My son was deferred from Northeastern today

Very disappointing ACT 34 WGPA 4.3. Great EC. What gives? We thought he had a great chance to get in.

It’s possible NEU has their “ring of acceptance” that happens at some schools, ie you go above a certain test score/GPA and you get waitlisted. My S had a 35 ACT/1540 SAT/4.3+ weighted GPA/nationally ranked player and got waitlisted, though he was RD. Did clear waitlist and actually got some decent merit but by that time had already accepted somewhere else.

A deferral is not a rejection as Northeastern uses it, so I would wait for RD. If you look in the EA thread you’ll find plenty of others deferred with the same stats.

@AngieT NEU like a lot of schools will defer some high stat students to RD to be sure you are interested and not using it as a safety school… so show more interest, contact your admissions rep, etc. I agree with Pengphils – check out the EA thread and you will see many students with high stats that are deferred and later get in with merit and honors in RD.

Northeastern gets about 60K total applications. Not sure about the exact number but their EA pool must be very large with lots of high stat students. How could they possibly go ahead and accept them all? The forum has lots of 34s, 35s and 15xx accepted so it is not that they do not accept high stats kid. But the number of applicants is crazy! I have been there and I understand how annoying it is to be deferred but on the other hand the way that the EA application pool has exploded this is a necessary evil. For the competitive schools EA is not what it used to be anymore.
Last year my child applied EA to most of her schools. We thought that by Jan all will be said and done. Yet, the decision where to attend was made the last week of April. Between deferrals, late acceptances and last minute Fin Aid adjustments it took it seems for ever. Thankfully we had no waitlists ha ha.
Hang in there and good luck! By this time next year you will have a happy freshman!

I totally understand how frustrating it is. Exact same thing happened to my daughter with Case Western. Most of the acceptances I was seeing were for much lower stats. I can’t pretend to understand it.