<p>Our DD applied binding Early Decision to Boston University, and received an email indicating that her application was deferred to regular admission. </p>
<p>Her question: if a college receives an application that falls rather toward the middle of thier statistics, are students automatically deferred rather than rejected? In other words, do they pretty much defer all the Nos rather than rejecting them outright?</p>
<p>No, they don’t just put all EDs into the deferred pile. Some EDs will be outright rejects. She still has a chance.</p>
<p>^ I think that’s generally true. However, it varies by school. Yale outright rejects few if any SCEA and chooses to defer, while Stanford rejects most SCEA. Tulane rejects ZERO EA, all are deferred.</p>
<p>**** correction ******* per this self reported sampling, <a href=“http://www.collegedata.com/cs/admissions/admissions_tracker_result.jhtml?schoolId=244&classYear=2013[/url]”>http://www.collegedata.com/cs/admissions/admissions_tracker_result.jhtml?schoolId=244&classYear=2013</a> From this limited sampling. Yale deferred 13, and rejected 33, out of SCEA for the class of 2013. I would mention that 29 were accepted out of SCEA, but that is misleading as most athletic recruits fall into the SCEA admissions cycle.</p>
<p>Per the same website, Stanford deferred 2 in 2013 while rejecting 22, and deferred 2 in 2014 while rejecting 19. So it is true Stanford defers a much smaller % out of SCEA than Yale does. Per this sampling, Yale defers about 30% of its SCEA while Stanford defers about 10%</p>
<p>I would suggest going to the Boston U section of this website <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/boston-university/[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/boston-university/</a> and see if you can collect data about how BU handles reject/defer out of EA. If they outright reject none, then you won’t know what deferral means in their context.</p>