How early should you submit your college application?
What if you submit it on the deadline? The day before the deadline? The week before? The month before? Three months before?
I was asked to answer this question on the website Quora.com
********************************************************************************
The huge number of colleges and universities means there is not a single answer to your question, but overall, I think what I will say will cover many of the variables.
First, the easy part. If you are applying to any school that has rolling admission, then it is in your benefit to get your materials in as early as possible. Schools evaluate applications as they come in and make offers of admission. If they begin to fill all the spaces they have, even before the final deadline, and you have not already applied, then your chances of getting in will be very slim.
For those students who have very strong credentials and who are submitting applications to schools outside those near the top of the rankings, it won’t make any difference when the application comes in. There really are not all that many schools that are very highly selective, so a star student, in terms of grades, academic program and testing will be offered admission at schools looking for this type of student. There are many schools that admit strong students based almost solely on numbers even if they don’t say this in public.
While what I have said is true, it is also true that schools are looking for students who want to accept their offer so that their yield (the percentage of students who accept offers) goes up as this increases the selectivity of the school which is a rubric for US News and other rankings of schools. A student who submits an application at the last minute and has done nothing to demonstrate interest at schools that factor interest in may not get in even if the numbers are good. I know of one school that won’t admit any student who has not visited if they live within a 50 mile radius of the school. Their thinking is that a student who lives that close and does not visit is not all that interested and they don’t want to ‘waste’ an offer.
But now let me focus on the schools that get huge numbers of applications but admit few students. First of all, students who are applying to the most selective schools should apply to at least one school either early action or early decision. I know this is not what you are asking, but it is important to know that accept rates are typically higher, and in some cases much higher, for students who apply early action or early decision.
Once again while what I have said is supported by lots of data (for example, Duke just filled almost half its class this year through early decision, so getting in regular will be much harder), it does not matter if a student applying early to these selective schools gets in the application weeks ahead or at the last minute. The reason for this is that the pool for early is not all that large compared to the overall pool. Early also means that admission officers are relatively fresh when it comes to reading and most look forward to reading after a tiring season of travel.
In support of what I have just said about when things need to come in, let me just cite a student who talked to me very late in the game about applying early to Stanford this year. The student was quite strong but then so is everyone else who applies, and her numbers were not better than the average accepted student. Were it not for the time difference between east and west coast and daylight savings time change, she would not have been able to submit her application. My guess is she was certainly one of the very last students from the east coast to apply and yet she was offered admission in the most selective year ever for Stanford which is now the most selective school in the US.
On the other hand (you can see this answer follows a dialectical form), it is a different story for regular decision. There are a couple of reasons why I think it is a good idea for those applying regular decision to highly selective schools to get materials in well before the deadline. One is data based. Since applications come in and are circulated to readers by when they are submitted it is possible to track the number of offers that get entered by date. When I worked in admission, I certainly noticed that the number of offers that readers made to applicants happened with greater frequency relatively soon after the deadline had passed. These students had submitted materials early enough that when regular decision evaluations happen they were read in early January. I have theories about why this is but nothing that would be called scientific. Students who get everything together a bit earlier tend to be high performers. They’ve stayed on top of everything in secondary school, stuck to a rigorous schedule and submitted things in on time. Those who wait until the very last minute are, more often, less organized and possibly less able to demonstrate academic promise either by numbers or by the way they have completed the subjective parts of the application. Those who start to fill out applications late in the game often have to rush to get things in and this is when silly mistakes can happen: the one most often cited is the essay that the students submit about why they want to attend a particular school that have the last sentence end “and this is why I really want to attend Harvard” when the essay was submitted to Duke or some other school. It’s more likely someone doing a rush job will leave something out, or make some sort of error that will be enough to at least give a reader pause.
The other factor that comes into play for those who submit applications at the deadline is what I call The Fatigue Factor. By the time February rolls around, people have been reading (including early decision) since November, they have been reading non-stop day and night for months. They are tired, they are sleep deprived, and they are often not quite up to date on the number of applications they should have read. I cannot prove that application fatigue affects decisions, but many forms of mental fatigue have been cited in data to show that mistakes get made when people are overly fatigued and stressed.
In addition to this, it also becomes clear in the latter stages of reading how many students have already been offered admission (some go through the process and are already entered in the database as an offer, or deny or some are held for further committee consideration). As offers creep up in the database, some readers may feel that they need to be tougher as they do not want to have to go through what some schools call a purge (going back through offers and pulling down students). There is a finite number of offers that can be made and if there are too many offers that are already in the system then there needs to be a purge. This creates a big time crunch near the end of the process. A big purge is messy and rushed and can then become largely a numbers game (who has the highest numbers).
My advice then is that for students applying regular decision to get started early and get things in well before the typical submit date of January 1. This advice especially applies to those who are not a part of groups that schools most want to recruit (athletes, legacies under-represented students, development cases).
Finally, I will add that a number of very well-regarded counselors from secondary schools around the world who have read my remarks on a closed discussion group on admission and who have said that they encourage their students to get materials in much earlier than the regular decision deadline.
No comments:
Post a Comment