Early Decision Hunger Games

Whether you applied this cycle or won’t be applying for another year or two, I want to let you know about some yucky practices we’ve seen this cycle around Early Decision deferrals. Hopefully they don’t become a trend...

You might already know that Early Decision admission plans are binding... sort of. The language the schools use makes the binding nature sound ironclad, but in fact the worst that can happen if you turn down an offer from an Early Decision plan is that you don’t go to that college. They can’t?force?you to attend if you want to go somewhere else.

The other caveat is that if your ED college admits you from the ED round, you do NOT have to withdraw your applications at other colleges until that ED college has shown you their financial aid offer. Sometimes they don’t send you the financial aid offer until after they’ve sent you the admissions offer, and if the financial aid offer is not to your liking, you do not have to accept the offer of admission. (As I wrote about last week, reporter Ron Lieber has done great work nudging some colleges into clarifying their ED policies. See?here?and?here.)

You might also already know that when you apply ED, the college can admit you, deny you, or?defer?you. Typically, if they defer you, they’re deferring you into the Regular Decision pool, and by definition, in the RD pool you are no longer bound by the ED terms.

But this cycle we saw a college defer ED people into their second ED round, which made my jaw drop.

To be clear: You are not bound in any way if a college defers you into the second ED round (sometimes called ED2). You never agreed to those terms when you applied, and a college can’t unilaterally bind you that way. I’d love to see them try to enforce the ED2 terms on you, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t ever come to that; the blowback for that college would be too strong.

Please add a comment or DM me if you find yourself in any Early Decision pickles. We can figure out what your best options are. ??

?? News You Can Use

1 - 15-month college & career-readiness calendar for high school counselors?(NCAN)

2 - Science-backed tips for improving your grades and test scores?(our?blog post)

3 -?Arizona State University to enroll 100 million more students by 2030 through a free global education initiative:?this year the initiative will attempt to reach students in Iran, Kenya, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, India, Senegal, Brazil, and Vietnam (WSJ)

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?? My Favorite Things This Week

1 - How a Gray Painting Can Break Your Heart:?This dissection of a Jasper Johns painting alone makes my subscription entirely worth it. I love the technology the NYT uses to zoom in and out of different parts of the painting.?Brilliant.

2 - Yellowjackets: No spoilers. I’ll just say I love how the writers handle characters as high schoolers and in middle age. (Showtime)

3 -?Inside the Student-Led Covid Walkouts:?Loved this coverage in?Wired.

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?? Quote of the Week

My mom has only ever spoken English to me, and for a very long time, I assumed that whenever my mom was speaking to another Filipino person, she was speaking Tagalog. I didn’t really have a good reason for thinking this other than that I knew she did speak Tagalog and it all sort of sounded like Tagalog to me. But my mom was only sometimes speaking Tagalog. Other times she was speaking Ilonggo, which is a completely different language that is specific to where she is from in the Philippines. The languages are not the same, i.e., one is not simply a dialect of the other; in fact, the Philippines is full of language groups that, according to my mom, have so little in common that speakers would not be able to understand each other, and Tagalog is only one. This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.

From?How to Do Nothing?by Jenny Odell