Student Gets Into First-Choice College — and Then Finds Out It's Closing
Photo: Don Melcher
Waiting for a college acceptance letter is both nerve-wracking and exciting. However, once students receive their answers, they can either rejoice at their new opportunity or cross their fingers they’ll get in elsewhere. And sometimes things are a bit more complicated.
That’s exactly what happened to 17-year-old Amelia Currin of North Carolina when she got accepted into Sweet Briar College in West Virginia. However, there soon came a glitch: Last week, the 114-year-old women’s college announced that it’s closing in August due to “insurmountable financial challenges,” leaving Currin — and many others who had planned to attend the school this fall— scrambling. In a piece published by the Washington Post on Tuesday, Currin describes how she felt upon learning on social media that Sweet Briar College was shutting down.
“This past Tuesday I returned from school around 3 in the afternoon, plowed through my usual rituals: fed my horses, took the dog out, and sat down to catch-up on my social media accounts,” wrote Currin. “That’s when the life and future I had been working so hard to construct crumbled with just a tap of my finger ‘It’s so sad, Sweet Briar College is closing,’ the first post read. It sounded ridiculous. This was the school that I would be attending in the fall.”
Photo: Sweet Briar College/Facebook
Currin had been accepted through early admissions, received an $80K Bean Black Merit Scholarship and had even bought clothing in pink-and-green (her school colors) and stuck a Vixen mascot decal on her car.
“This child has worked for four years,” father Derek Currin tells Yahoo Parenting. “She has a 4.3 GPA, extremely high SAT scores. She would have been marketable to 95 percent of schools, but she picked Sweet Briar. She wanted the rural campus and the small out-of-state experience.”
Currin was especially devastated because she had wanted to attend Sweet Briar College since her freshmen year of high school. So much so, that she didn’t apply to any backup schools. “But now I was homeless,” she wrote.
What happens now? Jennifer McManamay a spokesperson for Sweet Briar College tells Yahoo Parenting that Sweet Briar has special deals with four other Virginia schools — Hollins University, Lynchburg College, Randolph College, and Mary Baldwin. Students will be able to transfer to those schools without enduring the normally rigorous transfer process.
Additionally, 169 other schools have contacted Sweet Briar to offer help, whether it’s offering to show support at one of its college fairs or relaxing some of their transfer procedures so students who wish to attend could make the change with greater ease.
Still, it’s hard for everyone involved. “It’s pretty mixed,” says McManama. “It’s a pretty emotional thing and it’s fair to say no one was really expecting it. No one was really expecting in terms of timing.”
For someone like Currin who was in the process of “launching,” it’s a rude introduction to the “real world.” Especially since none of the aforementioned schools are ones she would have chosen.
Still, Currin is staying positive and is planning to attend Hollins University in the fall. “These other schools are nice schools, too,” her father says. “And we don’t want to say anything disparaging about them.”
For a girl with equestrian dreams who wants to be a screenwriter, Hollins is a great choice for Currin. But it wasn’t her first choice and it’s unclear whether the $80,000 in scholarship money she was promised upon admission will carry over to Hollins. In the meantime, Currin says she is doing her best to salvage a painful situation.
“I feel like I was promised something big only to have it snatched away,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “It feels like they are saying: ‘just kidding.’”
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