I got into Duke early decision. Now i don't want to go there. Options?

Don’t go. They won’t do anything.

Agreed. This is Duke we are talking about. They will say, “wait until my father hears about this” and that will be the end of it.

Politely thank them for the honor of admitting you but let them know that you cannot attend because of (fill in a good reason here). Good reasons include: family matters, financial hardship (if not receiving a huge non-loan aid package), or personal health/mental health.

Duke will let you out without much drama because they have another 1000 or more applicants that will sell their soul to be admitted and have parents that can pay full price. The university doesn't lose in this situation. The caveat is that you will never attend Duke in the future - no grad school, medical school, law school.

This requires outside the box thinking. Tell them you have decided to become a Shepard and work at Biscuitville to pay for all your Sheparding paraphernalia. The campus police will escort you safely off the premises.

Call them?

This is actually an interesting problem. A few thoughts.

1. In the scheme of things, Duke doesn't care about you. If you decided not to go to college at all, they wouldn't miss you.

2. Colleges created early admissions programs to make their lives easier (more predictability about class size). If you don't show up, and word of that gets around to future applicants -- say, if you're the kind of person who posts about stuff like this on a random forum -- then that could create a headache for the admissions office.So they might come down hard on you to avoid that headache.

3. Coming down hard on you means circulating a memo to peer schools about you asking them not to admit you. I don't know for sure that this happens, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that colleges are in cahoots with the common app and/or the folks who send your SAT/ACT scores places -- point is, they can probably find out where you apply instead and make sure you don't get in there.

4. Your best option to get out is to say that financial aid isn't sufficient:

nytimes.com

Early Decision Isn’t Binding. Let Us Explain. (Published 2021)

By Ron Lieber

If you can’t afford the price a college quotes you, you don’t have to go. We corrected an N.Y.U. blog post and rewrote the Common App for you.

Open link

. Can you claim this?

5. Why don't you want to go to Duke? In your shoes, I'd probably go for a year, try to get straight As, and see what transfer options open up. Columbia's General Studies program might be a good fit -- it's essentially a much less competitive way to get a Columbia degree.

6. On the one hand, I want to encourage you to stick to your decisions and just go. On the other hand, the whole game is whack, so I can't get too "kids these days!" about this.

7. Good luck!

Tweet the definition of a woman

The student is accepted to Duke. We don't know yet if it was straight up, or with Coach's help, or even if they are a runner.

One would assume this caliber student would get into other top schools regular decision, and would not need a back door entry to Columbia.

If you don't want to go, then don't go. Contact them and tell them that, respectfully, you have changed your mind. Following through on choices you suspect you will regret is a great recipie for an unhappy life.

my understanding is ED though nominally "binding" is usually a contract signed by a minor -- unenforceable -- and subject to not knowing financial aid and other details that sometimes change minds. i think what the schools expect is you aren't applying 10 other places ED -- and if they found that out they could ruin your ED everyplace.

i agree with the poster above where you likely get blackballed from acceptance at any other duke school in the future, if you turned down their ED. but we wouldn't be talking this way unless you had already soured on the place in some way.

i would consider whether some similar quality schools still have application deadline left.

if you feel like duke was a bad decision, slow down for 5 seconds and self-assess what went wrong, before making your next set of applications. are your parents dictating choices you don't want? what is it you want? why was duke wrong? where in the country would you like to go? you will have better options at the end if you think through now (a) what you want and sort out (b) how much influence your parents get to have.

when i look back on my own process i wasted a lot of time on schools i didn't want, to make people happy. D1s who didn't have soccer or didn't want me to play there. NAIA offering soccer money but whose names were third rate. only at the end of the process did i shove the process back where i wanted. at that point i enjoyed the process and got what i wanted out of it -- and good financial aid offers from those schools, because they wanted me for academics and sports.

so for a brief second psychologize yourself and think about what just happened. then make sure that's fixed before the next round of applications, to make sure you get out of it what you want and were missing this time.

not true, UC schools and UT had deadlines in november and december. my memory when i applied some schools it was done in december.

the poster also needs to consider on the 1/1 deadlines the need to corral transcripts or recommendation letters during the holiday. technically there is time to apply but you may or may not be able to gather everything before new year's, unless you have a scanned letter or sealed official transcripts sitting around.

Oooops 24/25.

Apply to one the the service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force). They are not part of the colligate NIL program, and you will not pay one cent for a high quality education. They actually get many of their better athletes who were in the exact same situation as you.

ED has many potential causes - hormonal, psychological, other physical reasons.

0/10

Can get into Duke but can’t read the terms of the early decision? Even if running scholarship, no way making grades to be eligible.

one of the schools i pursued then dropped was west point. it is a grueling application process, with interviews, a physical fitness test, getting nominated by US congresspeople, and fairly selective. getting nominated is like applying twice. unless it is exactly what you want, going into the military i mean, it takes up a ton of time from other admissions effort. it is not a "drop the envelope in the mail and wait for the envelope back" (or whatever today's PDF equivalent is) process. it's you will spend one weekend doing interviews. it's you will spend another weekend testing situps and pullups and running for time. it's you will spend another weekend interviewing with congresspeople or their aides.

meanwhile, you put in all that effort, apply early, and the coaches come watch and say, sorry, D1 walk on material, get in the school and we'll see. compare that to being recruited by others and you have to really really want military/free school. i didn't.

if your goal in life is to be infantry or a ranger or whatnot, with some rank, good choice. if you don't want the military -- and there is a chance you can get sent to war when you join the armed forces -- there are some schools like berea that are free and not 5 year service obligation. or some ivies these days are tuition free below an income number.

last, i know on paper army has a later application deadline but my experience by this point in the year i had been interviewed, done physical fitness testing, been scouted for sports, and applied. his one saving grace would be if he gets everything in, west point worked by rank order. they let people in who are recruited jocks and such. then they start pulling off a rank list of people with nominations and complete files, based on how you scored in their index.

The reality is that there really isn't a lick of difference between these elite schools. Unless you are determined to go down a career path that has a meritocratic barrier where being a Duke grad is a nonstarter, you will do just as well in life and be just as happy at Duke as you would at any comparable school. And if at 17 or 18 you have convinced yourself that you will only be happy if you are a supreme court clerk and then a US Attorney or a partner at Goldman Sachs or whatever has got your worked up so that 4 years at Duke is awful, you need to step back in a big way and give yourself some room to find yourself and open yourself to different ideas and experiences.