OMG - I got deferred -- now what!

[gibby]

Six-years ago, about this time of year, my daughter was anxiously awaiting her SCEA application result. When the decision finally came down, she was deferred by her first choice school (Yale). This was exceedingly difficult for our family, as my daughter thought (or was simply delusional) that she was a shoe-in for Yale. Unfortunately, Yale Admissions didn’t think so.

And, double-unfortunately, my daughter was so confident she would be accepted to Yale that she had not submitted ANY other RD applications. Consequently, the two week period between mid-December and New Year’s became a nightmare for our family, as my daughter pumped out more than 10 applications to various colleges.

The not-so-good news: In the RD round, my daughter was ultimately rejected by Yale and waitlisted at Princeton. The good news: She was accepted to Harvard.

The moral of the story: No matter what happens this week, understand that your "dream school” may NOT be dreaming of you. But, another wonderful college actually might be!

Please read this article for a HUGE dose of reality: http://www.boston.com/news/education/2015/12/11/harvard-accepts-record-low-percentage-of-early-applicants

Last year, just 2.3 percent of applicants who were deferred to the regular admissions cycle received acceptance letters.

If you receive a deferral letter this week, please understand that **IT"S TIME TO MOVE ON! ** Sure, you can try to have your guidance counselor contact Harvard Admissions and find out why you were deferred – will it do any good (most likely not). Sure, you can write an update letter to Admissions – will it do any good (most likely not). Sure, you can try to get another teacher to write you a recommendation letter — will it do any good (most likely not). Sure, you can write another essay that’s better than the ones you’ve already submitted – will it do any good (most likely not).

Everyone needs to understand **A DEFERRAL IS AS GOOD AS A REJECTION ** and if you can wrap your head around that fact, you’ll be in a much better frame of mind to embrace the colleges that actually accept and want you!

Best of luck to everyone!

[gibby]

I posted the above on the HYP forums’s and received this reply from a Yale alumni interviewer which I thought was appropriate to share on the Harvard forum

I do believe everyone should take heed at @gibby advise and counsel. One or two instances of deferrals resulting in admission do, of course happen. But I have been doing interviews for years and years, and I can honestly say that not one of my deferred early action kids ultimately got in. We still of course wish you all the luck in the world, but I think you need to heed what the ultimate goal of the OP’s story was. The end result, even after the devastating news from Yale, turned out fine.

Yes it did, but – and I cannot stress this enough – it would also have turned out just fine if my daughter had ultimately been rejected from Harvard and had attended any other college that had accepted her, including her safety school! I strongly believe in this advice from Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale’s retired Admissions Director

After years of experience, however, here is what I know, virtually to the point of certainty: almost nothing depends on exactly which strong college admits you. Everything depends on what you decide to do once you get to a strong college, and how well prepared you are to take advantage of the infinite opportunities you will find there.

[Multiverse7]

Great post by admissions officer, MITChris, in the MIT forum about why kids are deferred:

profdad, you’re right that it’s harder for the students than it is for us; they’re students, and we’re professionals. I apologize for implying equivalence. My point was only that it’s not easy for us to defer people, either. I think sometimes people think that it’s easier for us to just defer someone than deny them, but it’s actually the reverse: it would be much easier for us, workload-wise, to deny many more students in early, but we would be doing MIT (and the applicants) a disservice.

As a point of clarification: the statistics you requested are available here - http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats, and the deferred instructions blog post was posted, as is our convention, two days after decisions here: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/tips-for-the-ea-deferred

The “applications evolve” explanation is the correct one, but the problem is that there is so much uncertainty about which applications will evolve how. Here are a few examples, made up completely on the spot by me, right now, because I woke up early and have no life, but representative of archetypes we see:

1. a student that we want to admit early but who comes from an underresourced high school and this is her first time taking AP STEM classes. By EA we don’t have any grades on her yet and we want to make sure that she’s doing well as she steps up to the rigor of APBC and AP Phys, so we defer her because her reaction to that academic challenge could go either way and we need more information

2. a student who applies early having just begun a research project. The research supplement sounds promising and the research LOR is going gaga but so do the portfolios/LORs for many of our students. The student indicates she is submitting her research project to, say, the Regeneron STS and will be notified about her semifinalist or finalist status in January or February. We defer to RA to see if the student is vetted by experienced judges as performing research that is among the top 300/40/10/1 of their cohort.

3. a student who is (to use the CC term) “unhooked” (i.e., lacks a formal distinction that identifies them as a clear institutional priority), but much beloved by their community and might play the same role at MIT. We don’t have the space for them in early, and we don’t know what the pool will look like in regular, so we defer to regular to see how many spaces we have and if we have the room to allocate to a student who lacks formal distinctions but remains compelling for fuzzier but still powerful reasons.

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As you can see from these three (I emphasize again arbitrary/made up/any resemblance to applicants past or present is completely accidental) examples, there are different kinds of evolution here. Some, like the grades, are largely within the applicant’s locus of control. Some, like the research contests, are mixed between them and the external program that they work with which vets, verifies, and fetes their projects. Some depend entirely on us and our process and are outside the locus of control of the students. This is why we can’t give ‘reasons’ for a deferral. Often, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with an application, at least in the sense of anything they can fix; instead, it’s stuff outside of them which nonetheless overdetermines their outcome in the process.

So the deferral period is a time during which these uncertainties, distributed across many different actors/agencies, are moving from flux to equilibrium, until sometime in March when we have to finalize decisions and so at that time we take a look at the students and say “allright, these are the students who were deferred, and here’s how all of these things worked out, and now here are the best decisions we can make at this point.” And the result of that, obviously, is that most students we deferred were denied anyway, because our applicant pool is ludicrously deep and strong. But again, we didn’t know which students those would be in early, or we would have denied them in early.

For us to deny more students than we currently do in early, we would have to make decisions with known-to-be-incomplete-information, decisions we couldn’t take back, and decisions that would potentially impoverish MIT (and also turn away really great students who might, on balance, have preferred to been deferred if they might have gotten in). So what we try to do is to deny as many students as possible in early, but only if we are effectively certain that they will not be admitted in regular.

It’s hard. And as someone who went to my undergrad off the waitlist (aka RA deferral), I get the gut feels. I’m just trying to explain the background mechanics that “applicants evolve” is shorthand for.