As someone who got her professional start as an admissions counselor and who has now spent over 25 years working in higher education, I’m intimately familiar with the annual ebbs and flows of the college admissions cycle. My internal calendar is set to an academic schedule and events like the opening of the new FAFSA cycle and the start of the new admissions cycle are as familiar to me as knowing when Halloween is every year.
This is why I tend to have a creeping feeling of dread as we get closer to the end of the admissions cycle every year.
I know that “decision day” is coming and I know that I’m going to spend a lot of time online wishing that so many kids weren’t getting their hearts crushed by a broken system.
A quick note: “decision day” (also sometimes called “Ivy Day” or “Ivy Decision Day”) refers to the day, usually in late March, when Ivy League1 (and some other highly selective schools) release their admissions decisions for students who applied as regular decision (rather than early decision) applicants. Generally speaking, the eight schools of the Ivy League collaborate2 to release their decisions not only on the same day, but at the same time, a situation that honestly seems like it was created in a lab to create maximum anxiety for high achieving high school students.
Research suggests that most students who apply to one Ivy League generally apply to multiple Ivies (as well as other highly selective schools that may release decisions on the same day), “decision day” has the potential to result in crazy joy or devastating disappointment.
Given that the least selective Ivy (Cornell) had about an 8% acceptance rate the last admissions cycle for which there is data, the VAST majority of students who are awaiting news on decision day are likely to end up at least a little confused and disappointed as they open their emails/student portals. The odds of getting a rejection are just so much higher than the odds of being accepted, even for the most high achieving students.
(A quick sidebar: Thanks to things like rolling admissions, priority deadlines, early action, and some colleges not wanting to be jerks who leave applicants hanging for six or more months3, most students already have their college acceptances in hand the time we get into the spring. Always remember that the majority of high school students aren’t going to end up at highly selective schools and it is entirely possible to have an application season that results in far more “yes” than “no” decisions by rejecting the idea that the only “good schools” are those that are in the top 20 or top 50 of selectivity.)
In the days following “decision day”, the Facebook groups, Discord servers, and Reddit threads where anxious parents and students hang out can be filled with heartbreaking posts. This year I’ve seen:
A student with a self-reported perfect GPA and a 1560 SAT score who is frantically looking for colleges and universities who are still accepting applications after he didn’t get into a single school that he applied to… because he was advised by his private college counselor to only apply for T20 schools4. As of decision day, he had nine outright rejections and one waitlist and crushing sense that he’d wasted his high school years chasing this dream
A student trying to make sense of how they got into Harvard but rejected by all of the other Ivies and by their top choice of Duke. What did Harvard (which admits 3% of their applicants) see that Duke (which usually admits closer to 7%) didn’t?
The parent of a kid who is going to be valedictorian of their school screaming about how affirmative action kept their kid out of the Ivies, despite the fact that affirmative action isn’t a thing anymore
Many, many, many accounts from students claiming that someone at their school who has worse grades/test scores/ECs/essays than theirs got in but they didn’t and they just don’t understand.
There is disappointment and anger and conspiracy theories and regret a plenty and, as someone who cares a lot about how students experience the college admissions process, it never gets easier to see how walloped some kids are by these rejections.
I often don’t respond to these posts online because I could easily lose an entire day to doing nothing beside trying to correct errors of fact and to quash some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories. But sometimes I wish I could reach out to every disappointed student and tell them the following things as they work to make sense of their rejection:
You almost certainly didn’t do something wrong5. The odds were simply never in your favor. Highly selective schools are routinely getting more than 50,000 applications and will only say “yes” to around 2,000 students. Thousands of students who never gotten a “B” in their life also got rejected. People with perfect SAT/ACT scores got rejected. Student who took every single AP class they could got rejected. You could have done everything “right”, followed every tip from every college admissions blog or expert, and still get rejected. The process isn’t fair and it never has been.
Your rejection isn’t really about you. Assuming you weren’t either wildly overreaching (e.g. your GPA was under a 3.0) and/or didn’t right your essay about how, like, Pol Pot is an underrated example of effective leadership or something similarly offensive, you should assume that your rejection isn’t actually evidence that they didn’t like you or didn’t think you could be successful. The truth is that most rejected students would probably do fine academically and socially at the schools that said no. The school was just looking to fill some boxes that you might not have fit.
