College Application process

What happens to your applications after you tell a school that you are not going to go there?
do they have the right to keep it for a certain period of time or do they get rid of them right away?

Here (private university in New York State), applications of students who do not enroll are the property of the college. They are discarded fairly quickly. We have no legal obligation to keep them, and we don’t have the space to store them.