For many teenagers an inevitable part of the college admission process is disappointment.
Ambitious students aiming for highly selective schools will often fail to secure an acceptance into their dream school.
One way to avoid this emotional rejection is to not get attached too strongly to any particular college or university. That, however, is hard for teenagers—or really anyone—to do.
In cases of rejection, it’s important to focus on what students and their parents can control—making the right decisions going forward.
In this column, I’m focusing on what actions families can take when they receive bad news.
Understand the Odds when Deferred
Sometimes an applicant’s rejection is delayed. Instead of immediately crushing a student’s hope, a college will “defer” the admission decision until later. Frankly this is often a way that colleges attempt to reduce the pain of ultimately delivering bad news.
The students whose application decisions have been deferred had applied Early Decision or Early Action in the fall. They had hoped to get an admission nod early on, but they will have to wait until the regular decision results to find out their fate.
Deferred students, who want to boost their chances of being accepted in the regular admission cycle, could send in an updated transcript that includes grades from the first semester of senior year. They could also update a school on any accomplishments that they have achieved since the application was submitted and possibly share an additional recommendation. These students could also write a brief note expressing their desire to attend.
Understand the Odds of Waitlisting
Students can also be waitlisted when the regular admission notifications are delivered. A waitlisted student generally faces even worse odds than those who were deferred. Depending on how many accepted applicants actually commit, some slots may free up at a school for waitlisted students.
Before getting hopes up, a waitlisted student should check the past fate of waitlisted applicants at individual schools.
It’s easy to find these waitlist statistics for many schools by looking at their Common Data Set. This is a document, created by each school, that includes numerous statistics about admissions, financial aid and other areas.
In section C2 of the document you will see the number of students who were waitlisted, those who accepted a waitlist spot and those that the college ultimately accepted.
As an example, here are the waitlist figures for Lehigh University in Pennsylvania:
As you can see, there was little chance of getting off the waitlist at Lehigh. And that’s the reality at many highly selective schools. Keep in mind that most schools, which don’t reject the vast majority of their applicants, have no need to maintain waitlists.
For those determined to successfully get off a waitlist, students can try the same strategies as those who are deferred.
Try Early Decision II
Students who were turned down after submitting an Early Decision application in November, could consider submitting a late-stage ED application. As you probably already know, Early Decision provides the best opportunity for a teenager to get accepted to a highly rejective school. With ED, students have to promise that they will attend regardless of the merit and/or financial package the teenagers are offered.
What fewer families know is that a second chance exists to apply ED. It’s called Early Decision II. The deadline for this later ED option is usually in January.
It’s ideal for students who are aiming for an elite institution but got turned down in an initial ED try or who needed better test scores or grades from their first semester report card senior year before trying. It also can make sense for students who aren’t thrilled with the schools they got into via Early Action or rolling admissions in the fall and early winter.
Here is a list of colleges and universities that offer ED II.
Start from Scratch
The traditional admission cycle bit the dust years ago. Traditionally, schools’ deposit deadline was May 1 and while many of the most selective schools cling to that date, many others, which have to work harder to finalize their freshmen class, do not. So even when students get rejected from their favorite schools, opportunities remain to search for more in the spring and even the summer.
A great resource for looking for potential schools at the last minute or actually early in the admission process is TuitionFit.
TuitionFit can widen the college search for families that will likely include promising colleges and universities that weren’t on their radar. TuitionFit serves as a repository of college acceptances and actual merit and financial aid awards as part of its goal of making college pricing transparent.
Students who share at least one of their offers with TuitionFit gets free access to other current awards from students with similar financial need and academic profile.
With this online platform, parents can compare the awards their child received with the prices that similar students are getting offered by colleges and universities all over the country in real-time. By using this resource, families can discover potential college that never previously crossed their radar.
Lynn O’Shaughnessy, a nationally recognized college expert, offers an online course – Savvy College Planning – exclusively for financial advisors. Click here to get Lynn’s guide, Finding the Most Generous Colleges.