Turned down offer, then school emailed back?

[ajak568]

To understate the situation, I'm a little surprised. Please tell me if this is normal. I'm new to the whole grad school app thing.

 

I applied to a bunch of schools this cycle and was fortunate enough to get some great offers. I picked one offer (haven't yet made it official) and sent nice emails to the other schools thanking them for the opportunity to study at their school and informing them that I was instead going with another offer.

 

After sending the notification (declining the offers), a couple of the schools emailed me back (one offering more money, the other wanting to 'review' my financial aid situation since I had turned down the offer before getting a funding decision). They will both be giving me a call next week.

 

Now, I am incredibly surprised to say the least. These are pretty good programs. I have applied to Masters programs and did not expect to get into half of them. My GREs are not 170s, my GPA isn't a 4.0, and I don't have that much work experience. Do you all have any idea why a grad school would do this? Is this normal? My theories were the following:

 

1) The schools are looking to make sure they get a good percentage of admitted students to actually attend their institution in order to maintain good stats for the admissions office.

 

2) They're looking to maintain diversity in their student profile. (I'm a minority.)

 

Any other ideas? Anybody else have experience with this? I am not seriously looking to change my graduate school decision, but I did at least want to hear out the other schools since they reached out to me.

 

Any and all feedback is very much appreciated. While I realize that this is a good problem to have (I'm not complaining!) I will say that it's overwhelming, to say the least. I'm not used to all this fuss.

[Taeyers]

This is not uncommon at all and you don't have to be a perfect applicant to be pursued by programs if they were impressed with you and feel that you'd be a good fit. Don't overthink it, it's just their way to persuade you (you as a person, not as a minority or a notch in their belt) to attend because they want you there. 

 

It hasn't happened to me personally because I only applied to the one program I'm attending now, but I believe my program is currently taking this route with our top choice applicant this year who recently declined our offer.