High school senior Mike Nitz said he cannot wait for the next eight months to be over, because come next fall, Nitz will be attending his first choice school: Boston University.
‘I love the campus. I love everything about it,’ Nitz, a student at Francis Scott Key Senior High in Westminster, Maryland, said. ‘I can’t wait. I just want to fast forward and be there right now.’
Nitz is one of the 403 graduating high school seniors accepted early decision into BU’s Class of 2013, a 16 percent increase over the 347 students accepted early decision last year, Office of Admissions Executive Director Kelly Walter said. The number of early decision applications increased by 16 percent this year.
‘This is a pretty talented group of students,” Walter said. ‘They rank in the top 11 percent of their high school class. They have an A- average. They come from 33 different states, plus Puerto Rico and six foreign countries, and 80 percent of them are from outside Massachusetts.’
Though many accepted students, like Nitz, are relieved to know their undergraduate fates, some said they feel trapped by their early application’s stipulations.
The early decision application process gives students the option to apply and learn their acceptance status earlier than other applicants. If a student is accepted to BU early, he or she is committed to attend BU and must withdraw all other applications.
Leslie Duran, a senior at Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut, said after receiving her acceptance, there was a moment in which she wished she had more options.
‘It’s the fear that I am finally committed,’ Duran said. ‘These are the next four years of my life. There’s no going back.’
Duran, who also considered Cornell University, New York University and Northeastern University, said she wishes she could find out if she was accepted to other schools.
‘Now, I will never know,’ she said.
Although some students were worried about being bound to BU, other students said the dominant distress was being bound to BU’s price tag and not receiving enough financial aid to afford it.
‘I was kind of worried that they wouldn’t give me more than $10,000 and I’d have to come up with $40,000 out of the air,’ Nitz ;who received about $37,000 between grants, loans and work study, said.
Dean Walston, who was deferred from the early decision applicant pool, said his guidance counselor was hesitant toward early decision because of financial aid.
‘I looked at statistics for coming out of college with debt,’ Walston, a senior at East Lynne High School in Connecticut, said. ‘Going to BU, I can find a great job and pay debt off in a decade or so.’
Kevin Wang, a senior at Sage Hill School in Newport Coast, California, likened his deferral from the early decision applicant pool to a ‘soft rejection.’
‘Now that it’s not binding, I will spend time deciding between other colleges to see if they compare or make me think twice.’ he said. ‘If a school offered me a more affordable tuition, I would definitely take that into account.’
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