It's May Day! Decision Time for College Applicants

For the college admissions process, May Day is about much more than spring flowers and maypoles. Most colleges around the country set May 1st as the deadline for students to accept an offer of admission. The past few weeks have witnessed frantic visits to campuses, negotiations with financial aid offices, and some agonizing soul searching.

But the admissions process doesn't end on May 1st. Now that admissions offices have a good sense of the yield from their accepted applicant pools, they will turn to their wait lists to fill any vacancies. There may be more action on the wait list front than in years past because of the difficulty schools have had predicting their yields. This exceptionally competitive admissions year meant that students were hedging their bets by applying to more schools, and the rising popularity of "gap years" means that more students might defer admission for a year.

photo of tulips at University of Michigan by merriehaskell / Flickr