An Honest College Rejection Letter
Heartbroken student,
We regret to inform you that we cannot offer you the opportunity to accrue a lifetime of crippling debt to help supplement the salary of our football team’s second Strength and Conditioning coach.
Unsurprisingly, this year’s pool of applicants was the largest and most accomplished we’ve ever received, like every year for the past forty-seven. That’s by design as we allocated $12.3 million in aggressive marketing and advertising, a 12% increase from last year. In addition, our men’s basketball team earning a bid to the Elite 8 caused a surprising spike in interest.
We appreciate that you applied after we solicited your application from College Board’s PSAT list for $.04. Following us on social media and visiting our campus may have gotten your hopes up, and we do not take responsibility for leading you on. You actually like believed you had a chance because of a direct mail postcard? Everyone gets those lol.
“Prestige is overrated anyway,” says us, the prestigious university fighting tooth and nail to maintain our US News ranking.
We confess that we didn’t review your application particularly closely. Once we break your application down into compartmentalized data points, we move on to the next one. With budget cuts to our admissions staff, and receiving 55% more applications from last year partly because we went test-optional to “increase accress,” we had to read your application even quicker than the usual 8-10 minutes.
We needed to admit a lot more rich kids on campus to compensate for budget shortfalls due to COVID, and sadly, you’re merely middle class without legacy preference or niche sports recruitment. Understand that your inability to pay was a deciding factor in your outcome.
Like you, we’re also humans who are prone to error, bias, and mood swings. We also have mental breakdowns, failed relationships, strains with our family, hangovers, and many other human ailments. We’re overworked, underpaid, and struggling with the transition to remote work. Our profession experiences severe turnover, so whichever admissions representative you spoke with freshman year was highly unlikely to still be employed today.
Perhaps you were denied because your reviewer’s favorite football team lost, or they just experienced a breakup. Maybe your reviewer(s) haven’t been getting enough sleep or worrying about a family member with COVID. Some of us are simply ornery and score applications more strictly and less leniently than others. After reading the thirty-fourth application of the evening for the sixth week in a row, you all begin to look the same. Even though we can’t recall your essay specifically, it was probably painfully uninspiring and mediocre, partly because our essay topics are vague and non-specific. We make no apologies for requiring you to write 1,500-2,000 words worth of essays.
Our process is highly inconsistent and is neither an art nor a science but a series of gut feelings and hunches. Pretty much anyone could do our jobs, but we like to pretend we have special insights into human nature and “authenticity,” of which your score was a 3-minus. We make up fancy scoring systems and have closed-door committees to give the impression that we’re carefully evaluating each applicant. Unfortunately, it’s mostly Kabuki theater.
Nobody, not even us, can explain exactly why you were rejected and others admitted, so don’t ask. Everyone gets this same stupid letter vetted by our public relations team, so you don’t have the benefit of knowing just how close or how far you were to getting in.
We understand universities that are significantly more competitive than us may have admitted you. Each of our peer institutions thinks we’re so special, which allows us to claim you didn’t quite “fit” in our holistic review process. Outcomes are unpredictable and inconsistent, but that’s life isn’t it? We have waitlists, deferrals, appeals, and letters of continued interest that distribute spaces randomly, but we will never resort to an actual lottery. We prefer to maintain an aura of secrecy to cover our asses in case we enroll certain demographics at the expense of others. Isn’t holistic review wonderful?
We could extend admission to many more applicants by expanding our enrolling class sizes dramatically, but that would tarnish our luxury brand image and artificial scarcity. 1,700 incoming students has worked well for us during the past century. Why change things despite a pandemic that requires educating our students virtually yet without decreasing tuition fees?
It is totally within our power to admit some of the more than 12,000 4.0 GPAs and 1520+ SATs that we rejected, but that might cut into our endowment’s capital gains. Plus, we’re fighting our graduate students against unionizing – union-busting lawyers don’t come cheap. Once politics cuts into our bottom line, our progressive ideals end at woke press releases and superficial diversity recruitment efforts.
We’d like to congratulate you on your impressive academic accomplishments, and we see that you have a 78% probability of earning your degree in four years (+-2.3%). We understand that you sacrificed your interest, beliefs, and talents in service to us gatekeepers and have little to show. You did everything we asked of you, and we’re indifferent to your sacrifice. Your NSHSS membership will serve you well in the future.
Life is unfair, so get used to it at your safety school. Don’t e-mail us asking for reconsideration; we’re busy with another list of names to buy to entice future applicants to apply and subsequently reject.
Thank you for your tears and application fees,
Senior Admissions Communications and Enrollment WeCare® Middle Manager
