Stanford Deferral Numbers Don't Add Up

Colleges and Universities A-Z Stanford University
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<p>Hey everyone, so I got deferred REA. As many of you know, Stanford likes to either give you a yes or a no when applying EA, and says that they will only defer you if they are seriously considering your application. Let's say, for example, that of the REA applicants, they accept 10%, defer 10%, and deny 80% (I'm just making these numbers up, but they are in the right ballpark). That means that the deferred applicants are in the top 20% of the REA pool.</p>

<p>In the email to the deferred students, Stanford said that in the past three years about 10% of its deferred students have been admitted regular decision. What? Does anybody else feel that these numbers don't add up? A 10% admit rate is only slightly above the admit rate of the average RD applicant, yet the deferred students are in the top 20% of the REA pool. is the RD pool that much stronger than the REA pool? Or am I missing something?</p>

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<p>Isn’t the RD acceptance rate somewhere around five percent? That would make ten percent double the regular rate (ignoring the fact that the five percent probably includes the deferred applicants).</p>

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<p>They accepted 754/5929, and deferred 500. Early admit rate is 12.7%</p>

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<p>The REA deferral pool is probably much stronger than the general RD pool. I have seen applicants who are USAMO qualifiers, Siemens semifinalists, USABO team members, and perfect SAT scorer being deferred. If only 10% of REA deferrals are admitted in the RD process, it is probably much lower than what most people would have expected. </p>

<p>Did Stanford ever publish this sort of stats? Also for the past REA deferrals but admitted in RD, can you please shed some light? Thanks!</p>

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<p>I agree with you, MikeDoesWork. Here are some rough numbers, mixing 2 years of data, because that’s what’s readily available. I’m going with ewho’s post that 754 of 5929 REA applicants were accepted, and 500 deferred. That seems to be in line with the numbers in past years.</p>

<p>The Common Data Set for Stanford shows 32,022 applicants for 2010-2011, with 2340 accepted.</p>

<p>Suppose that the REA and RD pools are comparable. In that case, since 78.85% of the REA applicants were rejected outright, we could conclude that 78.85% of the regular applicant pool would not have a realistic chance of admission, either. Of the 32,022 applicants total (if the total number of applicants winds up being the same as last year), 26,093 would be RD applicants. But only 5519 of them would be comparable to the REA applicants who were accepted or deferred. Last year, a total of 1536 offers were made to RD students. This means that an RD applicant whose qualifications are comparable to those accepted or deferred in the REA pool actually stands a 27.8% chance of admission–not the 10% accorded to deferred REA applicants.</p>

<p>I think a little more transparency about the process for the deferred applicants would be in order, at Stanford. IMHO, the letter that admissions sends, about wanting to see how you do the first semester of your senior year, is misleading at best.</p>

<p>On another thread in the Stanford forum, I posted the comment that I think it is better for a student who is in the run-of-the-mill outstanding category to apply RD at Stanford, rather than REA. By that, I mean 2300+ SAT, 3.9+ UW GPA, state-level awards, varsity sports, but nothing that is knock-your-socks off. This seems consistent with that advice.</p>

<p>On the other hand, an applicant who is deferred from Stanford REA is likely to be highly competitive elsewhere. The various college admissions committees all have their own preferences in terms of student profiles, and I think the odds are very high that a student in the REA-deferred category will have better outcomes elsewhere.</p>

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<p>For balance, there is another way of looking at this. In the group of 5929 who applied REA, 1254 were admitted or deferred. So of those who were sufficiently desirable to Stanford to be admitted or deferred, 60.13% were actually admitted (754). If the RD group is as strong as the REA group, then there would be 5519 applicants who were comparable to those admitted or deferred. If 60.13% of those were admitted, that would be 3318 admits, vs. the actual number of admits from the RD group, which was 1536. So, viewed in this way, the odds do appear to favor the REA group. On the other hand, a lot of the admissions success of the REA group is due to the inclusion of recruited athletes, which skews the admissions rate, making it artificially high.</p>

<p>Also, I am not sure that the RD group yields 5519 applicants who are as strong as the REA group admitted + deferred. </p>

<p>(Sorry about mixing data from two years to do the calculations.)</p>

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<p>The REA group is usually stronger because:
Kids generally interested in going
Kids of alumni (double chance of admission)
Kids the Coaches Want</p>

