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Boston University to meet 100% of student need

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Boston University’s Associate Vice President for Enrollment & Dean of Admissions, Kelly A. Walter, has announced that BU has a new, expanded financial assistance program, affordableBU, that will meet 100% demonstrated need of any admitted first-year student who is also a U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident.

“We understand that now, more than ever, students and families expect a return on their investment when choosing where to apply to college. BU pledges to deliver that…” continued Walter. BU applicants’ financial need is determined based on both the FAFSA and CSS Profile™. Once BU has determined what a family’s expected contribution is, the university subtract that from the full cost of attendance. The difference, what BU refers to as “calculated need,” will be made up by financial aid.

Many selective colleges and universities meet 100% of demonstrated student need for domestic students (BU is now in this group); however, others don’t. Only a rarified few do for international students as well.

If you are interested in BU, be sure to check out its deadlines for when financial assistance applications are due, for the coming year.

Penn reveals new supplemental essay questions, other admissions changes

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Penn’s campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania announced today that its supplemental essay question in search of a 650-word response by applicants is no more. Students applying during the 2019-2020 admissions cycle for Fall 2020 admission will be asked two new questions instead:

  1. How did you discover your intellectual and academic interests, and how will you explore them at the University of Pennsylvania? Please respond considering the specific undergraduate school you have selected. (300-450 words)
  2. At Penn, learning and growth happen outside of the classroom, too. How will you explore the community at Penn? Consider how this community will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape this community. (150-200 words)

Students are still able to write up to a grand total of 650 words in their responses to these questions; yet, with the changes, applicants will now have the challenge and opportunity to deliver two distinct messages in response to two distinct essay prompts.

Also announced today is a new policy that would have kept both U.S. President Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump (who both transferred to Penn’s Wharton School of Business as juniors) from ever attending or graduating from Wharton.

“From cycle year 2019-2020 forward, Wharton and Engineering will no longer accept external junior transfers. The College and Nursing will continue to accept junior transfers…We have made this change in consultation with our academic partners across campus. The curricular pre-requisites for transferring into Wharton or Engineering as a junior are both specific and extensive. As we reviewed Wharton and Engineering transfer applicants, we consistently saw that most applicants were unable to take the coursework necessary for a seamless transition into these schools. We hope this change will help applicants focus on the schools and programs that best align with their interests and preparation, and that allow them to successfully transition to our campus.” wrote Eric Furda, who currently holds the title of Dean of Admissions at Penn.

Ironically, earlier this month this site pondered how Ivanka Trump got into Penn back in 2002 and whether or not she would get in again today. It’s clearly a sore point with the powers that be at Penn these days that the current president of the U.S. and one of his top assistants both graduated from Penn. Whether or not this Penn admissions policy change has anything to do with the university’s current “resistance” to the leader of the free world is purely a matter of speculation.

Additional interesting tidbits shared by Furda this summer include:

-Penn will allow applicants to self-report test scores – as long as they are not athletes or international students. This means that certain students will simply be trusted to honestly report their highest scores on their applications and only send in official corroboration of their scores if they ultimately get into and deposit at Penn later in the admissions cycle.

– Penn is passive-agressively encouraging its IB applicants to take Math Analysis HL instead of other new math offerings rolled out recently by the IBDP.

– Penn will offer both regional and virtual information sessions during the year ahead and all of these will be listed here.

Remembering Tom Weede, and Calling on the Next Tom Weedes

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I could tell this was not going to be a typical meeting with a college representative.  He walked into my office with absolutely no hurry, as if this was all he had to do all day, and talked about his school from the heart, not from a memory-committed checklist of things someone else told him to say.  When I asked questions, he left a space between when I stopped talking, and when he started his answer, never once referring me to the school’s website, or the college catalog.  This was clearly a guy who knew his school as well as he knew his middle name.

It was also notable that he didn’t talk about his school in some theoretical abstract.  We do that a lot in college admissions, where we talk about a college in the third person, like it’s some kind of god.  He mostly talked about the students at his school, what they were doing, what they liked about being there.  He knew that’s what makes the college experience work for a student—who you go to school with.  He wasn’t going to waste my time reciting scores and rankings, because Rugg’s could tell me about scores, and rankings were, well, pretty pointless.  If you have time to talk with someone face-to-face, the conversation should be a giving of self, not of data, and that meant talking about things that mattered.  What matters most in college is the students.

