Is it a bad sign if my son who applied early decision has not been offered an interview yet?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
1

We are about an hour from Harvard. Is it a bad sign if my son who applied early decision has not been offered an interview yet?

2

In case more information would be helpful, early action decisions are supposed to be made and commuincated by mid December, so within the next 2 seeks. Does it suggest that my son will be rejected if he has not been contacted yet for an interview?

3

You just have to accept Admissions at their word: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/application-process/what-we-look/interviews

There are many other students in the same situation as your son, so I would’t be worried about it.

4

Thanks Gibby. That is helpful. But to clarify a little more, my concern was not so much that not getting an interview would hurt the application as much as with so many applicants and the mid Dec decision dealine, not getting an interview might relfect that they’re going to rejecy him. The idea would be, why watse an interview on someone they can already see they will reject. It sems like it could be that they only assign interviews after looking over the appllication. But I am not sure how many applicants get interviews. I could check on that. I had the impression it was the vast majority, but I could be confusing that with other colleges.

5

In the RD round, with 30,000 applicants to interview, Admissions may start to rank student’s in the order of preference for interviews. However, in the SCEA round with about 5,500 total applicants, I don’t think that’s an issue.

Last year Harvard rejected LESS than 10% of all SCEA applicants. However they did defer 72.5% of all SCEA applicants, so any student applying in the SCEA round – with or without an interview – should plan on being deferred. An acceptance is a happy accident, at least that’s the reality as I see it.