on December 16, 2025, 22:20:08, in reply to "APS does not count college visits as excused absences and many schools don’t offer tours"
Previous Message
over weekends or breaks. mini has made 5-6 campus visits/tours but we’re going to wait for admissions decisions before doing any more. Previous Message
apply to the ones you like as possibilities.
Previous Message
Tulane is pushing yield (amount of accepted students that enroll) and so they heavily emphasize engagement with the school.
Early decision is part of that, but so too is visiting campus, attending info sessions, contacting admissions, etc.
Which some of these are low effort… but how many kids can really afford to travel to New Orleans to visit campus prior to admission? Isn’t that going to impact low or mid income applicants?
Anyway, maybe it’s just how I applied, but I got in and THEN did my homework on the school that they’re looking for to get in now in the first place. Just feels like yield is a misplaced priority. Whether they want yield to have confidence in enrollment numbers or because it makes them more attractive to whoever does the rankings, I assume the answer is both. Previous Message
Meet the Millionaire Masters of Early Decision at Colleges
The enrollment chiefs at Tulane and the University of Chicago attracted many early applicants. Now both of them earn a lot of money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/business/tulane-university-chicago-early-decision.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k8.udP8.k1GX-ndYwYCs&smid=nytcore-ios-share
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/opinion/college-admission-early-decision-application.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k8.EK2b.bDrXbxTJXpuX&smid=nytcore-ios-share
At Boston University, her chances through early decision are three times as likely as through the less restrictive options. Elsewhere, the numbers are even more skewed: If you want to get into Amherst, signing away your chance to consider other options gives you an almost fourfold advantage. At Tulane, the advantage is fivefold. At Northeastern, it’s more than tenfold.
…
As she put it, “I’m only 17. At the end of the day I’m still a kid. I get why schools do early decision. But asking a 17-year-old to sign an agreement” that could obligate them to “pay $90,000 a year is a really, really big ask.” As of this writing, she’s still waiting to hear the school’s verdict.
The early decision agreement that students, parents and high school counselors must all sign states that a student must attend the college if accepted, but it hints at an exception if, even with financial aid, the cost of attending is still too high for the student to afford. The thing is, says Mark Salisbury, an expert on how financial aid and admissions interact, the school gets to decide what qualifies as too high. A spokesman for Tulane told me that of the people it admitted by early decision last year, it released around 10 percent from their obligation, for financial reasons. But applicants don’t know in advance how this will play out.
27
