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Important Tasks

Check Email and Application Portals Frequently

Apply for Financial Aid/Negotiation Strategies

Understanding College Admission Decisions and Next Steps

Making the Final College Decision

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• Check Email & Application Portals Frequently:  Seniors who have been working independently with Virtual College Counselors should have all of their applications submitted or ready to submit. Once all of those applications are in, it’s really important to check your email frequently for any updates from the school. It is also critical that you consistently check your prospective student portals for each school, to ensure that all application components have been received. Some schools add additional essays or components that can only be discovered and accessed through their portal, so applying before deadlines and checking frequently should ensure that no major piece is left out. Here’s a list of some things you should be looking for:

  • FAFSA/CSS Profile (when applicable)

  • High School Transcripts

  • School Report/School Profile

  • Letters of Recommendation

  • Student Self-Reported Academic Record (SSAR [if required])

  • Additional supplemental essays and responses not in the regular application

  • An additional scholarships application (if required for consideration)
    Please note, these portals are also where you’ll hear about most admission decisions. Most schools will send an email notifying you that a decision has been made and published in the portal, but some will just expect you to discover the decision on your own without prompting!

• Apply for Financial Aid/Negotiation Strategies:  If you haven’t done so already, we strongly encourage all families to apply for financial aid, especially considering some colleges require these forms to disperse merit scholarship funds. Instead of reinventing the wheel and writing our own version of these important documents, we are directing you to some of the most helpful links and best financial aid resources available:

  • Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)

  • College Scholarship Service Profile (CSS Profile)

    • Getting Started PDF for parents​​

    • Webpage on how to create an account

    • Schools that Require the CSS Profile

  • Big J Educational Consulting's blog page (this is a helpful resource to have all of your questions answered about the changes to FAFSA for this year, and what to expect in subsequent years.

    • 21 important tips for the FAFSA and CSS Profile

  • A helpful infographic from studentaid.gov

  • ​Once you have your official financial aid award letter that lays out the total cost of attendance and the aid being offered, you may have an opportunity to negotiate for more aid. Unless a school explicitly states that the aid award is finalized and non-negotiable, it typically never hurts to inquire about more funding opportunities. Students can reach out to their admissions representative to inquire about increasing merit scholarships or other potential opportunities (like departmental scholarships) once admitted. **Please note that students should also explore the scholarship pages on each college’s website to see if there are additional scholarships that they may be eligible to apply for through the institution.** And parents can reach out to the office of financial aid if there has been a change in finances that might warrant more financial support from the school. In that scenario, the parent will be requesting a professional judgment and likely completing a form for a change in financial circumstance.

  • Before you choose to pursue additional financial support in the form of non-institutional scholarships, it’s important to find out from the school if they allow scholarship stacking or practice scholarship displacement. Scholarship stacking will allow the student to take money earned through other scholarship avenues and add it onto their aid offer, minimizing loans or a gap in aid. If they practice scholarship displacement, that means that money earned outside of the institution will take the place of what was offered from the school. In these cases, the student only receives a lower cost of tuition if the scholarship(s) they earn outside of the institution exceed the scholarship offered by the institution. Free aid that does not need to be paid back (scholarships and grants) are typically the first to be reduced at schools that practice scholarship displacement, so there’s sometimes no actual benefit to earning other scholarships. Another thing to note is that most non-institutional scholarships are non-renewable, meaning they’re only available for the student’s first year of college. If the school displaces other merit scholarship from the institution as a result of earning an outside scholarship, there’s a chance that will result in paying significantly more over the four years at that school!

    • Relevant Blogs: ​Finding Scholarships on College Websites -- Can You Stack Scholarships? -- What is a Financial Aid Appeal? -- How to Find Scholarships -- How to Understand Your Financial Aid Award Letter

• Understanding College Admission Decisions and Next Steps: As colleges and universities send out their admission decisions, it’s important to understand all of the nuances in decisions being made and the next steps you can take:​​​​​​

  • Accepted/Admitted: If you receive an acceptance letter, it means you’ve been admitted to the institution. Some letters will indicate that you’ve been admitted to your intended major, while others may say that you were admitted to a pre-major or admitted to the school but not the major you listed on the application. And yet, there are still other nuances in acceptances! Some letters might indicate that you’re admitted, but for a summer start, or a spring start. Still others may be offering conditional acceptance as a sophomore, if you complete your freshman year elsewhere (Cornell University is a primary culprit of this kind of offer). Be sure to read the letter in its entirety to understand your acceptance.​

  • Rejected/Not Admitted: This one is pretty self explanatory: the school has reviewed your application and were unable to offer you admission to their incoming class.

  • Waitlist: It’s becoming more and more commonplace for schools to admit students to their waitlist instead of deferring (which you can read about below), admitting, or rejecting an application. The waitlist is typically a list of students who they believe can be successful in their school, but that they don’t have space for in the incoming class until they know who else will choose to enroll. Some schools admit a large portion of students off the waitlist, while others don’t admit any, or just a select few. Colleges won’t tell you which position you are on the waitlist, because many schools only go to the waitlist to fulfill various institutional priorities after the enrollment deadline (May 1st for most colleges). Students can choose whether or not they stay on the waitlist–there’s no guarantee staying on will lead to an offer of admission.

  • Deferred: If you applied Early Action (EA) or Early Decision (ED) and subsequently received a deferral to the regular decision round, it means they haven’t made a decision yet about your application. This can happen for many reasons–the school may not have had time to read all of the early applications (like at University of Michigan), they may want to see the mid-year grade report to ensure that your positive grade trend is sustainable, or they may want to see your application in the context of the rest of the applicant pool. What’s most important to remember is that some schools only accept or defer in the early rounds, without sending out any rejections. In those cases, the deferral is typically a “soft rejection” and it’s best to focus your energies on the other school options you might have on the table. In the case of schools that defer a small portion of the early applicants, then it’s important to continue to demonstrate interest. Some schools report this data in their Common Data Set (which can be found by Googling “[Institution name] Common Data Set]”.

    • If you are deferred, many schools will request or allow you to submit a Letter of Continued Interest (LOCI). ​

  • Relevant Blogs: ​What is a Letter of Continued Interest -- What's Up with the Waitlists in 2022?

• Making the Final College Decision: It’s almost time for seniors to make their final college decision, and some of you might already be in that position! If you have already decided on a college to attend, congratulations!! Your next step is to accept your offer of admission and start to complete the housing forms. Once you accept the offer, it’s safe to decline your other offers of admission. Most of these decisions can be made in the prospective student portal for each school, but if you can’t find the place to accept or decline the offer, you can always email admissions to keep them in the loop. If declining an offer of admission, don’t forget to thank them for their time and consideration and explain that you’ve chosen to attend a different institution.
  Most schools give students until May 1st to enroll, but there is sometimes a benefit to enrolling early (for example, if housing is limited and not guaranteed for freshmen, it makes sense to enroll as soon as you have been admitted to your institution of choice–but make sure that the financial offer is sufficient before submitting the enrollment deposit).
  For the students working with Virtual College Counselors, once you have your offers on the table, please don’t forget to schedule a meeting with us to help you make your final decision if you need!

  • Relevant Blogs: ​Accepting and Declining Offers of Admission