After he said everything he thought I should know, he got up and gave me his card.  As I recall, he said something about how he’d like to hear from me, but the university had made it kind of hard to get hold of him, with a student aide and a secretary standing between him and every incoming call, but he urged me to persist.  After he’d left, I read his card, and realized I’d just spent forty-five minutes talking to a Director of Admissions who had made a cold call to my high school.

That was my introduction to Tom Weede, who passed on earlier this month, leaving this world and our profession all the poorer.  The outpouring of loss has come from all circles of our field, and it all contains one common message; Tom was the rare person who not only felt you mattered; he made sure you knew you mattered.  He trusted you with his opinion, and trusted that you would step up and let him know how you felt in turn, even if you saw things differently.  His advocacy in the profession was focused on students, and when he engaged you in conversation, you felt, as George Bailey once said, that he knew you all the way to your back collar button.

Tom’s come to mind quite a bit this summer, and not just because of his passing.  I’ve been besieged by a number of students and parents flooding my office with requests to make college plans, and they’re all ninth and tenth graders.  One father called and insisted he had to meet with me right away, since his son was a junior, and had no college plans at all.  The student’s name wasn’t familiar to me, so I looked him up.  Turns out he was a sophomore, but since his father called the day after school was over, calling his son a junior made things sound more important, I guess.

That’s the kind of month it’s been.  One parent wants to meet to talk about “college strategy,” another one is convinced his ninth grader’s chances at graduate school are already shot because the student has no plans for this summer.  It’s easy enough to get caught up in the mania the media is peddling as college readiness, but it’s never hit the ninth and tenth graders like this before.  Worse, it seems to be hitting their parents, and too many of them are succumbing to the herd mentality of college angst, abandoning their post as sentinels of their children’s youth.

If there’s any remedy to this, I’d like to think it’s the calm, listening voice of the Tom Weedes that are still with us.  Tom did most of his preaching to admissions officers, and none of us were smart enough to ever ask him if he’d thought about saying this to kids and families. Since similar voices are doing the same thing, it’s time to ask them to broaden their scope, before SAT flash cards become the in gift for bar mitzvahs.

Voices like Ken Anselment, Heath Einstein, and Tamara Siler do a very nice job of reminding colleagues that that the college selection process is all about the kids. What’s needed now is for them to share their insights with a larger audience, giving kids permission to be kids. It would be a great way to honor Tom’s memory.  Better still, it would be the right thing to do for our world.

How did Ivanka Trump get into Wharton?

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Recently, Tucker Carlson of Fox News asked on his evening program, “How did (CNN host and child of a former Democrat Governor) Chris Cuomo get into Yale?”

The answer to this question is important for all Americans to know for the reasons Tucker Carlson explains in his monologue.

Yet, just as important, if not more important, would be for Americans to get answers to the following two related questions:

  1. How did Ivanka Trump (who is obviously the most powerful woman in America right now by virtue of her personal and professional proximity to President Trump) get into Penn’s Wharton School of Business in 2002 – as a transfer student no less?
  2. Would Ivanka still have gotten into Wharton with the same qualifications if she had submitted her transfer application after her father made his famous escalator speech announcing his run for president in 2015?

As thousands of rising high school seniors around the world embark on completing their college applications for “selective” American colleges over the weeks ahead, the answers to the above two questions would be clarifying and important for these young people to know.

Update: The powers-that-be at Penn changed their admissions policy just a couple of weeks after this post was published. The change, had it been implemented in years/decades prior, would have meant that Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump both would have been denied admission to Penn. Learn more here. 

Ivanka Trump and family pose between Locust Walk and Jon M. Huntsman Hall on Penn’s campus in May 2004

University of Alabama, other colleges, open applications on July 1

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University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Off to the races! The 2020 application for the University of Alabama went live on July 1. Those students with questions about the process of applying to the increasingly-popular-with-out-of-state-students public university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama are encouraged to contact their UA Regional Recruiter.

