<p>I tried searching for "Likely Letter" and got a gazillion hits, so sorry if this is on another thread.</p>
<p>likely letters are letters sent out by colleges before they are supposed to send out acceptances, telling the applicants that they are "likely" going to get accepted. And by "likely" they mean a 99.9% chance of you getting accepted.</p>
<p>A lot of schools send them out.</p>
<p>Thank you for your prompt response, 3Bobs. Why do colleges send out these letters? What is the point?</p>
<p>So you know earlier. They are normally sent out in mid-February, and it makes you the agonizing time of waiting ("what if I didn't get in? omg... I wanna get in so badly...") a lot shorter. It's called Early Evaluation.</p>
<p>Likely letters are intended to snag a strong applicant, and many schools are increasingly using them to try to improve yield. A Yale applicant might receive a likely letter in an attempt to draw his/her attention before being admitted to Harvard, to whom they lose the majority of cross-admits. Ivies supposedly send out "unlikely" letters as well, but I've never heard of anyone receiving one.</p>
<p>wait so do all colleges do likely letters? can you just mail your stuff to a college and ask them to send you a likely letter back?</p>
<p>Not all colleges do it, and relatively few people (top 1-5% of the applicant pool, usually) get them. An exception is Smith, which I think does it for all applicants.</p>
<p>I remember reading somewhere on this forum a pretty good analogy: the likely letter is supposed to be like a first love. Though you move on, but there's a special place in your heart for your first love. Strong applicants receive likely letters in the hope that they'll have a special place in their hearts for the first school to essentially accept them. Colleges are hoping this will be enough pull to have the applicants enroll or at least view the college with more excitement.</p>
<p>I think Wellesley and a couple other schools let you request an early information letter which will give you a "likely," "unlikely," or something else that I don't remember.</p>
<p>Likely letters are typically given to athletic recruits by schools that do NOT offer scholarship money. This indicates almost certain admission which helps to counter a financial offer from another school.</p>
<p>From what I got from it, they basically tell you about a month in advance (although Cornell was hella late this year, like March 20th or something like that) in order to snag you and to keep you interested in the school. Personally, I have a pretty strange story with Dartmouth on this. I remember that I had gotten a likely letter, but the timing was a little off because a)Dartmouth requests a peer evaluation, which wasn't in at the time [nor did I ever actually send it] and b)I had gotten the letter the same day as my interview. So basically I learned that I was into Dartmouth, and that if they really want you, they don't care about incomplete applications because apparently, what you had put out was already enough to make a decision. And also, that colleges don't care about the interview apparently, because I felt like I was sent the wrong message from Dartmouth (one of the reasons I ultimately didn't apply), so....</p>