Decision prep part three: a few useful facts

Barring some crazy unforeseeable weather event, we’ll be releasing decisions tomorrow.  In my final post to prepare readers for their admission decisions, I want to cover a few points.

Scholarship awards

Fletcher has a source of scholarship funds for new and continuing students.  All of the funds allocated for incoming students (including those who applied by the Early Notification deadline and were admitted in December) will be offered as scholarships this month.  The award information is included in admission letters.

Here’s what you need to know about the scholarship business.  If we have $100 in our special pot of scholarship cash, we don’t simply distribute $100.  Instead, we reckon that half of the award recipients will decide to continue working, attend another program, or, for whatever reason, decline our offer of admission.  This is predictably the case and, with enrollment history in mind, we actually distribute $200 in scholarships.  It’s a gamble, but if we’ve done our math right, it’s a safe gamble.

Why do you need to learn about this back-office aspect of awarding scholarships?  Let’s imagine that Jim and Bill are friends who have applied to Fletcher.  Both are admitted and receive $100 scholarships.  Bill decides to enroll at Fletcher, but Jim decides to postpone graduate school for a year.  Bill knows that Jim has received a $100 scholarship, and Bill would like to claim it for himself.  Alas, Jim’s award doesn’t represent actual cash that goes back in the pot, and Bill cannot have it after Jim moves on.

At the end of the enrollment process, we’ll calculate how much genuine money has been added back to the scholarship account.  One thing you can be sure of is that we will distribute all of the available funds.

Note that, if you’re in a two-year program, you’ll learn your two-year award so that you can plan ahead.  We make scholarship decisions based on a combination of merit and need: for any level of merit — as determined through the application review process — the larger awards go to those with greater need.  We hope that all applicants will be happy with their awards, though we know that only Admissions Committee members have the full picture of the breadth of need (and merit, for that matter) among the admitted applicants.  Fletcher’s applicant pool is diverse in every possible way.

Waitlist ranking

As I mentioned yesterday, we don’t rank the waitlist.  And while you can and should update us with information that brightens up your application, you can’t wrangle your way to the top of the list.  In fact, there isn’t a top of the list.  Each time we make an offer of admission from the waitlist, we’ll be doing so with the nature of the enrolling class in mind.  For example, if more men than women have decided to enroll, we might even out that situation via the waitlist.  In other words, the “list” is really a fluid thing.  And remember Jim and Bill from the scholarship example? When Jim makes his decision not to enroll, it doesn’t mean we’ll be going right to the waitlist.  We need to wait until after April 20 before we’ll know how close we have come to our planned enrollment.

Reversing decisions

This one is easy.  We don’t reverse decisions.  I’m sorry.

I think that should do it.  Readers now know everything they need to know about decisions.  Looking forward to admitting some folks tomorrow!