The adults around you might not get it, especially if they went to one of these schools. Here’s an indisputable fact: it used to be easier to get into the Ivies. If you know adults who got into the schools that rejected you, that doesn’t mean that they were better students, smarter, or more accomplished. Harvard, for example used to admit five times as many applicants as they do know (largely because they got a lot less applications) and there are plenty of Ivy alums who certainly wouldn’t have gotten admitted under today’s application standards, so take any feedback from them about what you could have/should have done differently with several shakers of salt. There will also be lots of adults who are shocked, sad, and disappointed for you because they might not have realized how tough admission to T50 schools has become. You are allowed to feel sad and disappointed too.
You’ll never really know why they chose the students who did get in. One of the most destructive things about the highly selective admissions process is how it can make students obsessive and even mean sometimes trying to figure out why some other student at their school got in and they didn’t. There are always a lot of these stories online: the kid who got admitted but has no ECs, the kid who got admitted whose GPA is lower, the valedictorian who didn’t get in and the kid only in the top 5 or 10% of the class who did. I say this with love but also firmness: let it go. You’ll never know why someone else got picked and you didn’t. Maybe they were a legacy admit. Maybe the school is “need aware” and factors in finances in the admissions process and they didn’t need as much financial aid. Maybe their parent knows someone famous and they got a letter of rec from a big name or someone well connected in the school. Maybe they wrote a really, really good essay. Maybe you don’t actually know what their test scores and ECs actually are. Maybe they only wanted to admit a certain number of students from your school and that other person brought something else they were looking for or had great chemistry with their alumni interviewer or a faculty member when they did their campus visit. There are so many variables and you’ll NEVER actually know all of the details of someone else’s admissions file.
Your “spot” wasn’t stolen by someone else. Related to the last point: someone else who got in didn’t take something from you. This is a little tough love but: They didn’t get “your” spot. You never had a spot. There are no guarantees in highly selective admissions and even if you are sure you deserve to be there… that doesn’t mean that something was taken from you by someone else and speculating that it is because of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever can take you to some pretty gross places. Don’t do it. You might not be able to be happy for someone else who got in when you didn’t and that is super normal. But don’t be the asshole who tries to imply that the other people aren’t as qualified or smart as you are.
If you don’t end up at an Ivy/T20/T50 school, you’re in good company: The most selective colleges and universities in the country educate the small percentage of all college students. Less than 1% of college students at Ivy League institutions. Less than 3% of all students attend the so-called T20 school, perhaps about 5% attend schools in the top 50 of most ranking lists. There are many, many, many highly successful people who did not attend highly selective schools. There are Fulbright and Rhodes scholars coming state schools, there are people getting into Ivies for medical, law, and grad school coming from non-selective institutions. Now, to be real, the highly selective schools are great replicators of social privilege and there can be some advantages to the cache of the name and the connections people might make, but not getting into one of these schools doesn’t mean that the grad school or career of your dreams is lost to you. (Well… unless you want to be a staff writer for SNL. They really do have a penchant for nepo babies and Harvard alums, it seems.
I never want to minimize the very real feelings that college rejection can cause, especially for students who get a lot more “no”s than they do admissions. Some kids sacrifice a lot on the altar of college admissions and that truly makes me sad. High school should never be a four year gauntlet of academic perfectionism in the service of getting to be one of the 3% who get it to Harvard, but it is for some kids and it sucks when that gamble doesn’t pay off.
But there is good news.
Students almost certainly end up being happy, wherever they go.
One of my favorite pieces of higher ed research is that most students end up feeling good about their college choices, end up making friends and social connections, and feel like they are getting a good education… even if they didn’t get into their top choice institution. The odds are good that as they go through all of the developmental changes and maturing that happen from 17-22, they’ll spend a lot more time enjoying the experience they are having than mourning for the one they didn’t get to have.
There is so much life after college rejection, no matter where they go.
Ivy League: Brown, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Dartmouth, and Columbia
Or collude, depending on your level of cynicism
And, honestly, less selective schools typically want to notify students sooner rather than later so they can do the hard work of converting those students from admits to enrollees
This is malpractice. Nobody should ever advise a student to put all their eggs in that particular basket
Assuming they didn’t use AI to write their essay and have above average grades and test scores