For many teens an inevitable part of the college admissions process is disappointment.
Ambitious students targeting highly selective schools will often fail to secure an admission to their dream school.
One way to avoid this emotional rejection is to not become too attached to any particular college or university. However, this is difficult 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 actions families can take when they receive bad news.
Understand the odds when pushed
Sometimes the rejection of the applicant is delayed. Instead of immediately crushing a student's hope, a college will “delay” the admissions decision until later. Frankly, this is often a way colleges try to lessen the pain of ending up delivering bad news.
Students whose application decisions have been deferred applied Early Decision or Early Action in the fall. They had hoped to get an early nod, but will have to wait until the regular decision comes out to find out their fate.
Deferred students who want to increase their chances of being accepted into the regular admissions cycle can submit an updated transcript that includes grades from the first semester of their senior year. They can also update a school on any accomplishments they've had since the application was submitted and perhaps share an additional recommendation. These students can also write a short note expressing their desire to participate.
Understand your waitlist odds
Students may also be waitlisted when regular acceptance notices are submitted. A waitlisted student generally faces even worse odds than those who were deferred. Depending on the number of applicants actually admitted, some places may become available at a school for waitlisted students.
Before getting one's hopes up, a waitlisted student should check the past fortunes 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 on admissions, financial aid, and other areas.
In section C2 of the document you will see the number of students who were on the waitlist, those who accepted a place on the waitlist and those the college finally 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 waiting list at Lehigh. And this is the reality in many highly selective schools. Keep in mind that most schools that do not reject the vast majority of their applicants do not need to maintain waiting lists.
For those determined to successfully get off a waitlist, students can try the same strategies as those who have been deferred.
Try Early Decision II
Students who were rejected after submitting an Early Decision application in November may consider submitting a late-stage ED application. As you probably already know, Early Decision offers the best chance for a teenager to get accepted to a highly rejecting school. With ED, students must promise to attend regardless of the merit and/or financial package offered to the juniors.
What fewer families know is that there is a second chance to apply for ED. It's called Early Decision II. The deadline for this later ED option is usually in January.
It is ideal for students who are aiming for an elite institution but were rejected on an initial ED attempt or who needed better test scores or grades from their senior year's first semester report card before trying out. It can also make sense for students who aren't thrilled with the schools they got into through Early Action or rolling admissions in the fall and early winter.
Here is a list of colleges and universities that offer ED II.
Start over
The traditional admissions cycle bit the dust years ago. Traditionally, the school filing deadline was May 1, and while many of the more selective schools stick to that date, many others, who have to work harder to finalize their first class, do not. So even when students are rejected by their preferred schools, opportunities remain to apply more in the spring and even summer.
A great resource for looking up potential schools at the last minute or actually early in the admissions process is TuitionFit.
TuitionFit can expand the college search for likely families to include promising colleges and universities that weren't on their radar. TuitionFit serves as a repository of current college admissions and merit and financial aid prices as part of its goal to make college prices transparent.
Students who share at least one of their offers with TuitionFit receive free access to other current prices from students with similar financial need and academic profile.
With this online platform, parents can compare the awards their child has received with the awards similar students are offering from colleges and universities across the country in real time. Using this resource, families can discover potential colleges that may have never crossed their radar before.
Lynn O'Shaughnessy, a nationally recognized expert, offers an online course – Savvy College Planning – exclusively for financial advisors. Click here to get Lynn's guide, Finding the Most Generous Colleges.