There are no statewide ACTs or SATs given in schools for graduation in my state. No SATs available here since before March, even up until now.
As are you.
Ime, Adcoms are far less concerned with college GPA than CC is. They look for the best kids, per the collegeâs values/expectations, the whole shebang, and trust these kids will proceed. (Yes, they have ways to track, but itâs not as simple as whoâs got the 3.9 vs 3.2 or whatever.)
In part, that has to do with that dreaded concept: traits. That includes the ability to self advocate: recognize when you need support and go get it, whether tutoring, the writing center, office hours, study groups, etc. That often does come through in an LoR, though there are other ways. (And part of this relates to showing collaborative strengths.) This primarily relates to kids wanting difficult majors, but applies to all.
Anyoneâs first hand (or 2nd hand, when it comes from another,) is anecdotal. Itâs not enough to claim itâs a trend or even an ordinary risk.
âDemonstrated interestâ is much more, to an elite, than opening emails. It has to do with your knowledge of the college, more evidence than that they offer some class or other things often cited on CC.
@theloniusmonk Re: city vs college. I canât disagree- but itâs all in how itâs done. I know that sounds like an easy out, but I think we agree so much is subjective.
The hardest issue (after remote learning limiting so many kids from ongoing contact with teachers and counselors) is ECâs, I think. They can reflect so much, when theyâre there. They are part of the vital picture for elites, with or without scores. And so many kids have been cut off from so many of them.
Thereâs lots to look at and learn from an app package.
My child goes to one of the top 5 prep schools in the country (at least according to Niche). About 20% of the students end up at an ivy and the other 20-30% at other T20 schools. According to our GC, with whom we just had an appointment, this is year is bad for pretty much all the seniors. Not just at our school but also at all the peer schools. Only a few got in early, all the rest deferred. Besides TO, he also blames it on the success of the outreach effort from the T20. He said these schools were able to reach a lot of the rural kids. So for the early round, most of acceptances went to 1st gen, rural kids, athletes and a few super academic kids. But because of the surge in the number of applications, they simply didnât have time to read through all the applicationsâŠthatâs why Harvard basically deferred 80% of the applicants. His final comment: he thinks TO will be the new normal. 
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He is right about test optional being here to stay, and partially right on ED IMO. I believe admissions did read those applications carefully but was able to justify taking certain profiles that look better without scores. Prep school types may have been âslightlyâ hurt ED
(I know many who killed it), but the year is not over. Elite prep school types will end up just fine.
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It does seem to be a weird year, but so far my sonâs friends are doing very well. There was one deferral that surprised everyone (he was a recruited athlete with top scores), but there have also been acceptances at Yale, Northwestern, Tufts, Colby, Bates, Bowdoin, Amherst, Middlebury, Columbia, canât remember others⊠Multiple kids accepted at most of these schools. This is at a pubic school. Some of these kids submitted test scores, and others didnât. Four were recruited athletes. I donât know enough outcomes to be able to detect a new pattern yet.
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Harvard rejecting 9% in early round and deferring the rest is nothing new and probably as little to do with the recent increase in applications. I believe the last time Harvard published deferral figures was for the class of 2022. As listed at College Admits 14.5 Percent of Early Applicants to Class of 2022 | News | The Harvard Crimson , the rates were as follows. Note that they only rejected 9% in 2022, just as they did in 2025. Instead the key difference is in the acceptance rate.
Class of 2022
Deferred â 74%
Accepted â 14.5%
Rejected â 9%
Class of 2025
Deferred â 80%
Accepted â 7%
Rejected â 9%
Some schools have been much worse in the past. For example, the article at Updated: 714 students, or 18.5 percent, offered early admission in third year of U.âs early action program - The Princetonian , mentions that in a previous year Princeton only rejected 1% of applicants during the early round â less than 50 kids in total.
@theloniusmonk the SAT was offered on March 14th, this was before all the Covid shut downs. My Dâs HS also offered a March 4th in school SAT, so two ops to take a test. She also took an ACT in the fall of 2019.
@erd1020 Just to clarify, in many places in the US, the March 14 test date did not happen, as school shutdowns occurred on Fri March 13, and not having any plan in place, the schools just didnât open period. People showed up to testing centers with locked doors. (My apologies if this is not relevant to the conversation; just wanted to offer that clarification.)
Students in our area were able to get test dates in the fall, but the bottom line is that once colleges announced their test optional policies in late spring/early summer, students could rely on that requirement change, even if there was local availability in fall.
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The sum of the numbers of applicants who were accepted or rejected in the SCEA round in each of these two years is (the rest were deferred):
Class of 2022: 1,575
Class of 2025: 1,671
These results arenât inconsistent with @yrutweetingâs conjecture on the reason why more applicants were deferred this past year. In the SCEA round, it may very well be that only the obvious admits and rejects were seriously considered.
