Well, I said reading season was coming, and has it ever arrived! The counseling staff met for 4 1/2 hours Monday for our annual "reading meeting," the official starting point for the application review process. Our Early Action (EA) deadline of November 1 has come and gone, of course, and we did receive some applications. More than just "some," actually.

Right now we have just about 3,100 Early Action applications in our office... which is up nearly 40% from the 2,200 we received last year at the EA deadline. First off, nobody panic! (That's what the counseling staff has been repeating lately!!). Obviously, it is a considerable increase from last year's number at the Early deadline. The question that immediately surfaced for us today was, "How many students can we accept Early Action while leaving enough remaining spaces in the freshman class for all of the qualified applicants we expect will apply Regular Decision?" The answer to that question...?

Let's start with this: While we are very excited to have so many qualified candidates apply Early Action, we are not about to have the entire class enrolled from the EA pool because we are very aware of the fact that many strong students do wait to apply until the January 15 deadline, and that is perfectly fine. We have always stressed that there is no competitive advantage to applying EA at PC, and that will continue to be the case as we will still have spaces available in the freshman class for our strong Regular Decision applicants! As for those of you who did apply Early Action, we will be passing along decision letters in late December.

A popular question we receive every year about the Early Action review process is: "If I am not accepted Early, is my application automatically moved to the Regular Decision pool?" The short answer is no, applications are not automatically moved to Regular Decision, and the long answer is as follows:

There are three decisions possible on EA apps: (1) INVITE- This is great, obviously, and because at PC our Early Action program is non-binding, students who are accepted EA have until the national reply deadline of May 1 to let us know if they want to enroll. (2) DEFER- We do defer some students to the Regular Decision pool each year, and we do this because we need more information to make an appropriate decision on their application. Most often, this information is in the form of first semester senior year grades; while we will see your senior courses if you have applied Early Action, we will not see your grades and sometimes we do need to wait until your first semester has been completed to make a final decision. (3) DENY- We do deny students EA, and this is a final decision at PC (meaning a student denied Early cannot reapply at the January 15 deadline). The reason we deny students EA is that we do have a consistent review from Early to Regular, and so we know that if a student is not competitive in the Early Action pool, they will not be competitive in the Regular Decision group either. So, we give out the decision up front to give the student and family time to pursue other options.

So that is where we are in the Office of Admission. We are busy organizing files and recalculating grade point averages as we prepare to start reading the 3,100 EA apps. Before I return to the big pile of transcripts on my desk, I also do want to say thank you to Adam and Eileen, the first two (brave!) souls to post questions on this blog... Thank you both for "breaking the ice" and we'll hope that encourages more questions and comments as the "reading season" progresses!

P.S. Congrats to the PC men's soccer team for earning a berth in the 48-team NCAA Tournament for the second straight season! They will take on Hofstra in their first-round game on Friday night!