If you’ve recently submitted your college applications and have come here to learn what you should be doing next, first of all, congratulations! After months of preparation—writing essays, securing recommendations, and completing forms—you can finally relax. Well, sort of.
Students often ask us what happens after they hit submit and their application makes its way behind the closed doors of an admissions office, and while we can’t pretend to know all of the answers, several of our team members have worked in admissions offices across the country and we’ve asked them what usually happens when an application is submitted. The review process is often much more nuanced than most students realize, so stick around to learn more!
Application Processing and Completion
The first step after you submit your application is basic processing. The admissions office first confirms that all required components have been received, a process that usually takes 2 to 3 business days.
Once you gain access to your application portal, where you can check for yourself that all required materials have been received and read any application updates. If anything is missing, you’ll usually receive a notification in your application portal or via email, which is why it’s super important to check for updates regularly between the time you submit your application and when you hear back.
The Reading and Evaluation Phase
Next, your application enters the reading phase. At many colleges, this means that your submission is being reviewed by at least two, but sometimes three or more, different admissions officers. They’ll analyze your academic profile, activities, essays, recommendations, and other submitted materials to gain a holistic picture of you as an applicant. This is all put into context through an analysis of your school’s profile, which can help colleges understand what you’ve been able to achieve in context of the opportunities you’ve been offered.
At many colleges, promising applications then move on to committee review after individual readings. At this point, admissions officers advocate for students they believe would thrive at their school. To do so, parts of the student’s essay might be read aloud, specific activities might be highlighted for their ability to contribute to a thriving campus culture, or the candidate’s relationship to general academic trends within the university might be analyzed and discussed in greater depth. This collaborative approach helps make sure that multiple perspectives contribute to the final decisions, especially for borderline cases.
Specialized Reviews
If you’re the kind of applicant who indicated special talents in areas such as the arts, athletics, or research, your application might undergo a review by the relevant departments. This might mean giving the music department the chance to look over applications with specific musical talents to respond to needs in the orchestra or the biology department the chance to look for students with specific research interests to fill out a study niche.
While these specialized reviews do not guarantee admission, colleges have institutional priorities that can influence how they build each incoming class. These priorities may include specific academic interests, honoring department requests, athletic recruitments, admitting first generation college students, or specific areas of campus or academic culture that they’d like to strengthen.
There is no way that you can fully anticipate these institutional priorities and therefore you shouldn’t try. Colleges want to hear from the real you—which is the reason they don’t widely release this information. Many colleges fear that if students knew they were looking to fill a few specific spots with bassoon players, astrologists, or stem cell researchers, they would inauthentically alter their applications to reflect these institutional class considerations made in the admissions room. However, that’s not to say that colleges don’t publicize their student interests in subtle ways– for example, when they start a new initiative or a new program. While we’d never recommend a student alter their application to say they’re interested in something that they are not, we do advise students to pay attention to what is happening at an institution that meets their interests.
Decision Release and Next Steps
After completing all the necessary evaluations, colleges will then prepare to release admissions decisions. Typically, early action decisions are announced from December to February, while regular decision notifications are usually released in late March or early April, and each application within a specific pool will often but not always be released at the same time.
If you’re admitted, congratulations! You’ll have until May 1st, National College Decision Day, to accept your offer by submitting an enrollment deposit.
If you’re waitlisted or deferred, check out our blogs for more information about what that means and how you could potentially get yourself onto the admitted students roster. One thing we tend to recommend to waitlisted or deferred students is to send colleges an “update” email, much like a letter of continued interest, which informs them of any achievements or progress you’ve made since submitting your application. You’ll want to avoid messaging the college unless you have something new to add, but your senior year is often a time of growth, so many students find that a challenging course they took, or an extracurricular activity that turned out to be particularly meaningful, are great things to mention to aid in a college’s decision to admit you or not.
If you are denied admission, it’s important to remember that it’s not necessarily because you didn’t submit a strong application or that the college wasn’t impressed by you. Sometimes colleges can only admit a specific number of students from a given demographic, or there aren’t enough spots to accept every phenomenal student who applies. Take solace in the fact that you’ve done everything you can to guarantee your own success and turn your attention to the schools that have admitted you.
Looking for more expert advice? Check out our college application resource pages or contact us for more information!