If you’ve been rejected by NYU Early Decision, that’s a major downer. You picked New York University for your Early Decision school because it was a top choice that you knew you wanted to attend, and believed you had a strong chance at. But it didn’t work out, and now you need to know what to do next. First, let’s do a bit of a post-mortem on NYU.
NYU received 118,000 applications for the Class of 2028, and accepted only 8% of applicants — total. 22,000 of those applications were submitted Early Decision, marking a 56% surge in ED applications in recent years. We can’t precisely pinpoint the reason for this source, but we can hypothesize. As acceptance rates have plummeted across the country, many schools that used to be back-ups for Ivy-minded applicants have become the first choice. NYU is one of these schools that has gone from a back-up for the best students in the country, to their top pick. But why, maybe, were you ultimately rejected?
First, if you were rejected by NYU ED and you are a New York City-area student with super strong grades, you may have been the victim of statistics. NYU receives an absurd number of applications from student in and around NYC. They do not want to be a school solely serving NYC-area students, so they have to say no to a lot of amazing applicants for heavily geographic reasons. This is a bummer. It also means that you can’t necessarily take a huge amount away from your rejection from NYU if you are an NYC local who is also a strong applicant.
If you aren’t a New York City local, though, there’s most definitely something else going on that caused them to not even want to defer you. At risk of being harsh, the reality is that your grades aren’t good enough, the scores you submitted didn’t measure up, your essays fell flat, your extracurriculars weren’t impressive, or some mix of those issues, resulting in your rejection. What you do next, though, can completely flip the script and result in a dream school acceptance. So, let’s get into it.
Starting off your application experience with a rejection can be a punch in the gut. Contact us to bounce back stronger than ever.
Before we can get into next steps, we need to be blunt: the house is on fire. You’ve been rejected by your Early Decision school — not deferred, rejected. This means that you need to do more than just mourn that NYU isn’t in your immediate future. You need to go back to basics.
Reevaluate Your College List
Your college list is the starting point for a successful college admissions strategy. You may have been working on a college list for months, or you didn’t have a plan in place for if ED didn’t pan out. Either way, you need to start from a clean slate (even if some of the schools will stay the same).
With that clean slate, start at the foundation: the safety schools, or foundation schools. These are schools that you are very likely to get into, and you should have 3-4 of them on your list. Your grades and scores should be in the top 25% of recently accepted students, and your extracurricular foci should line up with their priorities (i.e., service, community mindedness, faith, etc.) A strong foundation may also be an in-state school for you.
Next, you have your 3-4 targets. Target schools are ones that you are a strong fit for based on your grades and scores, and you align well too — so these aren’t that different than your foundations except that the acceptance rate is typically lower.
Finally, reaches. Learn a lesson from NYU, and accept that you may have reached too far. For example, if you are thinking of Columbia as a reach, that’s a bad call. It’s more competitive than NYU, not less. Aim for schools with higher acceptance rates than NYU, but that are still dream schools for you. Limit your list of reaches to 2-3. Then, it’s time to meet your application deadlines.
Rework Your Common App Essay
Once you have your list set, you need to consider whether you essay may be a weak point for your application. Start off by reading our 2024-2025 Guide to the Common App Essay, and assess how your current essay measures up against these successful Common App essays. We have yet to meet a Common App essay post-ED rejection that doesn’t have room for improvement, and your essay may just need some editing. It’s worth considering a rewrite, though, as the Common App Essay is one of the most impactful pieces of your college application experience that you can control at this point.
If you are game for taking a fresh stab at it, the best place to start, we’ve found, is in the banal. Yes, the boring. So many students (and their parents) think that it’s what they have done that makes them interesting: the pay-to-play programs, the big trips, the fancy experiences that, even when you don’t say how much they cost (because that would obviously be weird), the reader sees it as a weird kind of flex. But this is entirely the wrong approach. It isn’t what you’ve done — nor what has been done to you — that is interesting. Rather, it is who you are. The application readers want to learn something about you that maybe only your closest friends know. Not a secret, but a side.
Maybe you are insatiably curious, and recently memorized the tributaries for every major river in the US. Or maybe you are tactile, so convinced your history teacher to let you present your final presentation in a period costume you sewed with your grandmother. Or maybe you are someone who finds joy in helping others find success, and have tutored dozens of your peers. Start with a trait or value, and then reverse engineer the essay by finding the right story from your life to illustrate it.
When you’re ready to tell the story, tell it as just that — a story. Don’t preach at the reader; pull them in. Your essay should be a great essay and a college essay, not despite being a college essay.
Find a Fresh Supplement Strategy
Finally, you need to rethink how you are approaching your supplements. We often find top students whose lackluster early application outcomes are directly related to weak supplements. If you treat the supplements as an afterthought, or as something that can be copy-and-pasted from one school to the next, you’re going to experience outcomes that match your effort. Instead, start with our school-specific college application supplement guides. Then, start chipping away.
We encourage students to begin with some ‘free-writing’ to generate stories that you can select from when looking for the perfect story to ‘frame’ an answer for a supplement. This can help ideas flow and grow without the pressure of sounding impressive. The New York Times has a list of 1,000 writing prompts for students, so pick 5-10 to respond to no strings attached. Then set a time for 10 minutes, and write for that whole 10 minutes for each prompt. You may find that many stories, even, come from the same prompt. This is awesome, and exactly what free-writing is aimed to create.
As you then look to pair a story with a supplement, remember that schools like specificity. They want to know you, but they also want to be sure that you know them. Cite specific courses, professors, programs, and clubs along with your prospective major. If you’ve been listing yourself as undecided, stop. You may not be certain of what you want to major in, but for the purpose of your applications you are confident and clear on your academic trajectory. Remember that you can change your major once you’re in, but you’re only making it harder to get in if you select “undecided.”
We also encourage students to focus first on narrative, and only worry about wordcount after you have a draft. You can edit an overly-long supplement down to hit the maximum wordcount, but it’s hard to write a stellar supplement with the pressures of a word count hanging over your head. Let that limitation sit in the background for a bit as you focus on strong writing, then edit as needed.
To work with a pro, see the “It’s Going to Be Okay” package.
Consider EDII
Finally, you need to seriously consider applying Early Decision II to a school that is somewhere between a target and a reach for you. Instead of stretching too far again, using the powerful EDII tool to get into a top school that is a target for you.
It’s normal to not feel great right now, but you need to get yourself back on your feet and operating from a place of positivity and optimism, tempered by the reality check of your NYU rejection. You can do this, but you need to start now.
We help strong students get into top schools through a story-forward approach that spotlights who you truly are. Email us to learn more.