Yet, it’s not just aggressive Alabama that is attempting to fling open the doors of its Fall 2020 first-year application in the dead of Summer 2019; the Coalition Application, too, likes to be strong out of the gate each summer by going live on July 1, one whole month before its larger competitor, the Common Application, which is available to rising seniors on August 1.

Yours truly, upon hearing about design and functionality upgrades to the 2019-2020 Coalition App, tried to create an account to review the application this morning, but never received the verification email to complete the process of creating an application. I then asked for the verification email to be resent. Still nothing. I looked in my inbox, I looked in my spam folder, I looked under by bed – but it was nowhere to be found. So, an official review of the 2019-2020 Coalition App will have to wait until a later date.

(Update: about an hour after publishing this article, the writer received two verification emails from the Coalition Application, which permitted access to the application; a review of the 2019-2020 Coalition Application will be forthcoming in this space in the near future)

Other colleges either never take their applications down or have also made available their 2020 application before Independence Day. Notable names in this category include Georgetown University and Wake Forest University.

University of Florida to Finally Accept Common Application

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Gainesville, Florida is home to University of Florida.

Charles Murphy, University of Florida’s Director of Freshman and International Admissions has made news that is sure to boost University of Florida’s first-year application numbers, make UF more selective for first-year applicants, bring smiles to the faces of high school counselors across the country, and keep high school seniors on edge later into this upcoming year’s admissions cycle.

“Starting with the 2019-20 application cycle, the University of Florida will accept both the Common Application and the Coalition Application. As you likely know, we have exclusively taken the Coalition Application the last few years, and look forward to continued partnerships with Coalition for applications and programming aimed at promoting access and student success. We are still finalizing some internal logistics with the Common Application, so you will not yet see this information updated on our admissions website or the Common Application’s website. However, that information will be updated as soon as possible once everything is finalized.” Murphy shared.

Murphy went on to add that starting during the 2019-2020 admissions cycle, UF’s admissions notification date will move back to the last Friday of February, which for the upcoming admissions cycle is February 28, 2020. In recent years, UF has notified applicants of their admissions decisions in early February. According to Murphy, UF already enjoys “consistent year to year increases in application volume,” and with the acceptance of the Common App, UF will certainly need the extra weeks in February to review what will surely be the biggest increase in applications UF has experienced yet based on how other colleges’ first-year application numbers have increased after joining the Common App.

UF’s one first-year application deadline of November 1 will remain the same as in past years. High school counselors have not so much enjoyed having their students apply to UF in recent years, as the university has most recently been a Coalition Application exclusive college, which means it accepted no application other than the Coalition Application. The Coalition Application, while a good idea in theory (it was created to promote equity and access and to serve as a strong and more user-friendly counter balance to the Common App), turns out to be an increasingly wretched application in practice, as its functionality and usability has taken a nose dive with each passing admissions cycle. This is saying a lot because the application was never as user-friendly as behemoth competitor Common App (approaching 1,000 members) or the small but seamless Universal College App (in an inexplicable funk with only ten members). In fact, the Coalition Application is so horrible to use from the perspective of applicants (I had one student fly into an uncontrollable rage this past year when trying to navigate her Coalition Application, while another student I was working with at one point pushed his chair back from the computer where he was working on the Coalition Application and proceeded to just look out into the distance in what seemed like a catatonic state for at least four minutes after becoming completely stupefied by the application’s interface) that I purposely won’t link to it in this article for fear that doing so would encourage students to use it. High school counselors have been increasingly befuddled by how to advise students to navigate the Coalition Application, which seems filled with trap doors, dead ends, and missing links.

Sadly, University of Maryland, College Park and University of Washington will remain Coalition-exclusive colleges for the upcoming admissions cycle. Meanwhile, University of Virginia and Dartmouth College have quietly made clear that they will stop accepting the hot mess that is the Coalition Application for the 2019-2020 application cycle, though both institutions did not use those words – or any words, actually – in making the change.

