Accepting and Declining

[Penguin]

What happens after you accept an admission offer? Do you get a barrage of exciting emails and start applying for housing? Is there any real advantage to accepting sooner rather than later? Like a better choice of housing, maybe?

What are best practices for declining an offer? I was thinking that he should send an email in addition to answering on the portal.

Anything else to think about?

 

[Mom0012]

I don’t remember a barrage of exciting emails once my son accepted.  He emailed the schools that he wasn’t going to attend.  I was kind of surprised that there was no set way to turn down acceptances.  Most schools seemed to just assume he would be attending.  I would have thought they would have had a clear way to turn down acceptances so they could make decisions about waitlisted students ASAP, but that did not seem to be the case.

[RootAnn]

DD has turned down one school so far that provided her with a post card for accepting or declining. They sent a nice letter back and within a week, the barrage of emails stopped.

She's put two housing deposits down because at those two places, the sooner you put a deposit down, the better your chance of getting your first choice of housing. ($10 to $25 of the deposit is non-refundable and neither requires acceptance of admission to apply for housing.) 

Some schools have already started orientation sign up so if you only have some dates you can go to, it makes sense to accept early (assuming you know where you want to go).

[GoodGrief]

Depends on the school as to whether there is an advantage to accepting an offer early. Usually the advantage is in regard to housing, but sometimes the pot might be sweetened in some other way. Neither of my older daughters' schools sent exciting e mails, and in the case of Princeton, there was absolutely nothing from them until summer.

As far as declining, my daughters declined as soon as it was clear they would not attend, as long as the college made it simple enough to do so, via a postcard or online form.

[lewelma]

DS accepted early and lost out on an unknown scholarship from another school because he had accepted before the scholarship was awarded.  If you are second on the list for a scholarship, you don't hear about it until the first person turns it down.   

[easypeasy]

Housing usually doesn't require acceptance before you can put down an early deposit (just be sure to read all the fine print - some housing deposits are nearly 100% refundable... others are nearly 100% NONrefundable!). One university with notoriously few housing options required a $500 deposit - and none of it, as I recall, was refundable. 😶 So, you either had to be okay with losing a chunk of $$$, or had to risk living on the streets. lol

Some schools require a somewhat early acceptance to accept a scholarship (one of dds schools was peculiarly early - she had to turn them down very early in the process due to the scholarship acceptance date).

Other than that - I can't think of a reason to accept any earlier than when you/she are 100% ready to do it!

We were surprised how difficult some schools made it to turn down the acceptance - where DD had to hunt down email addresses and/or phone numbers. DD emailed one uni specifically to free up space on the wait list, and they were just "*shrug* - just let the scholarship date pass and it will automatically show as though you've turned it down...." Three others had nice little buttons or links to click on from the portal - one of those sent the funniest/snarkiest "fine, but you're going to regret this decision" email while the other two sent very nice, positive "maybe we'll see you again for graduate school' type emails.