Warning to high school seniors

It is the last semester of your senior year, your college applications are in, and you may be tempted to relax. That’s fine, just don’t relax too much: Colleges DO revoke acceptances.

According to the 2009 State of College Admissions report issued a few months ago by the non-profit National Association for College Admission Counseling, more than one-fifth of colleges reported having revoked an admission offer in 2008.

To be exact, 21 percent have reported doing so in 2008, though, admittedly, that number was down from 35 percent in 2007.

The average number of offers that were revoked was 10. The most common reason--65 percent--was lousy final grades. The second most common--35 percent--were because of disciplinary issues and 29 percent were because of falsification of application information.

Public colleges and universities were more likely than private schools to pull back an acceptance offer due to grades--84 percent versus 49 percent. But it was the more selective colleges that were more likely to revoke an offer for disciplinary reasons.

How many schools go through the trouble of verifying application information?

According to the report, 5 percent do. And 8 percent review social networking profiles of prospective students.

While those percentages are low, the problem for seniors here is that they can’t know which schools do, and when--or whether schools that did not do it in the past will start.

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