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The concept of an “exploding offer” - an offer of admission or employment that expires and is no longer valid if you wait too long to accept it, has been around a while. They were once very popular at top business schools and law schools, where a recruiting employer might offer you a position at their firm, but only if you accepted the offer within a short period of time. The idea was to keep students from waiting on other potential employers, or negotiating freely among multiple offers. The career services folks at these top schools have largely tried to outlaw exploding job offers, but their effectiveness is undeniable. “We really want you to work here and take this job...but if you don’t accept it by tomorrow, then we’ll offer it to someone else.” If you’re a fan of the tv show Shark Tank, you may have seen the same dynamic at work among the sharks, quickly pulling an offer if an entrepreneur tries to hold out for a better deal.
But what if the concept of exploding offers came to the college admissions process? It’s not here yet (in the regular round anyway), but this year, it did creep into the law school admissions process. And not just at any law school, but at the highly selective Notre Dame Law School, which is ranked #22 by US News and World Report. Shocked? Here is what happened:
...imagine the concept of exploding offers happening with college admissions. It’s not that far away from what goes on now with Early Decision.
- Notre Dame Law has always offered rolling admissions to its law school, admitting students as they apply
- But this year, instead of simply putting a deposit deadline in the letter, Notre Dame let accepted students know that once they hit a certain deposit %, they would stop taking deposits from other accepted students, essentially turning the offer into an exploding one (“deposit soon or you won’t be able to deposit at all”)
- To enforce their tactic, they began sending out emails to accepted students that had not yet deposited, informing them of how much capacity was left before they began refusing additional deposits. (“we’re at 67%....now we’re at 80%”).
- So what happened? Those emails created a “run” on spaces, and sure enough they hit 100% deposits leaving some students holding exploded acceptance letters. Objective largely achieved for Notre Dame - a full class.
Now for sure, some of those who paid their non-refundable $600 deposit did it purely for the option value and will be willing to lose it if they later get an offer of admission (or a financial aid offer) that is more attractive, elsewhere. That would open up spots again for students who were accepted but locked out. Notre Dame is claiming a bit of ignorance here, explaining that they were only trying to keep the class from over-enrolling, as it had done in the past. But for some students, the damage was done.
Now imagine the concept of exploding offers happening with college admissions. It’s not that far away from what goes on now with Early Decision. The only difference between what Notre Dame Law did this year with its exploding offers, and what colleges with ED do every year, is that in the college ED arrangement, you, as the student, are willingly signing on to the binding decision. Get in, and you must attend - there is no option to compare offers or see if more appealing choices come in. LIkewise, when colleges pull students off the wait-list, they often ask for a commitment on the phone or will move on to another waitlist candidate. Many do provide the same deposit date to waitlisted students as they do regularly admitted students, but not always!
But now imagine if colleges begin doing these kinds of exploding offers in the regular round. Vanderbilt released its decisions on March 29th this year - a week before Ivy Day on April 6th. Vandy might have easily said to a certain group of these accepted students: we need your decision by April 5th, or we’re going to go to the waitlist. That would put a lot of pressure on students. Do I wait for the Ivy decisions or take this incredible Vanderbilt offer before it explodes? Now, we don’t think Vanderbilt or other colleges are going to do this. But they could.
The reason they could do this is because of recent changes to the NACAC Charter (a document that NACAC members agree to abide by). Just a few years ago, the Justice Department forced the hand of member colleges to abolish measures they deemed anti-competitive (like the gentlemen’s agreement among colleges that they won’t market to kids after the long-standing May 1st deposit date). The pandemic has obscured some of the tactics that lower-end colleges have begun using to more aggressively recruit students and steal matriculants from one another, but they are definitely happening. Exploding offers could easily become one of these tactics, especially for schools that are maximizing yield for the purpose of improving their US News rankings and perceived desirability.
The good news is that exploding offers are not yet happening in the world of college admissions - and given the blowback that Notre Dame Law has received, might not continue there either. But then again there may be some colleges that see this tactic as an effective way to make sure they hit their enrollment targets each year.