In both years, only 9% of applicants were rejected, and the rest of non-acceptances were deferred. Other years form a similar pattern. The overwhelming majority of applicants were deferred in 2022, 2025, and every other recent year I am aware of. This hasnât changed much with test optional or the increase in applications, so no reason to assume that is a primary cause.
If they were only accepting the obvious admits and deferring everyone else, then one would expect a noteworthy portion of the deferred kids to get accepted in the RD round. This hasnât happened in previous years. Instead the initial SCEA acceptance rate (not including deferred) is much higher than RD, and the lawsuit analysis suggests among that after controlling for hook status, SCEA offers a noteworthy improvement in chance of admission among similarly qualified applicants. Again this wouldnât occur if only the obvious admits are being accepted, and everyone else is deferred. Instead it seems that Harvard really is considering applications from borderline applicants and making a careful decision during the early round.
I think the more likely explanation is that some colleges treat deferral kind of like a polite rejection. It may mean that the kid was at least somewhat qualified (not in bottom 9% of applicants), so no need to cause unnecessary upset. And it might be theoretically possible to be accepted in RD, if something amazing gets added to the applicant, even if extraordinarily unlikely. Some other colleges seem to have a very different policy with deferrals, such as Stanford, who appears to only defer truly borderline applicants.
Rather than the deferral or rejection rate, I think the key change this year is the acceptance rate. The early acceptance rate by year is below. The early acceptance rate has been hovering around 14% for years, the suddenly dropped nearly in half to 7% this year. The huge increase in number of applications and expected reduced 2025 admitted class size contribute. The latter also explains why number of acceptances (not % accepted) was a bit lower this year.
Harvard Early Admit Rate
2020 â 14.8%
2021 â 14.5%
2022 â 14.5%
2023 â 13.4%
2024 â 13.9%
2025 â 7.4%
Why would you expect that with large number of applicants in the RD pool, espcially this year? It seems to me that Harvard accepts and rejects similar numbers of applicants each year, regardless of the total number of applicants. Itâs always filled close to 50% of its available seats in the SCEA round in recent years.
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As stated in my earlier post, I donât believe they they are only accepting obvious admits and believe instead that they are truly considering borderline applicants. I wonât repeat the reasons again. However, if this was not true and they were instead only accepting the few obvious admits during SCEA, then it follows that the many not carefully reviewed borderline kids who get deferred instead of accepted stand a reasonable chance of being accepted in RD⊠probably more so than the non-deferred RD applicants. However, this hasnât happened in previous years. Again suggesting that they are not just accepting the few obvious admits.
If you look at the total number of admits, in 2024 Harvard admitted 895 in early round. 340 admits from 2024 chose to take a gap year (mostly due to COVID-19), the vast majority of which are expected to start in 2025. Harvard typically fills around half the class during the early round, as you stated. So the expected total number of admits during early round this year might be expected to be around 895 - 50%*340 = 725 . The actual number of admits was 747. This slight difference does not strike me as an anomaly, with deferring more borderline applicants than usual.
My S is in this boat - he applied to more schools than my S18. With his brother, we started with a larger list of colleges that checked his boxes on paper and eliminated at least 3 based on the feel of the visit. For S21, we just put in the apps and will do more visits (hopefully) in Spring. Their lists had very little overlap bc their interests are so different so we have never seen some of the colleges he chose in person.
We are doing the same. A few more apps than older sibling bc of so much unpredictability. Hoping to visit and see actual campus and students in April but increasingly pessimistic about the viability of that.
There are several possible reasons for deferral. And it involves another swing through the review process, more work. Now, a comparison with the RD applicants. Itâs Waitlist thatâs the more gentle let down.
I actually applied to McGill too and was just accepted to arts but deferred from sciences. Regardless, I had a huge decrease in grades due to a medical condition. Iâd explain this to McGill, but they need certified proof of it and my current doctor canât submit this form because she wasnât my doctor at the time. Point being, I have to heavily rely on the essay approach, and McGillâs process isnât necessarily helping.
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The most staggering number I see is that of the 349 gap year students who will be filling seats/essentially taking spots now in the class of 2025. This has true impact ! I wonder how their âgap numberâ - as a percentage of total class of 2024 enrollment - compares to that of other schools ? Would it be indicated on their common data set ? Seems quite large but maybe the norm.
Freshman applications up 28% at UCLA, to 139,000.
Application totals for the other UCs and in-state vs out-of-state are at https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_files/factsheets/2021/table-1.1-freshman-applications-by-campus-and-residency.pdf .
It looks like all UCs had an increase in applications. The largest increase was 28% at Berkeley and UCLA. The smallest increase was 4% at Mercedes. So there seems to be a loose correlation with selectivity, which is consistent with other newly test optional/blind colleges. Out-of-state had a notably larger increase than instate. Across the full UC system, out-of-state applicants increased by 44%.