Senior Sliiiiiiiiiide

It’s true: Colleges can revoke your admission if you don’t finish your senior year the way you started it. After all, they’re banking on getting the ace student you are—so don’t give them something else.

“I’ve worked in a number of different admissions offices,” says Becky Bowlby, who is now senior associate director of undergraduate admissions for Drexel University in Philadelphia. “Our admissions offers are always conditional.” That means you have to finish your year basically how you started it.

You’ve heard of the “senior slide” or “senioritis.” You know the symptoms: laziness, slipping grades and totally slacking off once senior status is secured. But take Bowlby’s message as a warning. Just because you’re done applying to college doesn’t mean you should stop applying yourself to your academics.

Why should you care about finishing high school well if you’ve already been accepted into a college? It has to do with giving the college the type of student they accepted in the first place.

“They need to fulfill their obligations, otherwise it’s sort of presenting false information,” says Gretchen Andersen, an admissions counselor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Penn. “It’s not just for the college admission process. You’re there to learn, and the learning doesn’t stop midway through senior year. You don’t want to slack off in the middle then show up to college unprepared.”

Drexel University officials request that accepted students send their transcripts to the college at the end of senior year. Bowlby says that’s for proof that you graduated and that, if your intended major has any prerequisites, you’ve taken those, as well.


What happens if your last-semester grades slide?
 “What we would do is call a student and say, ‘you had some diffi-culty with x, y, z, whatever.’ Then we try to rectify the situation,” Bowlby says. That could mean recommending summer classes, introducing you to the support services available at college or even just listening to your side of the story.

If you’re wondering how a mid-year change in your courseload could affect your entry into your top-choice college, call the school’s admissions office and ask. “This past year, we had a student who came in early decision and was looking to drop two AP courses,” Andersen says. “The director said no, she needed to maintain those two courses.”

Still need motivation to keep your academics strong second seme-ster? “Colleges do look at those final transcripts,” Bowlby says. “Colleges can rescind their admission. That should be motivation enough.”

Dickinson also reserves the right to revoke the admission of prospective students if their end-of-high-school record shows some serious slacking.

“On a form, it says that they’re saying that they’re going to successfully complete their senior year,” says Andersen. If that promise doesn’t happen, she says, students are sometimes asked to meet with the admissions director to talk about how they plan to succeed in college.

But don’t stress yourself out too much. Andersen says a post-acceptance meeting with admissions isn’t required very often. And although slacking off is definitely not advocated, she says that getting admitted into college lets you focus on other things in high school.

“In a way, now that you have been accepted, feel free to look beyond the grade, but concentrate on the learning,” says Andersen. “Be concerned about preparing for college. The more you can learn in high school, the better you’ll be in college.”

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