No. 6 — On Election Day, the colleges are counting, too

A lot of my students (and I!) got to breathe a sigh of relief over the last few days—maybe even do a little victory dance—after hitting submit on their early applications: Early Decision, Early Action, and honors colleges. Some made it just under the wire.

It’s Election Day in the U.S., and those students have something in common with candidates across the country: the work is done, the results aren’t in yet, and for a moment they get to rest before the nail-biting starts. (Their campaign staff could use a nap, too.)

Meanwhile, the colleges are counting. Tonight a lot of people will sit in front of a map, watching returns come in county by county and comparing every number with last cycle’s. College admissions offices have been doing their own version of that all week. Let’s dig into what they’re watching—and what it means when your kid gets an email saying a deadline has changed.

The deadline moved?? What to make of it

If you have a senior, you may have gotten an email in the last few days telling you that a deadline you’d circled for months isn’t the deadline anymore. Fordham pushed its Early Action and Early Decision I deadlines from November 1 to November 8. RPI moved Early Decision I to November 6. SMU, as best I can tell, moved to November 4. And plenty of parents I know (and a lot more on Facebook) are reporting emails offering their kid a personal extension, a waived application fee, or both.

So what’s happening? Is this new?

Not entirely. There’s plenty of precedent for deadline changes. Hurricane Sandy pushed back early deadlines at Penn, Yale, Columbia, and Duke in 2012. The Common App’s disastrous relaunch in 2013 did the same at a long list of schools. Penn State pushed Early Action two weeks later in 2020 because of COVID. Those extensions had an obvious cause, and everybody understood them.

The ones I’m seeing this cycle are of a different variety. No natural disaster or systemic disturbance. The school just decides to push back the deadline. SMU did this in 2023, too (to November 10), and there were reports of it again last fall. When a school does this year after year, November 1 becomes more of a nudge than a deadline.

Now, before you read too much into any single case, keep in mind that November 1 fell on a Sunday this year, which can explain some of the short extensions. And not every extension is about demand. Penn State gave applicants a few extra days to submit materials, and the reason was too many applications to process, not too few.

The term you need: enrollment management

This is the part I’d like every parent to understand, because it explains a lot more than deadlines.

A selective college doesn’t simply admit “the best applicants.” It builds a class to hit targets: how many students enroll, how much net tuition revenue they bring in, how the class looks on paper (scores, GPAs, geography), and whether the programs the school needs filled actually get filled—engineering, nursing, whatever it is that year. The office responsible for hitting those numbers, often a whole division, does what’s called enrollment management.

You’ll also hear “institutional priorities.” That’s the shopping list: recruited athletes, legacies, students from certain states or countries, kids who can pay full price, students for an underenrolled major. Institutional priorities are what the school needs. Enrollment management is the machinery that goes and gets it.

A deadline is one of the levers.

Enrollment offices track applications constantly against where they stood at the same point last year, broken down every way you can imagine—region, intended major, likely ability to pay, and so on. When a segment comes in light, they act. Sometimes that means extending the deadline for everyone. More often it means emails to specific students, like the ones who started an application but never submitted. Others go to students from a zip code or intended major where the school is running thin.

That’s why two things can be true at once. A school’s public deadline page can still say November 1 while a parent has an email in her inbox offering her kid an extension. A public extension tells you something about the whole pool. A personal email tells you something about a segment—and your kid is in it.

Okay, but is this a trend?

I’d call it the soft edge of a bigger one. The whole calendar has been moving earlier for years. UNC, Georgia, Texas, and Clemson close their early rounds October 15; Michigan added binding Early Decision last year; and more schools are steering students toward early rounds with merit money. Colleges like early commitments because they’re predictable. The schools that can command those commitments by November 1 do. The ones that can’t keep the door open a little longer.

Demand overall isn’t collapsing. The Common App reported applications up 10% through November 1 last year. What’s happening is concentration. The most selective schools are buried, while a lot of very good, very expensive schools are working harder to fill their early pools than their admit rates would suggest.

If you have a junior, the earlier calendar is the part of this that matters most.

People ask me why I’m urgent about this stuff “so early.”

Why? It gets late FAST.

Junior year flies by. Fall of junior year is too soon to expect a final school list. It is not too soon for test prep. For a student considering selective schools, fall is when the work should be happening (ideally it started over the summer, possibly even spring of sophomore year), with the goal of competitive SAT/ACT scores by March. Scores locked in by spring take an enormous amount of stress off the table and let the list get the attention it deserves, with room left for finals and prom and APs and summer plans, and for the changes of heart that often come.

If your junior is only now taking the PSAT and hasn’t started prep, I’ll be straight with you: you’re behind. Not doomed—it can still be done. It’s just harder than it has to be, and the common advice to wait until winter to think about testing isn’t doing anyone any favors. If you’re not sure whether your junior is on track, reply and tell me where things stand.

What I’d do with this

Don’t plan around extensions. You can’t count on one, and the student who submits a finished application on time is in better shape than the one who used the bonus week to start the supplement.

But if your kid gets one of these emails, treat it as information. A school that’s chasing your kid has told you something about where you stand, and that’s worth remembering when the financial aid and merit offers arrive.

Lastly, a school that extends its Early Decision deadline is asking for a binding commitment while showing you how badly it needs one. That’s not a reason to skip ED. It is a reason to be clear-eyed about what your family surrenders by applying: the ability to compare offers.

Things I’m thinking about

Tom