Recent Article from ND's student paper regarding this year's REA class

My dd is a currently a first year attending ND. I try to skim the online version of the student paper each day so I know what’s happening and being talked about on campus.

Earlier this week, there was an article posted about the class of 2023 REA admits. I also have a junior who currently has ND listed as his first choice, so this story was particularly interesting.

https://ndsmcobserver.com/2019/01/university-welcomes-early-admits-for-class-of-2023/

One thing that stands out for me is the relatively low percentage who are deferred. I think it’s better than deferring a whole lot so those kids can move on.

^ Agree. ND Admissions does its job. When the school just defers the majority who apply its really a meaningless gesture.

Great information. Crazy to think what the numbers will look like next year.

JBSSTillflying, not necessarily a meaningless gesture. For many schools, a higher proportion of those deferred end up being accepted in the regular round but the school wants to compare them to the regular round applicants. Don’t see how that is meaningless.

@lostaccount - yes, they all say that. But the vast majority of deferreds will be waitlisted in many cases. Those adcoms should do their job and not worry about students feeling bad. When everyone’s special, no one is.

^ Put another way, if someone’s not going to get in, it’s better to know that earlier rather than later. It’s harsh in the REA round because top candidates are rejected (not “waitlisted”), but at least it’s an honest assessment - otherwise they’d just be strung along, sending in a LOCI and hoping against hope, only to be waitlisted.

ND only defers 20% of so of its REA pool and even then they accept fewer than 10% of those in RD. That’s gotta be a lower admit rate than the regular pool! But it’s likely a high among elites that defer. For instance, MIT defers a good majority and only accepts just under 4% of its deferreds in RD, slightly worse than the new RD applicant admission rate. UChicago doesn’t publish data, but we know that only .5% are admitted in regular based on reports from their April student overnights. Most elites don’t make this much data available; however, what we can see isn’t very promising. Unless the school has a record of admitting a sizable number of deferred applicants (say, the admit rate is higher than new RD’s), it’s much better for the typical deferred applicant to move on, as @suzy100 is saying, because in all likelihood the school is only seriously comparing a handful of those deferreds to the regular pool.

At least at ND, it seems that deferred applicants do have a lower rate of acceptance than the average RD rate. The ND article linked above states “This year, 1,375 applicants — 19 percent— were deferred to the regular decision pool. Bishop said, on average, about 100 applicants are accepted during the regular application round.”

That would be an expected acceptance rate of 7.3% (100/1375) for the deferred students. Last year’s RD acceptance rate was just over 14%, so unless ND received a huge increase in applications, I would expect this year’s REA deferred expected acceptance rate of 7.3% to be lower than the overall RD acceptance rate.