The Office of Admissions is gearing up to send out its first batch of acceptance letters on Dec. 15 after receiving 6.6 percent more than at this time last year.
“So far, we’ve had 12,008 freshman applications submitted,” Thomas
Griffin, director of Admissions, said.
Last year, 17,685 students applied, a record for freshman applications, Griffin said.
Laura McLean, a senior associate director of Admissions, said N.C. State has different notification dates for applicants.
“We have four notification dates, Dec. 15, Jan. 30, March 15 and March 30,” she said.
Griffin said Admissions tries not to delay on their notifications.
“If we’ve made our decisions, we’re not going to sit on them and we’ll send them out earlier than the notification date but not later,” Griffin said.
Griffin also said having notification dates makes it easier on students and the staff of the admissions office.
“The student doesn’t have to check the mailbox every day, just around the
time of the dates,” he said.
For the admissions staff, Griffin said, “it helps to spread out the applications more efficiently for processing and overview.”
There are no disadvantages to notification dates, he said.
If a student has his or her application submitted in time for the Dec. 15 notification date, the student will get to know how competitive his or her application is, according to Griffin.
“If we could fill up the freshman class with all straight ‘A’ students, we would do that,” Griffin said.
What ends up happening, he said, is the University will admit a student with borderline grades later in the application process to fill up with higher quality students.
“If a student is not accepted for one of the earlier notification dates, then two things can happen,” McLean said. “The student can either be denied or deferred.”
If the student is deferred, then they have to wait until the March 30 date for review, she said.
While there weren’t any changes to the application process this year, Griffin said, the Office of Admission is constantly looking to improve.
“We’re always assessing and trying to improve the [admissions] process if we find problems with these [notification] dates,” he said.
Griffin said the University sent out 2,200 to 2,300 acceptance letters on the Dec. 15
notification date.
“This year, we plan of sending out 2,300 to 2,400 acceptance letters,” he said.
However, NCSU isn’t the only public university in the nation to see a rise in applications.
“Early information from other state universities across the nation is that everyone is seeing an increase in early applications,” Griffin said.
And Griffin said a few theories exist as to why that is the case.
“One theory is that some students that would normally go to a private university are now looking at a public university for financial aid,” he said.
But he warned that it is way too early to determine what exactly is going on.
“All we can do is observe the trends,” Griffin said.
However, NCSU doesn’t have an early decision admissions process like some other schools.
“Before we switched to notification dates, we did rolling admission and early action,” McLean said.
Griffin said early decision doesn’t advantage the student at all and that it only helps the school out not the student.
“We’ve been more interested in letting the student make an informed decision,” Griffin said.
Most schools that have early decision are moving away from it, he said.