force you to attend, I doubt they make it as easy as simply clicking decline on the portal.
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Agree with ski’s post above….definitely a conversation should happen, whether ‘required’ or not. The HS GC should strongly encourage that to happen IMO.
In the end, though, the school would let the student out of ED…there are many reasons that would suffice even beyond financial. For example, covid/stay close to home reasons, mental health issues, etc. IME schools don’t push back and don’t want a student who doesn’t want to be there.
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I wouldn’t suggest it’d be straightforward. Besides, I don’t think an EA admit will get her FA award from MIT until at least mid January, so that’d be another risk for that applicant if MIT were to offer less. It’s still a loophole, however.
The NPCs at many schools may not be accurate for a significant proportion of families….those who are divorced, those with businesses, those with real estate beyond a primary home, international students.
And really, the number of schools that have highly detailed, functional NPCs are relatively few. For example, many don’t ask for 401k contributions (and of course they add those back to income), or business financials, or they aren’t set to the correct year’s COA, etc.
The onus is on the schools to make that right, they know that, yet so many seem to struggle with it.
Why does MIT not give FA out with the admission notification?
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EA schools (unlike their ED counterparts) don’t need to work on applicants’ FA applications until they’re admitted (no need to waste time on applicants who aren’t going to be admitted) and EA admits don’t need to know their FA offers in order to quickly commit.
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I know, a month just seems like a long time, although the holidays are in that time span too, so maybe not that long really.
Some need blind EA schools have shared personnel between their admissions offices and their FA offices. By working on admission applications and FA applications sequentially (rather than in parallel), they can not only maintain the Chinese Wall between the two offices, but also make the wall stronger because no one there has even opened an applicant’s FA application when they’re making an admission decision.
One would think that colleges that use the College Board provided CSS Profile could use the College Board NPC template, which is fairly detailed (asks parents’ marital status and various questions about various kinds of income and assets) and probably covers most of the stuff that the CSS Profile includes.
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