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How long would you wait before contacting college re. Admission decision?


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So, dd applied to her colleges of choice last month. One of the schools sent a thank you for applying email, but has yet to send an admission. She qualifies for full merit scholarship there, so I'm sure she will be admitted. Also, she got a letter yesterday encouraging her to apply for their honors college.

 

Scholarship applications are due by December 1, and we don't want to miss the deadline for that.

 

How long would you wait before having dd contact admissions to ask?

 

(We are weird, but we don't want the college to know.)

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What is their timeline? Beginning of November seems terribly early for an admissions decision. Many colleges do not notify until March, and any earlier inquiry would be futile.

I would go ahead and do the scholarship application and not ask about admissions decision unless they specify on their website a decision deadline that has passed.

Edited by regentrude
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Unless the school is known for sending out early acceptance letters, I would wait.  Students who apply early decision usually hear back in December and students who apply Early Acceptance often hear back in January or February.  Many schools do mass mailings of acceptances rather than have them trickle out. 

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She's been accepted everywhere else she applied already. This is not a competitive school at all and their applications opened very early, like end of summer.

 

Only admitted students can apply for the scholarships, so if her acceptance letter was lost in the mail, it will matter.

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I should add that they seem kind of scattered. After the "thanks for applying" email was a "apply soon!" Email to the same address. Last year she was getting thanks for visiting/visit soon mail at the same time.

 

App was online so we know it is complete.

 

Not her first choice, but a big financial safety if she doesn't miss their scholarship deadline.

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She's been accepted everywhere else she applied already. This is not a competitive school at all and their applications opened very early, like end of summer.

 

Only admitted students can apply for the scholarships, so if her acceptance letter was lost in the mail, it will matter.

 

If that is the case, and the scholarship app deadline is Dec 1, I would call ASAP.

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So, dd applied to her colleges of choice last month. One of the schools sent a thank you for applying email, but has yet to send an admission. She qualifies for full merit scholarship there, so I'm sure she will be admitted. Also, she got a letter yesterday encouraging her to apply for their honors college.

 

Scholarship applications are due by December 1, and we don't want to miss the deadline for that.

 

How long would you wait before having dd contact admissions to ask?

 

(We are weird, but we don't want the college to know.)

 

Go ahead and have her call the admissions office since she cannot apply for scholarships unless she is admitted. If nothing else, they can give her a timeline for the decision. It's somewhat unusual that one couldn't apply for scholarships unless one is admitted, so make sure that information is accurate too.

 

It's not unusual to get conflicting e mails from the same university ("please apply!" "thank you for applying") as different departments are involved in the mailings.

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She's been accepted everywhere else she applied already. This is not a competitive school at all and their applications opened very early, like end of summer.

 

Only admitted students can apply for the scholarships, so if her acceptance letter was lost in the mail, it will matter.

 

Because of your last statement, I'd have her call Monday (if she didn't today).  I'd have her word it in a way similar to, "I'm interested in applying for the ______ Scholarship and I'm wondering what the timing is for receiving notice of admission.  My application was complete on _____.  This is our/my first experience with applying to college, so I'm not sure what's common for name of school."

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Is there a place she can look online and see what the status of her application is? I know of some students (especially at disorganized schools) that have found out this way.

Not that we can find. She did find out that way for her top choice, but the official letter followed in a couple of days.

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I would definitely agree with what’s stated above about having her call. I wouldn’t worry too much about some of the extraneous mail (I.e., the apply soon, etc.) that you’ve gotten. My daughter is attending a school this year as a freshman and this last week she received mail from them for prospective students. We laughed and gave it to her younger sister. I don’t think admissions talks to the prospective students department. Basically, I don’t think all departments at universities talk well with one another. Probably because these institutions are just too big.

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Yes, call and talk to Admissions. If they have rolling admission, then it isn't too early. Find out what the status of her application is - did they receive all of her required documents? Find out what the timeline is for getting her admissions decision. Ask about an online portal but calling is probably better anyway. I work in an admissions office and I can tell you that sometimes we receive documents that don't get marked in their electronic record, so you'll get more accurate information talking to someone who can physically pull your file and look at it. Occasionally a completed file doesn't get marked "ready for review" and then it just sits there in the cabinet until the student calls and asks about it.

 

Also there's all kinds of reasons for the conflicting email messages, so don't need to worry about that. Reporting software is based on download of information from the night before, so she could have applied and gotten an auto response saying "thank you for applying", but then an email blast to students who hadn't applied could have gone out the same day, and based on previous day's data, she was still not applied. Also depending on how well the application software integrates with the student record database, there could be a delay in having her application status show up in her student record. These scenarios could happen if the conflicting emails happened within a day of each other, two tops. More than that, and I'd probably call Admissions just to make sure everything was okay.

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