What’s the hold-up?

An applicant wrote to me this week with a good question, and I’d like to share my answer with all of you, too.  He was wondering, not necessarily in these words, what holds us up from releasing decisions on applications that have already been reviewed.  Particularly given other schools’ practices (rolling admissions, multiple admissions cycles, etc.), I understand that it could seem strange that Fletcher releases all decisions at once.

And the explanation of our practice is that reading an application is certainly the most time-consuming aspect of the review process — particularly since each application is read at least twice — but it isn’t the end of the process.  In addition to Admissions Committee discussions, the key factor is that we want to ensure all applications are read with the same standards in mind, whether the first readers get to them in January or at the end of February.  At the conclusion of the whole reading/Committee process, we’ll make sure we’ve got things right.

In addition, remember that we release admission and scholarship decisions at the same time, and we haven’t even started on scholarship review.  In fact, we won’t start for a few more weeks.  So the release of admission decisions will just need to wait.

As I always say, we’re reading as fast as we can.  But we’ll continue to hold on the ultimate release of decisions until all the many necessary elements are in place.

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