<p>Just to be clear, I am talking about people that are REJECTED early, and NOT deferred. I am also only talking about schools that reject a small percentage of applicants early - like Harvard or MIT. In these cases, being rejected means one is in the bottom 20% of applicants. I am NOT talking about schools like Stanford or Columbia that seem to reject many applicants early.</p>
<p>I know this sounds like a silly question, but it's hard to find an answer to this because I don't know very many people that have applied to schools early, and most people on college confidential get accepted or deferred to the types of schools I'm talking about. In some years at some schools, no one on who has posted on the results thread was rejected - everyone was either accepted or deferred. Even at schools that seem to reject a larger percentage of applicants early, like Chicago or CalTech, it's rare to see someone who was rejected on college confidential.</p>
<p>I realize that college admissions is really competitive and in some sense random. There are tons of cases where one person gets deferred from a top school early, but is accepted to top schools during the regular round (in some cases, it might be the same school). But it seems hard to find the same examples for people that are REJECTED early.</p>
<p>Difficult to answer, but I think in recent years, the reject rate has been rising tremendously, they know it’s unfair to keep kids waiting that really have no chance. I don’t have any number, but I would think Harvard and MIT are rejecting more than 20% now, just because they get so many substandard or even just merely good apps.</p>
<p>How a reject at Harvard compares to the standards at Brown or Penn is anybody’s guess. But you might want to make that evaluation on your own, just by looking at the numbers.</p>
<p>It certainly isn’t a signal that the applicant will be rejected everywhere. But, regardless of what school it is from, a rejection in an early round is a sign there is room for improvement in the application. </p>
<p>It is possible to make changes to improve an application after receiving an early rejection and before submitting to other schools. It is also possible to ask for recs from different teachers, etc. Some things (like transcript and test scores) can’t be changed of course, but a rejected student should certainly consider improving the responses and items which are within his or her control.</p>
<p>Someone on CC last year rejected early to S got accepted to Y in RD and is attending if I am not mistaken.</p>
<p>Ivies tend to defer a lot more candidates than S early and so I don’t think S rejection at close to 80% should be taken as seriously as an Ivy in the early round. </p>
<p>I think Duke is emulating S this year. They have rejected 55%.</p>
<p>It’s hard because numbers like SAT scores and GPA of accepted students don’t differ too much between the schools, and it’s hard to find information about students that were rejected early. For instance, I only found only 1 person rejected early from Harvard last year, and this person posted somewhere else that they actually didn’t apply to Harvard - so it’s hard to trust that this person is telling the truth.</p>
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<p>Right, I’m sure there are numerous examples of people that were rejected from Stanford early, but did very well in the regular round, because they reject so many people early. That’s why I specifically excluded them in my original post. However, it’s hard to find examples for schools that reject less applicants.</p>
<p>Just in case anyone was wondering, I looked through a few older results threads, and found people that were rejected early action from CalTech but were accepted at schools like MIT and UPenn. Additionally, according to comments on the MIT blogs, at least two people were rejected early from CalTech this year but were accepted early to MIT. These comments might be less trustworthy though since they weren’t accompanied by stats and a history of posting.</p>
<p>And just for reference, CalTech is one of the schools which rejects a larger portion of applicants early (around 50% in some years), but for which rejected applicants are hard to find on CC. So far this year, only two people have posted rejections in the results thread.</p>
<p>I just thought I would update this with my own experience. I had a friend who had applied to CalTech early, and got rejected. I was a bit worried because I thought out of many of the schools my friend applied to, CalTech was one of the best fits, and that he would at least get deferred. As I said previously CalTech rejects a larger number of EA applicants compared to other schools, but very few people on CC got rejected early this year. Fortunately, my friend was accepted to Cornell and Brown, and waitlisted at Harvard, so the early rejection didn’t completely predict my friend’s results. </p>