I was deferred from Brown. 3 people from my school were accepted. 1 of them committed last year for basketball. 2 of the got in from early decision. I’m think my chances for RD are very low at this point. Confirmation?
Usually, EA/ED deferrals get accepted at the normal rate of the RD pool – i.e. slightly lower than the overall cumulative rate.
@T26E4
Really? Do you have a cite for that? Because in my experience, at most schools these days a “deferral” is usually a “polite rejection.” (There are exceptions, but they tend to reject more frequently than they defer.)
anecdotal only — since colleges vary on whom they defer (some defer a lot, some reject a lot and defer a few), it depends. I’m only repeating what I recall from multiple years’ of Harvard deferrees’ admit rate posts. I suppose I could be way off. But then again, I wouldn’t doubt that most deferrees are clearly still in the running.
Whether or not it’s true that deferrals are admitted at the same rate as RD (I don’t think so but have no evidence to support that), I would emotionally treat a deferral as a rejection. What happened with other applicants from your school has no bearing.
Does Brown defer many/most or few? If many then I think it would be the polite rejection.
Eyeballing those numbers (post #6) and doing a little back of the envelope scribbling, I’d say the deferred group is probably facing about the same odds as the rest of the RD pool.
i do have a letter of recommendation from one of Brown’s phd students who is also teaches calculus. I think my commonapp essay was good but maybe not what they were quite looking for. I’m going to try my best in rd and whatever happens, happens. Hopefully I still have a chance with my dream school
My Harvard deferral letter says that the acceptance rates for deferred applicants are typically similar to those for RD applicants.
The OP needs to be very careful in interpreting these statements. They are reflections of the odds of the group. In other words, if we had a list of all the deferred applicants and picked names at random, the odds that the ones we picked were later accepted are the same as the odds of a randomly chosen person from the RD applicants.
This does not mean the OP’s chances are the same as the RD admit rate. To think so is to make what is called the “ecological fallacy”. As the Wikipedia entry notes
The OP now knows nothing about her/his chances.
Here’s why. A school like Stanford rejects 80% of its ED applicants and defers less than 10%. Brown rejected less than 15% of ED kids. Is Stanford that much harder to get into? No. A school like Brown is proud of its low admit rate, that’s why they and their kin are beating the bushes sending out misleading letters encouraging kids to apply. If they reject kids ED then other kids at their HS with similar or lower stats will realize they have no hope and not bother applying. Much better to “defer” the kid. Stanford is more admirable here, telling a kid they know won’t get in right away and letting the cards fall where they may.
There are 2 sub-groups in the Brown deferals. Those similar to the Stanford deferred that have a decent chance of getting in. And those that have no chance. Taken overall, the admit rate may indeed approximate the RD acceptance rate. But unless the OP has some way of knowing what sub-group he/she is in, being deferred carries no information about subsequent chances for the OP.
I’d just like to point out that my carefully worded response did not address the OP’s chance directly, it was specifically about the deferred group chances, so it was not in fact an example of the ecological fallacy.
“Eyeballing those numbers (post #6) and doing a little back of the envelope scribbling, I’d say the deferred group is probably facing about the same odds as the rest of the RD pool.”
No big deal, but if we are going to get pedantic…
Of course. In fact your reply has the words “the deferred group” in it!
However in post #1 the OP asked about “my chances”. I wanted to caution the OP against interpreting the group chances as reflecting her/his personal chances.
No biggie.
@mikemac 's [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19057704/#Comment_19057704%5Dreply%5B/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19057704/#Comment_19057704]reply[/url] is essential reading.