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A philosopher running admissions at a top PhD program writes:
When April 15th falls on a weekend, the IRS takes the Monday after that day to be the day Federal income tax returns are due. In view of this, and in view of NYU's very late open days, I would like to suggest the profession adopt the same policy for PhD acceptances this year.
This seems to me to make obvious sense. Is there any department out there not observing this? Comments are open.
Ugh. At Georgia State we've been putting the usual April 15 as the deadline in all of our communications. Since almost all of our exchanges with applicants are done via e-mail, which I'm still busy staying on top of during the weekends, I hadn't made any change–my office is still open on weekends, as it were.
If it turns out that pretty much all other programs are counting April 16 as their deadline, I'm happy to move it back too and have Monday as GSU's last day (some obvious advantages to that for me). But if only a few programs do so, having a later deadline, even if only by a day, puts you at a disadvantage. Because of the coordination issues, I'd be a lot happier if this suggestion had come on January 2 rather than April 2.
I agree with Tim that there are obvious coordination issues. The only way to effectively and fairly implement this would be to have every graduate program in the country agree to the new deadline, followed by them emailing all their prospectives.
It is likely that the amount of time it would take to disseminate the information and be reasonably certain that everyone agrees would exceed April 16th.
I applied to 11 Graduate schools this year, and all of them listed the 16th (and not the 15th) of April as the day decisions were required. Maybe this is already common knowledge?
I applied to many graduate schools this year and did not see a single school which listed the 16th as the final day. Maybe I was looking at old information on their websites. In any case, I've been ready for some time now to (hopefully!) field calls and make the final decision on a Sunday.
I applied to 14 programs this year, 9 PhDs and 5 Masters. I do not recall any of the schools stating the April 15th date. At least one said I would have a decision by 3/15/12, and it did.
Masters are naturally going to be a bit slower in responding, as they need to determine which applicants are still available – 2 of the 5 Masters programs responded very quickly (likely due to high demand for their program's).
At the very least, schools should try to be flexible. A few years ago, I had a student who was accepted by program A, and was very high on the wait list for program B, which she strongly preferred. Unfortunately, program A insisted on a decision on the 15th, but program B extended its deadline to the 16th. Consequently, she had to accept program A on the 15th and decline program B, who would have given her an offer the next day, if she had been able to wait (I learned this from the admissions chair at B). She ended up dropping out of program A after a year, because she didn't like the fit. Maybe she would have dropped out of B too, but I thought it was a much better fit for her.
Oh, I totally agree with Alastair on being flexible in that sort of case. Even if you bracket the interests of the student herself, I'd rather take a chance of losing a good student than bringing in somebody with hard feelings because we wouldn't give her one extra day to decide.
I noticed back in September that April 15 falls on a Sunday this year, and, as chair of graduate admissions at Georgetown, wrote to the Council of Graduate Schools to ask them about it. I got the following response from Robert Sowell, Vice President for Programs and Operations:
"CGS is changing the deadline for the “Resolution Regarding Graduate Scholars, Fellows, Trainees and Assistants” from April 15, 2012 to April 16, 2012, because April 15 is on Sunday. We appreciate you alerting us to this and will send a message to our member institutions informing them of this change."
I put April 16 as the deadline in my messages to our admitted students, funded and waitlisted for funding. But I hadn't thought about the fact that if other schools did not do likewise we could have problems anyway. A few days ago our contact in the Graduate School told me it's an individual decision up to each university. A uniform policy is clearly necessary.
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