When Do You Apply to College?

Our Recommendation for Submitting Your Admission Applications

College application deadlines are all over the place and vary widely by school so there is no hard and fast rule for when you should have all of your admission applications completed. In fact, some colleges may not have any application deadline at all permitting students to enroll up to the first day class is in session. Without a firm date to target, what is a student to do?

  Confirm the Application Deadline Dates with Each School
Because application deadlines vary widely between schools, ensure you know the deadlines for the schools to which you’ve chosen to apply. One easy way to track deadlines is to use our Student Dashboard which displays a calendar with approaching deadlines as well as provides all the deadlines for each college you add to your favorites.

You don’t have to submit all of your applications at once, either. Prioritize based on due date and spread out them out over a period of time.

Submit All Your Applications by the End of October
As much as possible, set a deadline for yourself to submit your admissions applications to all the colleges by the end of October. Again, if some are due sooner than October 31st, bump those up in the queue and send them off earlier.

This doesn’t mean you’re out of luck if you don’t have your applications submitted by the end of October. You may have quite a bit of wiggle room with that date. However, you need to have some urgency to get the admission applications done in the fall and setting an October 31 deadline for yourself is a good way to do that.