Families face tough choices when acceptance and rejection letters arrive. "Any parent who's shopped for a prom dress can tell you, window shopping is easy. It's the actual decision that's difficult," says Sally Rubenstone, co-author of Panicked Parents Guide to College Admissions. Rejection letters, expensive tuition, wait lists, reluctance to attend and an absence of acceptance letters are some of the ...

You finally get that long-awaited letter from your top-choice school, and you haven’t been accepted or rejected. You’ve been wait-listed. It’s easy to view being placed on the wait list as a rejection. While it’s not easy getting off the wait list, it’s not impossible either. Colleges use wait lists when they’ve accepted the maximum number of students but still view ...

You may have seen the headlines: College Rejection Rates at Record Highs. With schools like the University of Pennsylvania and Pomona College admitting less than two out of every 10 people who apply, you may think you'll never get into your top-choice school. Don't despair. The headlines appear daunting, but there's more to rejection rates than these headlines would lead you ...

As a kid, "The Sound of Music" was one of those movies I watched over and over again. There was something about the melodies of Rodgers and Hammerstein that fascinated me, and while my days of watching Julie Andrews as Maria are over, some of those lessons are still relevant today. At the beginning of the movie, Maria—a nun—gets kicked out ...

The dreaded small envelope. It's white, thin and has no indication as to its contents except the return address of a college. For the high school seniors who receive it, it is almost always a rejection letter. I opened up my mailbox the other day and discovered a small envelope from Occidental College, a liberal arts school in Los Angeles that ...

February and March are tense times for everyone involved in the college admissions process.  College hopefuls all over the country are waiting to hear from their top choices.  Angst is rising, and parents are helpless to end it.  And colleges are reading files and moving them through evaluation stages in the rush to “get the decisions out.”  This week, visiting blogger ...

This just in: Uh-oh, it’s May 6th…and you still haven’t made your college decision. Maybe you got rejected from your first choice college, which is pretty common after the high rejection rates this admissions season. Or maybe your first choice college ran out of space. Time to panic, right? Yesterday, the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) released their annual ...

Once you’ve spent time on a wait list, you might find yourself wishing instead for a flat out rejection from your top choice school. While there is hope that you’ll move off of the list and into the admitted pile, it’s a long, tedious process with no guarantees. A new report released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) ...

Most people will agree that one of the most frustrating things in life is waiting for an answer. Yes, patience is a virtue, but what about when you’re waiting to hear about your own future and you receive a “maybe?” Many students find themselves in this difficult position after being wait-listed by the college of their choice. You can sit back ...

Warren Buffet. Meredith Vieira. Ted Turner. Tom Brokaw. Besides being very successful, these famous business moguls and television personalities have something else in common. They were rejected from their first choice colleges. While you may think your rejection letter is signaling the end of the world, it’s not. Just consider it a speed bump in the admissions process and look forward ...