With so many colleges now accepting the Common App for first-year college entry admissions, UF can expect a lot more unserious apps coming its way, which, trust me, is just fine with UF because it will allow UF to increase its selectivity (UF will get to reject a higher percentage of students than ever before) and perceived prestige (though prestige, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder). It will also allow UF to turn away more Florida residents who often get to attend the institution for little out-of-poket money because of Florida’s generous Bright Futures scholarships, which are funded by players and addicts alike of the Florida Lottery.

University of California: Restrictions for Out-of-State Students Seeking Resident Tuition

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UC Berkeley

The nine University of California campuses, featuring top programs in sunny locales, attract many out-of-state students. UCLA, for example, processed 113,761 applications last fall — the highest in the nation – with 22,822 from out-of-state.

Those numbers make admission very competitive, but out-of-state students can take heart: they are admitted at a higher rate (22% of out-of state applicants to UCLA were admitted in 2018, versus 12% of in-state), because fewer will ultimately enroll (24% of admitted out-of-state students to UCLA enrolled, versus 50% of in-state). The nonresident tuition, however, can sting – it’s an additional $28,992 per year.

Hoping to offset this, nonresidents frequently explore possible routes to resident tuition. In truth, there are many restrictions for out-of-state students seeking to qualify.

UC says:

“Obtaining California residency for the purposes of tuition and fees is extremely difficult for undergraduates with nonresident parents (this includes transfer students from community colleges and other postsecondary institutions within California).     

Virtually all nonresident undergraduates with nonresident parents remain nonresidents for the duration of their undergraduate career at UC.”

Still, many out-of-state students will continue their quest to qualify. The following provides some guidance for their typical questions.

Can I qualify for residency if I get a California driver’s license and register to vote, and/or my parents buy property in California?

No.

UC says:

“Residence can be established only by the union of physical presence and intent. Physical presence alone is insufficient; intent alone is insufficient.”

This means that to establish residency, the student and family must relocate to California (physical presence), and establish legal ties in California while severing ties to their former place of residence (intent).

Furthermore, you must be continuously physically present in California for more than one year (366 days) immediately prior to the term start date. Also note that any reclassification of residency is not retroactive.

Aren’t there any exceptions?

Yes.

The list of exceptions, however, is very specific, such as:

  • a nonresident student who is the dependent of a California resident parent
  • a student member of the U.S. Armed Forces on active duty in California
  • an amateur student athlete training at a U.S. Olympic Training Center in California

What if I am financially independent and I move to California and work there for 366 days before starting school — will I qualify?

Maybe. 

In addition to establishing residency in California for 366 days prior to the start of the term, a self-supporting student must also “be able to verify financial independence for the two full years immediately preceding the term” they plan to enroll.

UC says:

“This requirement makes it extremely difficult for most undergraduates who are not financially dependent on a California-resident parent to qualify for classification as a California resident.”

My neighbor’s son attends a California State University and he doesn’t pay out-of-state tuition. How can I do that at a UC?

The circumstances may be different, so you will need more information.

UC says:

“Residency for purposes of UC tuition is specific to the University of California and separate from the California Community Colleges and California State University systems and may be different from residency for purposes of UC admission and other state rules or regulations governing residency for other purposes.”

My aunt lives in California. Can I just use her address to show that I am a resident?

No.

If a student conceals facts or makes untruthful statements regarding their residency, they are subject to penalty of perjury.

UC says:

“A student must sign the Statement of Legal Residence even if the Student has yet to reach the age of majority; pursuant to State of California law, a Minor may be prosecuted for perjury.”

What about the Nonresident Supplemental Tuition (NRST) exempt classification — how can I qualify?

You may qualify if you meet specific criteria, such as:

Who is the right person to contact for accurate information?

UC says:

“Inquiries regarding UC residency for purposes of tuition should be directed to a campus Residence Deputy in the campus Registrar’s Office or to a Residency Analyst in the Office of the General Counsel of The Regents of the University of California, Office of the President.”

The information provided above is applicable only to nonresident U.S. citizens; and is not comprehensive or all-inclusive. Find out more about residency requirements on the UC website at the Board of Regents Policy 3105 on Residency and Payment or Waiver of Tuition, Non-Resident Supplemental Tuition and Mandatory Systemwide Fees; the UC Residence Policy and Guidelines 2019/2020; and Understanding Residency.

Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough in College Admissions Either

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Earlier this month, I was trying to figure out what day it was.  Rather than look at the calendar, I simply looked at the College Admissions Facebook page on my computer screen.  There was one story about the record low admit rates at Ivy League colleges, four stories about how most colleges admit a vast majority of their applicants, and two or three reminders that it’s all about what you do in college, not where you do it.

“So” I said to myself, “it must be April 10th.” And I was right.

There is something equally comforting and disturbing about the college admissions grieving cycle. It begins in late March, when we all bemoan it’s easier to get struck by lightning than to get admitted to a selective school.  Even the recent admissions scandal, replete with movie stars and lots of cash, played right into the timing of the “ain’t it awful” phase.

Early April gives way to requests for help with aid packages and muffled cries for some kind of reform from the madness of the application process.  Mid-April begins the search for schools willing to accept great kids who somehow ended up with “nowhere” to go, and late April finds us back in the trenches, asking about colleges for really bright juniors who want to study Hungarian and elephants.

This is our version of thoughts and prayers.  Like legislators tackling school safety, we look at the misshapen blob college admissions has become long enough to be horrified, only to get swept away by the need to make the broken system work just one more time, if only for the benefit of next year’s hardworking seniors. Major changes are just too far out of reach, and minor changes make no palpable difference, so we sigh and carry on, hoping a thoughtful social media post or two will somehow turn the tide. Real change, it seems, is beyond our grasp.

It isn’t.  Like anything else that’s out of shape, moving in a new direction requires a little bit of time, and a ton of vision.  No one in this profession is short on vision; they’re stymied by how to bring that vision to life. Here are some starter ideas.

College Admission Personnel who want to open up college access have all kinds of small projects that, when regularly tended to, can take on lives of their own.

  • Buy lunch for someone on your student success team, and get an overview of their work.  What students are doing well once they’re on campus, and which ones aren’t? Is there anything your institution can learn from the success of Georgia State, understanding that student success is far more than a cut and copy endeavor? What does any of this mean about who you’re recruiting—and, more important, if they have no idea who’s succeeding and why, why not?
  • If you have two counselor fly-in programs, cut it to one.  Use the new-found money to hold a three-day College Counselor Workshop for any school counselor in your area with less than five years’ experience.  As a rule, counselor graduate programs teach nothing meaningful about college counseling.  You know the counselors who know their stuff, and you have a NACAC affiliate at your disposal.  Bring them in, and let them train your local rookies.
  • As long as you’re at it, have coffee with the director of your graduate counseling program, and ask them if you can have a three-hour class period to talk about college admission.  Most counselor educators will have the humility to admit they’ve been out of the college admissions game too long, so they’ll give you the time.  Bring along two of your favorite counselors, and the grad students will be begging for more.  If you don’t know what you’d do with those three hours, I have a program that’s in the box and ready to present, and you can have it.
  • Call a test-optional college that looks like yours and ask how it’s going. The argument that test optional is a ruse to raise average test scores means nothing to the bright kid heading to University of Chicago this fall who can’t even spell SAT.  If colleges that look like yours have figured out test scores mean nothing in the application of a straight A student– and they have– maybe your school could open things up, too.

High School Counselors  have eight bajillion kids on their caseloads and duties that have nothing to do with counseling.  That said, find a way to get to work twenty minutes early once a week, and pick one of these projects to work on:

  • Shoot an email to the professional development chair of your NACAC affiliate and volunteer to be a mentor.  Less than thirty graduate programs in the country devote a course to college counseling, and it’s showing.  What you know about this profession will be an oasis to a new counselor, and most of the mentoring can occur through email and phone calls.
  • Look at your messaging about college options.  Do you tell students and parents about test optional colleges, community colleges, or state colleges with amazing residential programs?  Use this time to bring yourself up to speed on the paths your students aren’t taking, then put together a plan for spreading the word to parents and students.
  • When’s the last time you talked college with your middle school and elementary mental health partners?  Opening up postsecondary options is as much a matter of changing the mindset of parents as it is presenting options to students—and if that’s starting in ninth grade, forget it.  Ask your NACAC affiliate for grant opportunities to strengthen your K-8 postsecondary curriculum, and build the partnerships needed to make it work.

