What to do with multiple offers?

[Platonist]

Hello everybody, 

 

I believe everybody has applied to more than one school (probably more than 5). But the offers of admission come in at different times. If the two offers that come to you first are not your top choices, and you have not yet heard from your top-choice school, what would you do? Would you keep the two schools waiting for your decision until you have heard from your topic choice? Or would you accept one of them because you are not sure if you will get an offer from your most favorite school? 

Edited January 18, 2014 by Platonist

[Swagato]

Not in Philosophy, but I did receive multiple offers when I applied last year. There is no reason to accept, formally, any offer before May (15th, I believe, is the official deadline). You should certainly not hesitate to make clear that you are considering the offer, but there's no reason to commit until you have heard back from all your places. All departments should be quite reasonable about this.

[MattDest]

Not in Philosophy, but I did receive multiple offers when I applied last year. There is no reason to accept, formally, any offer before May (15th, I believe, is the official deadline). You should certainly not hesitate to make clear that you are considering the offer, but there's no reason to commit until you have heard back from all your places. All departments should be quite reasonable about this.

 

This is the way it is handled in philosophy as well. I think the deadilne for philosophy is April 15, though. (Edit: April 15 is not field specific, apparently. Read Petros' post below.) 

Edited January 18, 2014 by MattDest

[ἠφανισμένος]

The official deadline is actually April 15th, but this should be stated clearly in any offers you receive. You're within your rights to wait until then, but it helps out those poor souls on the waitlist if you can decide sooner. (Also not in philosophy, but I received several offers two years ago. I withdrew from one program when it became clear I would never make it off the waitlist, accepted my current program's offer, and declined the rest.)

Edit: the April 15th deadline is not field-specific. It's a Council of Graduate Schools thing, binding for schools who have agreed to it.

Edited January 18, 2014 by Petros

[DHumeDominates]

Hello everybody, 

 

I believe everybody has applied to more than one school (probably more than 5). But the offers of admission come in at different times. If the two offers that come to you first are not your top choices, and you have not yet heard from your top-choice school, what would you do? Would you keep the two schools waiting for your decision until you have heard from your topic choice? Or would you accept one of them because you are not sure if you will get an offer from your most favorite school? 

 

My goodness, Platonist. You should absolutely not accept an offer from a school that is not your first choice if (i) you haven't yet heard from your first choice school and (ii) it is not yet April 15th. You have absolutely no incentive to do that.

 

Well, you do have some incentive to do that if you care more about the success of other applicants than you do about your own success, but no one could possibly have that attitude.

Edited January 18, 2014 by DHumeDominates

[Platonist]

Thanks for your posts, everybody. Yes, it would be rational to wait until you hear from the first choice school. But here is a more difficult dilemma. Suppose you are on the waitlist of your top choice school, and you have received an offer from a less favorite school. You want to wait until the deadline, April 15. But a guy who has received an offer from your topic choice school rejects it on April 15, and now you will get an offer from it on, say, April 17. But you cannot wait until April 17, because you have to accept the offer from the less favorite school on April 15 to be safe. So you will never get into your most favorite school that keeps you on the waitlist until after April 15. That is a real painful situation. What do you think? 

[Canis]

It's quite interesting to read the actual resolution, which I looked up last year:

http://www.cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/CGS_Resolution.pdf

When you do, you'll notice April 15 only applies to offers of funding, not admission as is often claimed in the forums here.

[TakeruK]

Definitely read the link in Canis' post carefully. Also, note that there is no binding agreement for schools to set their deadline to be April 15 because there is practically no consequence for a school on that CGS resolution to decide to make their deadline March 1. So, you should go by the dates written in your acceptance letter, however, keep in mind that most programs will use April 15 as the deadline (even if it's not a finanical offer) because it's easier on everyone to have a common deadline. 

 

In the case Platonist described (you have offer from choice #2 school but choice #1 school has waitlisted you), the optimal course of action would be to ask choice #2 to give you a few extra days past the deadline and see what they say. If they don't agree then, you will have to decide to take #2's sure offer or wait it out and hope for #1's offer. You might also do something like take #2's offer, and then change your mind and take #1's offer if you get it later, but that can have serious consequences for going back on your word, including #1's reversing their decision since many schools only allow you to accept an offer if you have not accepted elsewhere (if you had, you would need a release from #2).

 

To get the best possible scenario for everyone, people should avoid waiting until April 15 to make their decision even though it's within your rights to do so. For the people who have heard back from every school, you should be able to make a decision within a week or so. At the very least, if you can't decide between two (or three) schools, you should decline all other offers promptly. Those who get all their decisions early are in a privileged position and if they can make decisions earlier, then it can help reduce the number of people in Platonist's hypothetical scenario (which is very real for many people!).

[DHumeDominates]

Definitely read the link in Canis' post carefully. Also, note that there is no binding agreement for schools to set their deadline to be April 15 because there is practically no consequence for a school on that CGS resolution to decide to make their deadline March 1. So, you should go by the dates written in your acceptance letter, however, keep in mind that most programs will use April 15 as the deadline (even if it's not a finanical offer) because it's easier on everyone to have a common deadline. 

 

In the case Platonist described (you have offer from choice #2 school but choice #1 school has waitlisted you), the optimal course of action would be to ask choice #2 to give you a few extra days past the deadline and see what they say. If they don't agree then, you will have to decide to take #2's sure offer or wait it out and hope for #1's offer. You might also do something like take #2's offer, and then change your mind and take #1's offer if you get it later, but that can have serious consequences for going back on your word, including #1's reversing their decision since many schools only allow you to accept an offer if you have not accepted elsewhere (if you had, you would need a release from #2).

