It’s that time of year. Students who applied ED and EA have already heard from the colleges regarding their admission decisions. Students who are applying regular decision will be sending off those applications this month and hearing early in the spring. What happens next?

Colleges will provide your student with one of four responses: offered admission, wait-listed, deferred, or not offered admission. Today, students hear as the notices are posted online. The days of waiting for the letter are over. We live in an instant gratification world. You can expect, however, for your student to be hitting that computer refresh button on the day notices are posted!

Offers of admission

One counselor I work with refuses to call the college’s decision an acceptance. He prefers to call them “offers of admission”.

After all your teen’s hard work, there is nothing more satisfying or rewarding than reading this:

Congratulations, and welcome to State University. From a highly and very competitive group of applicants, you have been selected as a member of the upcoming freshman class in the College of Business. Because of your accomplishments and potential, the Board of Admissions believe that you will be an excellent addition to the State University community and will take full advantage of the wide variety of academic, cultural and extracurricular possibilities that await you.

Offers of admission are the prizes at the end of this long journey. You and your teen have done the work and will reap the rewards of your focused labor.

Wait-listed: what can you do?

If you land on a school’s waitlist, you’ll need to decide whether you will pursue or decline the waitlist invitation plus make plans to attend another college. Follow these tips to make sure you’re covered.

• Quickly respond to let the school know whether you will accept or decline your position on the waitlist.
• If you accept,
• Send a follow-up letter to let the school know why you would be excited to attend and the reasons why their college is still the best-fit school for you.
• Stay focused on your grades and prepping for AP exams.
• Request an interview, so you can reiterate your commitment to the school.
• If you decline, reevaluate the rest of your list. What schools do you need to learn more about? Which schools can you still visit?
• No matter what, get excited about the schools that accepted you. Decide which college fits you best and send in your deposit. If you do get off another college’s waitlist (and accept!), you’ll forfeit your deposit.

Relying on a wait-listed college is a gamble. Before you choose to do this, do some research at College Navigator and determine how many students are taken off the college waitlist every year. If it’s a very small percentage, it might be time to move on to a college that offered admission.

Deferred: how should you respond?

If you applied early decision or early action, you may receive a notification that your application has been deferred to the regular admission pool. This can happen if a college decides they need more information (like senior year grades or test scores) before making their final decision. Here are your priorities:

• Work hard to keep your grades up.
• If you plan to submit new SAT/ACT scores, prep thoroughly.
• Keep in touch with the admissions committee, and make sure you’re sending them the information they need to evaluate your application.
• Keep up your college search! If you applied Early Decision, you may not have done any additional college searching. Start looking at other options and apply to several colleges before the Regular Decision deadline.
• Look at the data. How often are deferred students offered admission? Be ready to move forward with other choices.

No offer of admission

As with the word acceptance, I prefer to refer to this response as “no offer of admission” instead of rejection. It softens the blow a bit. Hopefully, since your teen has done all the work, there will not be any of these responses. However, it’s entirely possible, especially if your teen applied to a highly selective college. If that does happen, help your teen focus on the colleges that said YES. It’s another of those life lessons that your teen will learn throughout college. And it’s another opportunity for you to reinforce the fact that sometimes life hands us disappointments. It’s what we do with those disappointments that build character.

If you didn’t get the news you were hoping for, it’s okay (and normal!) to feel disappointed. But don’t dwell too long! There are still some proactive things you can do to find your best-fit college.

• Focus on the schools that said “yes”! It’s time to visit or research in more depth the schools that accepted you. Sometimes your dream school has been on your mind for so long, that it can overshadow the rest of your options. There are bound to be plenty of new-to-you programs, internship opportunities, and other on-campus gems to get excited about!
• Stay positive! You might feel tempted to take a year off from academics altogether and apply to your first-choice school again next year. We caution against this route! It is easier to transfer to the school of your choice from a less prestigious school than to start again from scratch (even if you spend your year off doing something productive and character-building).
• Lean on your high school or college admissions counselor. Your counselor is a pro at helping students compare schools and decide which offer of admission—and financial aid package—to accept.