No one in this business was surprised last month to discover the wealthy have an advantage applying to college. What may come as a surprise is how much we can change that dynamic by throwing our hearts behind that change with twenty minutes a week, giving tangible shape to our thoughts, prayers, and deepest hopes for this profession.

UVA now offers an alternative route to Charlottesville

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While not exactly a “side door,” a new gate has opened to some Virginia students deferred from University of Virginia’s Class of 2023 – as long as they are willing to spend a year in rural Wise, Virginia.

Joining the ranks of colleges offering “alternative” routes to admission, the University of Virginia is proposing that a select group of students postpone starting in Charlottesville and spend a year at UVa-Wise, a small liberal arts college located not far from the Kentucky border.

“We are offering Virginians who were placed on the wait list for the College of Arts and Sciences the opportunity to enroll at the UVA College at Wise located in Southwest Virginia for one year before automatically enrolling at UVA in Charlottesville. Students in this program must complete 30 hours of transferrable credit post high school graduation at UVA-Wise with a 3.0 cumulative GPA or better to transfer into the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA.”

UVa has always had a great relationship with Virginia’s community college system and annually admits students earning two-year associates degrees through a guaranteed admission program. The UVa-Wise transfer offer is something new and wasn’t announced until notices went out to students wait listed for fall 2019 admission to UVa.

But not everyone was excited by the prospect of spending a year in rural Virginia, even if it meant an automatic transfer to the University of Virginia. Students posting on College Confidential had mixed reactions. One noted that UVa-Wise is “very much in the middle of nowhere,” while another pointed out that “it also seems to be a very small school, but maybe that would just mean more a more personalized education for the first year?”

One Fairfax County Public School student didn’t know much about UVa-Wise, but thought his offers at William and Mary and Virginia Tech made better sense for him. While he’s opting to stay on the UVa wait list, he has no intention of beginning his college career in Wise, Virginia. He added, “I don’t know anyone considering the offer.”

A member of the UVa-Wise Class of ’90 was quick to respond, “Is it small? Yes. Is the Town of Wise small? Yes. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a freshman. The classes are much less overcrowded, but the professors have very high standards and the academic rigor is there. The education is top notch.”

And the underlying message was clear, “If a year in Wise got you a ticket into Charlottesville and that’s your dream school, why not take it?”

Founded in 1954 as the Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, UVa-Wise first offered four-year degrees in 1966 and officially changed its name to the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, in 1999.

Since reaching a peak enrollment of 2,420 in 2012, UVa-Wise has steadily decreased in size to the point that the website reports a current enrollment of 2,021.

But having made a significant investment in new facilities, the Commonwealth is not about to let the university fail. Last week, UVa-Wise announced a rollback of the three-percent tuition increased planned for 2019-20, to $11,154—a bit less than the $14,094 in-state tuition (not including UVa’s substantial fees) planned for Charlottesville next year. In return for eliminating the tuition increase, UVa-Wise will receive an addit­­ional $235,000 from the Virginia General Assembly.

In addition, the General Assembly recently approved legislation allowing the college to offer reduced tuition to students who live within the Appalachian Regional Commission territory, which stretches from rural New York to Mississippi.

According to a press release, “The law is seen as one way for the liberal arts college, a division of the University of Virginia, to counter the same enrollment drop that is affecting most higher education institutions across the nation.”

But aside from some possible enrollment benefits for UVa-Wise, the University of Virginia is experimenting with a growing trend in higher education, which has created an underground network of alternative admissions offers. And these unexpected options contribute significantly to the confusion and stress faced by college applicants at this time of year.

For example, without apparent regard for harm done to freshman retention rates at other institutions, Cornell University admits students as sophomores, as long as they spend freshman year at another college or university and meet certain academic requirements. Northeastern University admits some freshman provided they study abroad for the first semester, while the University of Maryland admits students for the spring semester and encourages those students to take part in a fall program on campus where they could only take classes late in the afternoon or evening.

