Until this year, I’ve never heard of declaration day. It seems to be the day where an incoming college freshman declares which university s/he will attend. Is this something new? It’s all over my university’s Instagram feed.
Wait—if you’re incoming at a college, you’re already there, and a declaration that you’ll attend where you already are would be utterly tautological, superfluous, pleonastic. I don’t get what’s the point of this at all.
If you want to put it that way, it’s when you become incoming.
Sounds like the sort of decadent frivolity engaged in by bourgeoisie types who have the option of which university to attend, let alone having the means and connections to even get invited to one in the first place.
It’s existed for decades. Every college has a deadline for when students must tell them they’re attending, for reasons that are immediately obvious.
Schools may be publicizing it as a PR tool, but everyone publicizes things these days.
Yeah, it’s just one more bit of marketing nonsense. There’s no real honest-to-God deadline to declare so long as the school still has slots available.
Even after she’d chosen her school last year my kid was still getting offers and ‘requests for consideration’ up until the first of August.
There’s a deadline in the sense that if you don’t accept the admission offer from a particular school by their deadline, they start contacting wait listed students, and you’re no longer guaranteed a slot.
Well, obviously, but keep in mind that the development of the educational proletariat is conditioned by the development of the educational bourgeoisie.
I thought this was going to be about something along the lines of the National Letter of Intent program, where potential college athletes sign an “official letter of intent” to attend a particular school. I think the deal is, in exchange for agreeing not to transfer to a different school for at least the first two years, the school guarantees the student that his/her scholarship will remain intact. A number of highly-recruited athletes turn their college selection announcements into big deals; you can probably find a number of them on YouTube, and I’m pretty sure some non-athletes have similar “announcements” that spoof these.
Apparently, a number of colleges have a May 1 deadline for putting down a deposit on the first term’s tuition; somehow, this morphed into “National College Decision Day.”
Every damn thing has to be an “event” now. I await the day that there will be a graduation ceremony for each and every year of school and an elaborate “-posal” for every social event.
(I blame those stupid clouds over there.)
Untrue. If you don’t declare by the deadline, the college will assume you don’t want to attend. Any financial aid will go to those who have declared. Housing will be distributed among those who have declared. So declaring late may forfeit your financial aid and housing space.
Yes, maybe there will be something available, but you can’t count on it.
What happens if you ‘over declare’? What happens if you get a better offer? Is it just a marketing term for “deposit is due today”?
Declares it to whom?
What do they do? Go to all the other universities and say, “Heh! I’m going to that one, not yours.” I don’t think so.
There’s nothing to stop you from telling every University to which you’ve applied that you’ve chosen them. (Until they demand payment for class registration.) That’s why this “Day” makes no sense.
It is a deadline that is primarily relevant to students who have applied to multiple, selective colleges. For colleges it is useful because it gives them a fairly clear idea of the size of the incoming class and helps to lock-in students. For students it is useful because it prevents colleges from forcing them to make a decision before they all the offers on the table, i.e., we’ll give you this scholarship but you have to commit to coming by this Friday.
Applications for graduate schools have a similar process but the deadline is April 15, see The National Voice for Graduate Education - CGS
Basically it helps makes offers and decisions more orderly although there is a flurry of activity around the deadline as students accept/decline and frees up money for other students. (At least that is the case for grad admissions, not sure of undergraduate).
For colleges with rolling admissions, the date really isn’t relevant.
I’m sure some students accept multiple offers as the commitment cost is relatively low (a few hundred dollars of deposit). And if they are undecided and want more time the only penalty is that they lose the deposit at the school they don’t attend. It would annoy admissions/administrators at the college they don’t attend but there really isn’t a sanction.
True but one does have to put down a deposit and that would be lost. Less relevant to undergrad but for graduate school if someone accepted multiple offers and then turned some down it would be problematic for them. Not directly but because the universe is much smaller and faculty talk about these things. So they would alienate the folks at the university they turned down (particularly a problem in a small field) and also gain a reputation as unreliable and untrustworthy. Possible to work through but not what you really want to start out with. But again this is the grad school world.
You are not going to get a better offer (at least from these more selective schools). There is a lot more demand than supply. And by having the May 1st deadline ensures that a student can compare all the offers that have been made.
Of course, a school with rolling admissions may still make an offer of admissions after May 1st but 1) financial aid (particularly scholarships) might not be forthcoming and 2) and attending one of these might be cheaper, but not “better”. Of it depends on what the students values and how they define better.