<p>Academically, they are usually pretty equal to the rest. The Dean they cipould fill the classes 5 times over with perfect SAT,GPA, Student Body XYZ</p>

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<p>The Dean is probably exaggerating. There are only about 350 people who have a perfect score on the SAT I in a single sitting. Do I believe that more than ten times that many have a perfect superscore? Nah.</p>

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<p>Or that all the folks with 2400 superscore or not, apply to Stanford? Nah…I keep hearing that notion that X school could fill their class 5-10 times over by simply electing 2400-scoring valedictorians, but I think it might have its origin from a misquoted case.</p>

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<p>Don’t forget about perfect ACT scorers as well. Nonetheless, I find the claim that Princess’Dad paraphrased to be clearly false by a large margin.</p>

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<p>i don’t think they literally mean valedictorians with perfect scores (or they could). but yes, the idea is that there are many students who are competitive</p>

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<p>silverturtle, you raise a good point, about the ACT. I looked at the numbers on the Common Data Set again, for 2010-2011. Stanford enrolled a total of 1674 students as first-time freshmen. If we take just that number (and not the larger number of admitted students), five times that many is 8370. Ten times my estimate of 350 perfect scorers on the SAT at a single sitting is 3500. That would leave 4870 perfect scorers on the ACT. Again, not happening. Furthermore, some of the SAT perfect scorers also have scores of 36 on the ACT (ahem, silverturtle :slight_smile: )</p>

<p>I definitely understand that there is more to admissions at the top schools than scores and unweighted GPA. In fact, I think this is very wise.</p>

<p>However, I think when people want to dismiss an accomplishment as irrelevant, they should have some idea where the accomplishment falls between very rare (International Olympiad team member, Siemens/Intel winners) and dime-a-dozen. High school valedictorians are essentially a dime-a-dozen for the top schools. Even if each high school had only a single valedictorian (and many name multiples), there are about 37,000 high schools in the US–a rough figure, but ball park correct.</p>

<p>So if the Dean joined “perfect GPA, SAT, student body XYZ” with the word “or,” then I’d believe it. Actually, it’s unlikely that he said they could fill the incoming class five times over with people who had all three.</p>

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I found your post amusing, and I would agree. :-)</p>

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<p>You’ve got to remember that very little of the applications process is based on numbers. I don’t think Stanford pays very much attention to SAT scores at all, and not that much to class rank either.</p>

<p>I think that accepting only people that were Valedictorians OR perfect scorers would lead to a lower-quality and certainly less diverse class than Stanford has.</p>

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<p>Not to completely throw off everybody’s logic here but my college admissions counselor at my high school called the office of undergraduate admission after the release of the REA results. One of the admissions people said that the deferred candidates are in sort of a seperate pool. They will be taking roughly 10% of the 500ish they deferred from REA. I hope this information helps!</p>

<p>I know this may not make much sense considering they defer kids in order to see them with the rest of the regular pool but deferred kids are actually in an inner pool and in essence seperate from the RD candidates.</p>

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<p>Another thing to consider is that, among the deferred candidates, there are bound to be some who are legacies being deferred as a “courtesy”, rather than rejected outright. This subgroup has little chance of being admitted in the RD round. So not all deferred candidates are really similarly situated (even though I don’t think you’ll find any official acknowledgment of this).</p>

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<p>^ I know someone who had a flawed GPA, 2100 something SAT score, no ECs or awards, less rigorous course load because she chose not to take most APs, etc. but she was affiliated with a Stanford professor (her uncle). She applied SCEA, got a “courtesy deferral,” then rejected RD.</p>

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<p>Lol that’s very amusing! I hear different colleges claim that they “could fill entire class with perfect SAT scorers, but it’s just we don’t want that”.
Nah, they CAN’T, even if they want to. There are only 350 perfect scorers in SAT, and I would imagine they don’t apply to the same college. They probably spread out to all different colleges, like Yale, Princeton, Upenn, Williams etc. Each of these top colleges would be lucky to get 20 perfect SAT scorers ENROLL.</p>

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<p>Plus according to the alumni interview workbook, las year they only admitted 65% of applicants that had 2400. :)</p>

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<p>Keep in mind that 10% of the 700 deferred last year got accepted in Regular Decision. This year, Stanford only deferred around 500, so who knows, they could take anywhere from 10% to 14% this year.</p>