At Hamilton College, second semester admits may participate in a “gap” semester or enroll in courses at Arcadia University, at their London campus. The University of Southern California offers the “Trojan Transfer Plan,” through which students are provided with “a clear and predictable path to enrolling at USC for sophomore year” by attending a community college or one of four colleges in Europe. The University of Vermont, Middlebury College, Brandeis University, Rochester University, Michigan State, as well as the University of Tampa all offer second semester admission. And the list goes on.

On the plus side, these alternative admission plans offer students the possibility of attending their dream schools, even though they may not have been admissible as freshmen for the fall semester. On the other hand, these plans provide ways for colleges to dodge reporting lower scores or GPAs for the incoming class and to fill vacancies left by students traveling abroad or transferring out.

But the UVa-Wise offer seems to have a broader objective and could potentially benefit both schools. According to Kathy Still, UVa-Wise communications director, “Accepting students from the deferred list would further strengthen the relationship between Campus and Grounds,” which administratively share UVa President Jim Ryan and the UVa Board of Visitors.

While the College at Wise is unsure how many prospective UVa students will opt to take advantage of the new program, Ms. Still advises that “…interest is high and calls to our admissions office are brisk.” She goes on to add, “The students who enter the program would find an engaging faculty, rigorous academic classes, and they would leave after one year with 30 credit hours under their belts. It’s a win-win situation.”

In no rush, Case Western and Tulane keep some Early applicants in suspense

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Slow and steady wins the race?

Once upon a time, refined Early Decision and Early Action etiquette dictated that by December 15 colleges would inform such applicants of their admission, deferral, or rejection. My how times have changed!

While the likes of Penn, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Wash U., and Yale got on with it last week, some big names are keeping their powder dry to seemingly the last moment. University of Michigan and Boston College are notorious in recent years for December 18 or later admissions notifications to their Early Action applicants; yet, this year, two more colleges seem to believe the maxim that they should, “save the best for last.”

The two notable stragglers this December are Case Western Reserve University and Tulane University.

In Case’s case, Robert R. McCullough, the university’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, announced Monday, “We expect to send applicants an email providing a link to the secure webpage with their admission status on Wednesday, Dec. 19. We will begin sending these email notifications around 8 p.m. EST. Students who have applied for financial aid will also be able to see their financial aid package online at that time.” Just two years ago Case’s Early Action notifications came out a whole week earlier in December. That was before Case Western introduced Early Decision I and II into the mix and with it gone are the days of earlier Early notifications.

UPDATE 12/19/18 @ 7:20 EST: McCullough needs more time! On December 19 in the evening he announced, “Unfortunately, we find that we need a little more time to be absolutely sure applicants’ decisions, scholarships and financial aid packages are correct. We are therefore rescheduling decision release for Early Action and Early Decision admission until 8 p.m. Eastern Thursday, December 20.” He also expressed “regret” for holding students in suspense for another day but wanted to ensure the decisions they receive are accurate.”

Tulane will let Early Action applicants to the New Orleans university know of their admissions decisions on Thursday, December 20, 2018 at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Jeff Schiffman, Tulane’s Director of Admission shared, “I think it is also worth mentioning that Tulane saw a 14% increase in applications this year. Bottom line, we could fill up multiple freshman classes with students who are academically qualified to attend Tulane. We could fill up multiple freshman classes just with students who would be great fits here and genuinely want to be at Tulane. The problem is we can’t admit all of them.”

To Shiffman’s credit – and Tulane’s – the university notified its Early Decision applicants regarding their admissions decisions refreshingly fast. Tulane’s ED admission letters left Tulane’s Office of Admission on November 16 and were made available online at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 19. Talk about a nice Thanksgiving present! More universities should try to turn around admissions decisions in fewer than three weeks (Tulane’s Early Decision application deadline was November 1)!

Tulane, back in the day, released its Early Action notifications in November, but that was before they got into the ED I and ED II business recently.

So, seniors dreaming of a Case Western or Tulane acceptance letter this Christmas, hold on just a bit longer.