At colleges that defer a large percentage of non-admitted ED or EA applicants to RD, do all of the deferred applicants truly have another chance of admission in RD, or are some of them obvious (to the college) rejects who are given “courtesy deferrals” and have no real chance of admission during RD?
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I suspect that the unknown of the volume of RD applications leads them to be pretty conservative with rejections.
There are almost certainly students that won’t be admitted RD…unless RD applications fall well short of projections. They are deferred in case that actually happens.
I’m no expert with numbers, but I wrote this post a couple of years ago after doing a fair bit of research. Why it's so hard to get into an under 15% acceptance rate school
That post was based on numbers at Cornell. It seemed that about 15% of deferred applicants were accepted in the RD round. So I think that a deferral isn’t always a polite rejection, but I also don’t think it’s a high enough number for anyone to count on getting in after being deferred.
I also think there plenty of colleges where the deferred applicant really has almost no chance. I think U Mich is notorious for this. They seem to defer everyone these days, and I don’t think many of those students get in. I haven’t investigated that.
I am sure that a lot of tippy top colleges defer people they have no intention of admitting, as a means of soft rejection. There are so many children of alumni applying to tippy tops these days. They can’t admit all of them.
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So if a kid gets deferred from ED1, would it make sense to lock into an ED2 school? Or save hope for ED1?
@Lindagaf Still need to read your thread, but couldn’t a 15% shot after deferral compete with an ED2 chance somewhere else?
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An ED or EA applicant will be put in one of three categories by the college:
- Clear admit → admitted.
- Borderline → deferred.
- Clear reject → depending on the college, may be deferred or rejected.
At a college that rejects few or no ED or EA applicants (Michigan?), then a deferred applicant does not know if they are in group 2 or 3. On the other hand, if few non-admitted ED or EA applicants to the college get deferred (Stanford?), then a deferred applicant probably is in group 2.
So the specific college may matter in the deferred applicant deciding whether to give up a chance at that college to apply ED2 elsewhere, or hold onto that chance and not apply ED2 elsewhere.
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Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many schools publish that deferred/accepted percentage, which makes it a tough call. Along with not knowing what the acceptance probability difference is, if any, between ED2 and RD.
I suspect my D22 won’t be the only one making the “deferred MIT, do I ED2 CMU?” decision.
MIT’s the only one I’ve seen that provides the deferred EA/Accepted RD data, at 1.8%. (though one of my D17’s classmates followed that path)
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Anecdotally, I know kids who were deferred ED and admitted RD. One, the child of a donor of enough significance to merit a call to the student’s GC, was explicitly told that it wasn’t a courtesy deferral (a soft no) and that they wanted to see another term of grades. Clearly, the school used deferrals as both soft nos and to keep legitimate applicants in the pool.
Another, a multi generation legacy, was rejected in the RD round. His close friend, also deferred, ended up on the WL and was not admitted off the WL.
And another ended up on the WL but was admitted off the WL in May. That one had a very strong senior year – Clearly not something that would have been visible to AOs ED.
The vast majority of schools choose deferral to RD over rejection.
The majority of kids who are deferred are not admitted but some are. In many cases, these are the ones who become “better” applicants during that period – improving their GPA, winning prizes, etc.
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MIT is also one of the few schools (none of which is an ED school) where a deferred EA applicant has a chance of admissions that’s somewhat comparable to a RD applicant. There’re always exceptions, of course, but an ED deferral is practically synonymous with a rejection. An ED school is much more inclined to accept the same applicant in the ED round than in RD.
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Personally, the kids I know who were deferred from Ivy type schools last year EA were ultimately rejected. I don’t think their deferrals were necessarily a “courtesy” (they were fabulous, but unhooked, students) but once you enter the general pool you are competing with a greater number of talented students and, therefore, admission becomes less likely. As to moving on to a ED2 school I guess it would depend on how much you like your second choice and how competitive that school is. Is the potential boost at #2 worth potentially closing the door on school #1 (you still need to be accepted to #2).
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What statistics support this claim?
Yes.
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Since ED primarily benefits the school (certainty of enrollment, likelihood of little or no need for FA or at least relative insensitivity to the amount of FA), logically, it highly prefers an applicant who would apply ED. If it doesn’t want that applicant who applied ED, it’s highly unlikely it would want that same applicant during RD round.
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The numbers are available for some schools if you look:
Duke, for example, typically admits deferred Ed candidates at a rate higher than RD. Precovid, ED was commonly 22-24%accepted, deferral (only a couple yrs available) around 10%, RD around 6%. Last yr, IIRC, was 16% ED accepted, about 12%ED-deferrals accepted, and RD rate was about 4%accepted.
So, the chance of defer-accept is higher than the chance of RD accept. It seems a significant subgroup of deferrals is under serious consideration in RD.
S20 was deferred EA from Georgia Tech. We’re OOS. I think he said maybe 3 acceptances, 7 declines and his deferral.
No rhyme or reason based on stats. GT claims to be holistic and I believe it. He wrote a letter of continued interest. He was admitted RD and attends with two other HS classmates.
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Each year for five seasons, I had access to data for 550-650 ED and RD applicants to my Ivy (won’t say which one ; ) Not to reveal any specifics – confidentiality agreement – but here are a few impressions:
[Note that what I’ve written below applies to one selective college (assuming my observations from limited data are even correct), and things could be very different somewhere else.]
If the AO knows they aren’t going to admit an ED applicant, they won’t waste their own time or the applicant’s by pushing the application along to RD. A deferral to RD is made for the college’s benefit (make sure they have enough high-quality choices going into RD,) rather than to soothe sure-to-be-rejected applicants. This is supported by what’s been seen recently as their applications skyrocketed: A lot more ED denials. It used to be that the most common result for an ED application was deferral, followed by admit (say 20%), and only a smattering of denials. But the latter has jumped way up recently, which wouldn’t be happening if courtesy deferrals were much of a thing with them.
As for the possibility that ED legacies get courtesy deferrals on their way to certain denial, I can’t provide numbers but will say it would be inconsistent with how I’ve seen legacies handled… which is “about like everyone else”. Yes, they are admitted in higher percentages, but from what I’ve tracked in the aggregate and seen in specific cases as to who gets in (and even more notably, who doesn’t), that would seem to be more about correlation with the applicant’s demographics (family advantages leading to things like higher test scores & more EC opportunities) than a legacy “hook”. A few of their denials to well-qualified/well-healed legacy or even double-legacy applicants have been “epic” in my book. Akin to a top national university turning down the prime minister’s brainy son.
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