There is nothing unethical about placing a deposit and then exercising your option to cancel if a better offer comes along. It is part of the contract and colleges don't hold it against the student. There is no double commitment. The student is only under deposit at one college at a time.
Having deposits at two civilian colleges at the same time is unethical and in clear violation of the contract, which prohibits double commitment. The argument that colleges plan for this through wait lists and therefore no one is hurt is a false argument. The college is not hurt. The student that did not get the offer early in the process because of the double acceptance is the one screwed.
- In most cases, wait lists are not managed in order of merit (most colleges, including USMA, explicitly state this). The student not taken from the wait list in May/June because of the double deposit will not necessarily be chosen in July/August. Financial aid may no longer be available or the college's priorities may have shifted leading to the student not getting an offer.
- The student may also be so financially and emotionally tied to the 2nd choice by that time that they decline a wait list offer from the 1st choice.
Service Academies are a special situation - although it still violates the contract with the backup school to maintain that deposit. The intention is not to take unfair advantage of the system, but to prevent being the one who is screwed come September. Having a deposit at a civilian college until beast is over straddles the ethical line, but can be justified.
I am not sure I understand your claims entirely. You wrote, "There is nothing unethical about placing a deposit and then exercising your option to cancel if a better offer comes along." and then "Having deposits at two civilian colleges at the same time is unethical and in clear violation of the contract, which prohibits double commitment." These seem to conflict and I'm not sure what your intent is. As a point of decided law, a deposit to a college is not a legally binding contract any more than a deposit to purchase a car is.
However, as a faculty member on my college's admissions board, I take exception with this: "The student that did not get the offer early in the process because of the double acceptance is the one screwed." This itself is a fallacious belief - that a spot in a college or university or service academy is some particular student's spot
to lose. Claiming that a student who
didn't get into a particular college
would have under different circumstances X, Y, and/or Z is an untestable claim. Even if we want to compare "merit" among applicants, there are hard variables (ACT/SAT scores, GPA, class rank) but the soft variables and context matter just as much if more. Do two applicants with 32 composite ACTs compare if one of them took the ACT once, and the other took it five times? Is a 3.7 at Thomas Jefferson HS in Reston VA comparable to a 3.7 GPA at Des Moines Dowling HS? I don't have answers for these questions, but this is what people like me on admissions boards grapple with when we have more applicants than space for matriculants.
Your claim that "in most cases, wait lists are not managed in order of merit (most colleges, including USMA, explicitly state this)" is dubious. My college's wait list is both short, and placed in rough order of merit (merit being impossible to quantify in all respects). Other institutions we communicate with practice similarly. We are aware that the Ivies and other institutions may wait-list far more applicants than they ever expect to have spots to fill, but their purpose there is different than ours. We want to have full freshman-transfer classes of the students who, to the best of our experience and ability to discern, will do well here, contribute to the college community, and make themselves into educated adults. Perhaps you have access to some information we do not about how other colleges manage their wait lists, but our experience is that it is closely-held precisely
because "merit" is so difficult to quantify.
I'm puzzled why service academies are a special situation, but here again, I see no evidentiary support for this claim. I do understand you have closely-held opinions, but unless you are aware of a lot of information that we on the admissions board are not, then it is your opinion, not supported by facts.