 

To get the best possible scenario for everyone, people should avoid waiting until April 15 to make their decision even though it's within your rights to do so. For the people who have heard back from every school, you should be able to make a decision within a week or so. At the very least, if you can't decide between two (or three) schools, you should decline all other offers promptly. Those who get all their decisions early are in a privileged position and if they can make decisions earlier, then it can help reduce the number of people in Platonist's hypothetical scenario (which is very real for many people!).

 

I agree with a lot of this. Regarding the text in bold, it's worth noting that the admissions committees deserve the blame for Platonist's hypothetical scenario. If everyone received admissions decisions before the April 15th deadline (which is apparently the deadline for funding, as Canis points out), then no one would have to petition a department for a "release" after April 15th. When there are such petitions, that's always on the admissions committees that waited until the last minute, not the affected applicants.

Edited January 18, 2014 by DHumeDominates

[Canis]

Though since the CGS resolution only applies to funding offers - and many schools offer admissions first with funding information later, couldn't you accept an admissions offer and later reject it without the school's release, so long as you hadn't accepted a funding offer?

[philosophe]

I sincerely hope I have this problem. 

[TakeruK]

I agree with a lot of this. Regarding the text in bold, it's worth noting that the admissions committees deserve the blame for Platonist's hypothetical scenario. If everyone received admissions decisions before the April 15th deadline (which is apparently the deadline for funding, as Canis points out), then no one would have to petition a department for a "release" after April 15th. When there are such petitions, that's always on the admissions committees that waited until the last minute, not the affected applicants.

 

It's definitely a problem due to actions of both committees and students though. But given that the committees generally have more power and information, I agree that the responsibility is more on the schools to provide timely information for applicants to make decision. But consider this simplified example.

 

There are 4 students: A, B, C, D and 3 schools: X, Y, Z. Let's say each school has room for 2 students.

 

Let's say School X wants to admit A, B, C, D, in that order. 

School Y wants B, D, C, A

School Z wants A, C, B, D

 

So, let's say X makes offers to A, B. Y makes offers to B, D. Z makes offers to A, C. All 3 schools give their students until April 15 to make the decision. Let's say these offers were made March 1.

 

Let's look a preferences of students now. Let's say:

A has the option of X and Z, but they are not sure what is best for them yet.

B has the option of X and Y, but their top choice really was Z.

C has the option of Z only.

D has the option of Y only.

 

To keep it simple, let's say C and D are happy with their offers and they accept Y and Z right away. However, B really wants to wait to hear the final decision from Z. In this case, Z would make an offer to B only if A doesn't take the offer from Z. So, here is an example of where if A waits until April 15, then B has to wait until after April 15 to hear from Z. I think of this example when I say that students like A should make decisions prior to April 15 whenever possible (assuming that A really does have enough information to choose between X and Z but did not take the time to carefully weigh the pros and cons). I know sometimes applicants, when facing the difficult decision, decide to procrastinate and delay the decision until the last minute even though they won't have any more information to help them decide on April 14 than they had back on March 5 or whatever.

 

And you can imagine that in the real world, there are way more than 4 students and 3 schools, so other people might be waiting on B's decision. I am all for taking the time necessary to get the right information for such a big decision, but in cases where an applicant does have all the information possible, I would encourage them to make decisions as soon as possible!

 

So, I don't think it's only the admissions committee that deserves the full blame for the scenario. It's just a matter of unequal information distribution (students don't know about the waitlist and schools don't know about all the factors that might influence a student to pick one place or another) and when this happens, there will be inefficiencies.

 

This happens in everyday life too. Imagine a restaurant that only have tables for 4, but a group of 7 shows up, followed by several groups of 4. In order to seat the group of 7, the restaurant needs 2 nearby tables to clear up at roughly the same time. Once a single table clears up, they have to decide whether to seat the group of 4 behind the group of 7, or wait and hope another table nearby opens up. Both choices are inefficient though--the first choice is unsustainable...if they keep doing this, the group of 7 is never seated. The second choice means that there will be a table sitting empty while people are hungry! 

 

I just think inefficiencies like this are part of life and we have to deal with it. I definitely agree that one major source of problem is the admissions committee generally being very very guarded with what information they reveal, and also taking a long time to make their decisions. I wish they would make their process and decisions more transparent (particularly timely notification of accept/waitlist/rejection) and not having overly huge waitlists. 

 

To achieve maximum efficiency, I think we would have to give up some privacy. For example, if the schools were completely open and honest about their decisions (and who would replace whom in the waitlist for example) and if the applicants were completely open honest as well (every school would know where else their applicants got into) and if everyone (schools and applicants) did not use this information to gain any advantage while making decisions, then it would be maximally efficient. But this is obviously an idealised scenario that won't work practically! In the restaurant metaphor, the maximum efficiency would be achieved if there were 2 tables of 4 that opened up but were not near each other and the restaurant manager was able to move a group of 4 that was already eating in order to create 2 adjacent empty tables. But this is not something people eating in a restaurant would generally like! Similarly, I don't think either applicants nor admission committees would like having everything revealed and open either.

[maxhgns]

You collect as much info as you can about the programs (from the internet, current students, etc.), visit if you can, and decline offers and waitlists when it becomes clear to you that there's no way you'd attend a given program. It's perfectly fine to hold on to a few offers and waitlists 'til the deadline, but try to make timely decisions (and try not to hold on to too many for too long). It's also ok to accept an offer for the 15th and hold on to a waitlist at your top school, just in case. But don't go overboard.