I can appreciate that everyone’s trying to do the best they can to read the tea leaves with what little information is available, but this thread is starting to stray far enough from reality as I understand it that I will mention a few things.
It takes however long it takes. ED was straightforward, in the sense that there’s a pile of apps and you pick some. Less so for RD/WL, with a bigger pile of apps and a lot more on the line for getting the matriculation numbers to work out – covid of course throwing additional uncertainties into the mix as unprecedented numbers of students consider delaying a year. [Here’s some background reading which touches on the difficulties: An inside look at waitlist season in the UC system: Here's what UC says about the chances of being plucked from massive waitlists ] So now it’s down to Transfers, and things are getting really tense in Brown Admissions. This year especially, as the target keeps moving with unprecedented numbers of admits changing their plans both within the deadlines and not-within. It’s not as though Admissions already has everything decided, and they are simply sitting on the results for an extra week because it’s fun to field non-stop inquiries from anxious applicants.
Housing is yet another moving part this year, and with the de-densification has come the complementary move of their signing leases with many private concerns in the area, including at least one downtown hotel, for housing students. This and other dodges have been terribly expensive to the university BTW, but they are dipping into savings for now in an all-out effort to give students the best experience possible under the circumstances. As a result of the added-on housing, it’s hard to say whether transfers might be few-to-none this year just based on de-densification housing… but Brown definitely wants transfers.
As to “over-enrolling”, and “what happened with the freshman class wasn’t an accident”: The goal of Admissions is to get all the numbers to work out perfectly in the end. Seldom met, though most years they come close. Some of what that involves isn’t going to be obvious or perhaps even understandable to someone on the outside looking in (me, to some extent, even though I do have plenty of interactions with Brown Admissions in my volunteer capacity). So rather than trying to predict the unpredictable, consider the alternative of spending the next however many days enjoying all that there is in your lives to enjoy. You can never get those days back.
