@FStratford what you say makes a lot of sense. My daughter is finishing up her UChicago RD application today. She tells me the deadline is extended to January 3. One of her school friends with high stats and that is a double legacy (sister attends now and Dad attended) was deferred EA. Another friend that applied ED1 was admitted. It will be very interesting to track what happens this year with the switch to EA/ED1/ED2. They can sweep in some from the deferred list and bolster the RD rate.
Why would people apply to only one “reach” school RD? If you’re genuinely competitive for highly-selective schools and haven’t gotten into your first choice in the early round, you know it’s a crapshoot and you can’t predict which school is most likely to admit you, so why not apply to all that interest you at the RD stage? I get that there are situations in which application fees are a constraint, so you migh apply to 2 or 3 reaches RD rather than 7. But 1 seems suboptimal if you are really interested in a number of such schools.
@exacademic Generally, people tend to try to limit the amount of reaches (and schools in general) that they apply to RD, so they can 1. concentrate their efforts more on individual applications and 2. so schools won’t drop the student for yield protection. A highly competitive friend of mine applied to five Ivies and several other top schools and got rejected and waitlisted at all of them (she was eventually accepted off the waitlist to an Ivy), and my conjecture would be that the schools just wanted to protect their yield rate from a highly competitive applicant who was theoretically bound to get into and choose another one of those top schools. So there is logic behind wanting to ensure the RD pool is not too constricted.
I think UChicago’s admit rate for ED1/2 will be fairly high (20-25%), as these are, for the most part, highly competitive students who have a strong interest in the school. As for EA, since they’ll chiefly want to protect their yield rate, they most likely deferred a more sizable majority of EA applicants to the RD round (even if one is as qualified as an ED accepted student), where, like @Houston1021 said, they’ll accept some of them and increase the RD rate in order to attract future RD applicants as well. Case in point: I have two friends, one of which applied ED and one who applied EA. The EA applicant was, from my perspective, an objectively more qualified applicant. In the end, the EA applicant (who also applied EA to MIT and got deferred) was deferred, and the ED applicant was accepted.
In any case, while they’re incentivizing early applications, they also don’t want people to think that applying RD to UChicago is futile. They’re playing a very HYP-esque delicate balancing act of prioritizing early applicants but maintaining the RD influx as well.
Your friend probably wouldn’t have gotten into any highly selective school had she not applied to many. If there’s a strategic error on her part, it’s not too many reaches but no real safeties. It’s silly to think that during the RD round every school passed on her initially based on the theory that she’d get into and prefer some other rival school. More likely, she was clearly in range but not a compelling candidate.
No one is theoretically bound to get into some highly selective/“top” school. And different schools are looking for different things – people who don’t see the pool, understand the institutional objectives, and don’t have access to (or know how to evaluate things like) essays and recs aren’t really in a position to rank applicants.
Chicago is playing a Columbia/Penn game – not the HYPS game (or the MIT/CalTech/Notre Dame game it previously played, for that matter).
@exacademic she applied to as many targets and safeties as her peers, but applied to more reaches as well. I think it was partially a matter of yield protection as well as her spreading herself too thin. I don’t think every school passed on her solely for yield protection, but I firmly believe it was a large factor in that decision.
The fact that you have a firm belief doesn’t make something true. If all of the 7+ top schools your friend applied to waitlisted or rejected her, it’s not a sign that her application was so exceptional that everyone wanted but no one believed they could have her. Admissions officer at HYPS aren’t looking at the most impressive candidates in the RD pool and saying we’ll pass on this one because s/he’ll undoubtedly turn us down in favor of a another elite school. SCEA schools don’t even require a commitment in exchange for an early acceptance. They aren’t so protective of their yield that they decide not to accept what they consider to be the best students in the RD pool out of a fear of subsequently being turned down by those candidates.
That’s true––you’ve convinced me. It may have been that while she was an extremely competitive applicant, she may not have stood out particularly among others of her calibre. Therefore, there may not have been as much incentive to accept her over other extremely competitive applicants who had more interest in their school. If she had either shown more interest (and the lack of interest could have bled into her essays and interviews) or had more outstanding credentials, she could’ve wound up in a better situation. You’re right, it isn’t about yield protection in this case. Thanks for correcting me!
The US has such a screwed-up college admissions process at this point (and college admissions is perceived of as so high stakes) that people struggle to make sense of it. In the end, demand for some schools just exceeds supply, there are only so many ways HS kids can distinguish themselves, the objective indicators don’t do a good job of differentiation within the top tier, so decisionmaking comes down to factors that often aren’t visible (or commensurable) to observers and that, in some cases, seem pretty arbitrary. And that’s even before we get to the ways in which economic inequality shapes kids’ opportunities and outcomes (both in terms of their preparation for college and in their family’s ability to afford college).
Over the past few years I’ve watched a lot of kids (and a lot of parents) get very demoralized by the college admissions process and cling to the belief that if only they’d done something differently, everything would have worked out as they hoped/planned/desired. Truth is, at a certain level, it’s (a) beyond your control and (b) not so important. Smart, hardworking kids who don’t get into their dream school will do well at another school which will have so many amazing resources they can’t possibly take advantage of them all. It’s depressing to see what should be a happy, exciting time turn into such a stressful ordeal for so many families.
What percentage of the ED pool is deferred?
@ClarinetDad16, to my knowledge, the school has not released any data or statistics on their early round yet. From my very limited view (consisting of my school’s applicants and the results thread on CC), I have seldom heard of any ED applicants getting deferred.
An update on the admit numbers floating around :
ED I - 450
EA - 350
ED II - 400
Certainly doesn’t leave many spots for RD.
Where are those numbers “floating around”? What makes you think there is any validity to them?