Visits are over. Applications are complete. Recommendations and records have been chased down. Like it or not, the frenetic activity required to answer the right questions, check word counts, and file test scores has been all-engrossing. Abruptly, you are disentangled by the arrival of application deadlines. Your flurry of constructive diligence is replaced by a restless span of numerous weeks during which schools are making their candidate decisions.
Take charge. Start by reframing your expectations. Ninety percent of high school students attend public school. Instead, you have reached out for the unique opportunity of attending an independent school. Regardless of how attached you feel to the process of school change, these independent schools represent options more than requirements. Moreover, while some students apply sensibly to tailored lists of appropriate schools, other candidates, by challenges of geography or pie-in-the-sky optimism, load their application lists with improbable risks. Regardless, great education happens in a variety of venues. If you were motivated to apply, you are motivated to learn and to take charge of your education. Stand firmly and confidently in that growing awareness. The outcome of your applications changes nothing about your worth, only where you will be situated next fall.
The deliberation period inevitably feels long. Counter it by throwing your regained time and energy into your current program. Things will be happening in these weeks: winter teams, theatrical productions, new grades. Make the effort once, perhaps twice, to be back in touch with your desired schools. Update them on your activity or progress, and remind them of your affection for them. Perhaps you notice something on their website that excites you; feel free to comment on a winning season in your favorite sport, a prominent speaker, a new program announcement. Occasionally invitations appear for campus events. Take advantage if you can. See a play, a concert, or a game. If (and only if) a particular school is your first choice, be sure you have made your sentiments known.
Understand the school’s process of consideration. Most schools have more, many more, candidates than seats available. When you want one of their spots, it can be hard to sympathize with the work they face in making their selections. Nevertheless, it can be helpful to know how it is done. Most schools divide applicants by committee: ninth grade day boys, tenth grade boarding girls, etc. Committee members read every file. In the simplest version, each reader creates three piles: accepts, maybes, questionable matches. Together they review the latter group for misreads. They convene at length to push the “maybes” up or down. Finally they rank the “accepts,” knowing that only a certain percentage will get the nod while the balance will receive waiting list news. As they issue their offers, they know it is a rare school that is able to enroll 100% of the candidates they accept. More likely, being guided by historic patterns of yield on offers, a school will over accept by 30%-90% of their available seats.
Drilling down into the candidate ranking process, many schools use structured systems. A reader might score a candidate for their potential in three (or more) categories: academic, non-academic, and personal. Recall that it is the current framework of an individual school that provides the standard of comparison for potential newcomers. Remember, too, that students, especially young adolescents, are well known to be growing both rapidly and unevenly. Strength in one area might balance out lesser development in another. Application readers are optimistic in their deliberations. Committees debate candidates loudly, championing students and their characteristics. Thoroughly invested in “the match,” admissions readers keep both the best interests of their schools and the best interests of their applicants at heart.
Out of this very human process come very good decisions about candidates. Nonetheless, wise deliberations do not always result in offers of enrollment. The reality of having too few seats even for the well matched is often unavoidable. The sting of disappointment is just as real for students who we know reached too high. So, too, at every school, there are weeping committee members whose favorite personalities, star goalies, promising performers, or talented scientists did not stay in the stack of “accepts” in the final week of decision-making. Everyone, however, deserves accolades for their work. For students, taking the risk of applying to schools is just that, a risk. There is high praise for each candidate daring to be so examined and judged. This process has made you look closely in the mirror. Stand tall for your efforts. You have dared to take charge.