The early bird.
In all the years that we’ve been doing this work, one of the stats that has stood out to me the most is this one: When students receive advice from people who are not qualified, they are 9X more likely to be under-matched.
While there are many pieces of advice that lead to this under-matching, the biggest one is that you don’t have to hand in your application early.
Definition: Under-match
An undermatch is when you are more qualified than the majority of students who are admitted to the campus.
This does not seem to be a big deal because it does mean that you are likely to be admitted and will probably be funded. But it also means that you have a high likelihood of not graduating at all, on-time, or at that campus. So you’ll be admitted and funded, but you probably won’t graduate. The drop-out rates for under-matched students are as high or higher than over-matched students.
This is a tough one because young people, pre-frontal lobe developed people, are not thinking about long-term things like college graduation or using their degrees for a career. They can’t wait to tell their friends about the schools they were admitted to. One of the reasons this becomes relevant here is because those friends of yours are probably also waiting until the deadline to apply to college.
But what if I said that you are more likely to graduate from and be funded from a campus if you submit your application in September or October? And graduating from a campus implies you were admitted.
Some of this is a purely numbers game. The percentage of students who are admitted in the fall (even without the “early” designation, is so much higher than January and February. But every year that I’ve been doing this, I come across students who do not want to be the early bird. They will say things like they want to enjoy homecoming or they won’t be admitted anyway or they want to just get into one school before focusing on the other applications. Or the worst: none of their friends are turning things in early so why should they? Every single student who has said that to me has not be admitted to any college, or been under-funded, or under-matched. Every. Single. One.
I look back and think that the decision they made to not work on their early app for whatever reason turned out to be a $300,000 decision.
So the short story here is to be the early bird. Even if you don’t believe me, think about it this way: What do you have to lose by being early?
