Many schools consider demonstrated interest—ranging from it being necessary to just being considered. This list includes some top-ranked schools like Duke, Michigan, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, and many other public and private schools, small and large.
Our counselor advised us to make sure that our “target” schools knew we were interested during our search. Get on your area admission officers’ radar, an official visit, an interview, follow up emails, putting real-time and effort into the supplemental essay.
Also this year several of our friends kids did a big round of EA applications. Especially at schools like Clemson, Auburn, South Carolina the amount of applications spiked. You can picture the AO with a rubber thumb and a deferral stamp processing the apps. What we saw with a couple of kids was continued demonstrated interest after defferal might have made a difference. In both cases the students were rejected by several schools that were less selective than the school that they targeted after the defrral and got accepted into.
If you check Section C of the common data set for each school it will tell you the extent to which demonstrated interest plays a part in admissions decisions. Just google “XYZ College common data set.”
As a very general rule demonstrated interest is more important for the LACs and smaller private schools than the huge state universities (which have to process a tremendous number of of applications) but it does vary from school to school so I’d check the common data set for each college you are interested in.
Applying ED (for colleges which have that option) is the biggest show of demonstrated interest (but I’d only apply ED if one college is the applicant’s top choice and it appears affordable per the net price calculator).
IMO too many emails etc. to an AO can become a nuisance. It is great to visit, interview, and send an email if there is a meaningful question that can’t be answered by looking on the website or if there is an important update after the application is filed – but don’t just email to say hi. These are busy people.
If you can’t visit there are ways to demonstrate interest such as getting on the email list, seeing if you can interview locally, doing any online information sessions etc.
Do you think demonstrated interest is even more important in this current environment? When you get this spike in applications, it will affect the yield curve. The yield from students who have shown more demonstrated interest should be higher than those who show less.
It’s like anything on the app, the more you demonstrate your a good fit and want to attend said university the better it will be for you. Albeit demonstrated interest is fairly easy to do so you need to be competitive in all the other areas of the application.
In theory, that will be true given similar characteristics of applicants (note that yield is generally higher for applicants at the margin than for applicants at the top of the admit class). But note the following:
If applicants know that a college tracks indicators of level of interest, they may try to game it, so that what the college tracks becomes a less reliable proxy for actual level of interest.
Some colleges do not track level of interest for admission decisions, although they may do so for individual yield prediction. In other words, some colleges are only concerned about predicting yield, rather than raising yield.
I would have liked to take an official tour at Clemson but it was impossible. I checked the website daily for tours for months and then the dates were filled immediately. We did an unofficial visit and I don’t think the school cared one whit. Pretty school though. There are schools that care about demonstrated interest and I think that information can be found online. Some, i.e. Boston College tell you they don’t consider it.