Indecision carries consequences

Graduating high school students are changing the way the Admissions Office has to plan for the upcoming year. According to a recent study, admissions numbers are up across the nation, though the actual number of students attending college has not risen as drastically.

The reason for the inflated admission numbers is a phenomenon called double depositing, where a prospective student gives a non-refundable admission deposit to more than one university as a commitment that he or she plans to attend each of those schools in the fall.

Of course the student can only attend one college that was committed to, which means the money deposited to the other schools will be lost forever.

The only rational explanation for double depositing is that a prospective student is holding out to gain admission to his or her dream school. However, when researching the admission deadlines of several schools around the country, I found that all of the schools declared May 1 as their deadline to make the deposit to secure a place in the incoming freshman class.

The only other explanation, and a far less rational one, is that prospective students simply cannot chose which school they wish to attend. The student already spent close to 500 dollars on application fees applying to every prestigious school under the sun, and then the prospective freshman was only accepted into a couple of them. Most schools give students about a month to decide where to attend.

A month is a long time to make a decision, especially when everyone else around you is faced with the same decision; counseling is often available for the students who are most impacted by the stress of such a decision. I understand that certain factors play into the decision that some people find hard to take a stand on one way or another, such as staying close to home or going to a school far away with a better ranking. However, in less than a month, a person can confer with family and friends to help flesh out exactly what the best decision for that person should be.

Still, there are people who decide that it is better to waste a few hundred dollars than be forced to make a decision. These students argue that the distress arises out of pressure to make a life-altering decision, and ultimately these students do not want to be rushed.

I think the excuse of pressure to make a final decision is not valid. A bachelor's degree is losing its importance in the job market, and even more people are going on to some form of graduate work. Also not all universities are as narrowly designed as Tech as far as majors are concerned. At most major state universities, a variety of majors are offered, so a student who is unsure of declaring a major going into college will have another year to decide what they want to major in while completing core courses.

So these cash commitments to attend multiple universities come back to people simply being indecisive and the process costing them a lot of money; perhaps the irony of this situation lends itself to a real life lesson more than anything, with indecisiveness coming at a cost.

If you oscillate for too long, you will lose out. This time the loss may be only a two to three hundred dollar deposit that the parents are willing to pay to ensure the happiness of their child. But next time the loss might be a job offer or a big business deal that could cost thousands of dollars or even place the job at stake.

People who are indecisive rarely climb the corporate ladder because they cannot be trusted to make an important decision when needed. Instead the decisive individuals are the go-getters in life who seize opportunities and do not sit around calculating every little ramification.

So yes, incoming freshmen are talking about the rest of their lives when deciding on which college to attend. But in the same consequence, being unable to decide produces the adverse affect: those students unable to take a risk when the stakes are high will find themselves behind other students who can rationally make a timely decision.

Only the students with multiple deposits before coming to college know their reason for doing so.

But if multiple deposits are for the sole purpose of simply being too scared to actually make a life decision, then those individuals may have already sealed their fate with higher costs in the future.