<p>Hello all. UChicago was and still is my first choice school. I did not apply elsewhere ED. I believe that I myself, and many of you that got deferred, would have had an excellent chance at an EA acceptance even as early as a year ago. That dwindled with UChicago's sudden rise to fame via US News and World Report. We all know that when a college makes it to the top 5 on that list, students will apply to the school regardless of knowing a thing about the school, simply for the name recognition. Anyway, for those of you who got deferred and truly have UChicago at the top of your list, here is why you should relax a bit:
1) You were going against kids who dual-applied to another school ED and Uchicago EA. The kids who stood out enough were the kids who got admitted to both their ED school and UChicago EA (it takes a lot more standing out to get into a school EA than it does ED, so let's go on the assumption that an EA acceptance to UChicago in this record pool of 10k applicants = an ED acceptance to their first-choice university). These kids will all have to withdraw their apps and UChi will open spots up.
2) The fact that you applied EA gives you an advantage over the RD kids in the RD pool.
3) UChi may have just deferred you to see your senior year grades before confirming an acceptance.
4) If they are unsure of whether you truly find them to be #1, they may have deferred you to test you and see how hard you try to appeal to them (as most of us know, you should get a discourse going with your regional adcom when you get deferred if the school is really your #1).
5) Not getting rejected means that you are in the ballpark for acceptance, so your chances of acceptance are higher than the overall admissions rate for the college.
6) UChicago really has no actual incentive to accept most of us early. In fact, it is wholly in their benefit to defer you and see how you do senior year and consider your app with that information in tow instead of just assuming you perform senior year how you do junior year. If you performed well enough up to this point to not get rejected from UChi, and you perform consistently so in Senior year, then your chance of acceptance is still considerable. Most of the benefit of accepting people early (when it is EA and not ED) is for luring in crazily-hooked applicants, i.e. a genius, low-income, first-generation URM who looks like he will get into everywhere he applies. If UChi accepts this person, they are hoping that person will settle for UChi, get lazy, and not try to apply to other places. If This person doesn't take the spot, then that's still good for UChi because UChi doesn't have enough spots anyway.
7) UChicago still has a reputation of being "where fun goes to die." Think about it. Is getting deferred, causing you to consider other college prospects and look for other colleges that you think fit you well, a bad thing in this scenario? What if you find another college that you think fits you great but actually has a reputation as a fun school? The competition to matriculate at a school "where fun goes to die" is not as hard as it appears to be, it is being masked by UChicago's insane marketing.
8) UChicago may make assumptions in RD admissions based upon whether EA acceptees have accepted their spots by the time RD considerations are underway. If there is someone, for example, who was a good candidate and got accepted EA but still hasn't accepted their place by the time UChi starts considering deferred and RD applicants, UChi may lower their standards (per se) a little and accept you, who they think is more likely to matriculate ultimately.
9) Most accepted students naturally come from the RD cycle at any given school.
10) Read some of these. Hello all. UChicago was and still is my first choice school. I did not apply elsewhere ED. I believe that I myself, and many of you that got deferred, would have had an excellent chance at an EA acceptance even as early as a year ago. That dwindled with UChicago's sudden rise to fame via US News and World Report. We all know that when a college makes it to the top 5 on that list, students will apply to the school regardless of knowing a thing about the school, simply for the name recognition. Anyway, for those of you who got deferred and truly have UChicago at the top of your list, here is why you should relax a bit:
1) You were going against kids who dual-applied to another school ED and Uchicago EA. The kids who stood out enough were the kids who got admitted to both their ED school and UChicago EA (it takes a lot more standing out to get into a school EA than it does ED, so let's go on the assumption that an EA acceptance to UChicago in this record pool of 10k applicants = an ED acceptance to their first-choice university). These kids will all have to withdraw their apps and UChi will open spots up.
2) The fact that you applied EA gives you an advantage over the RD kids in the RD pool.
3) UChi may have just deferred you to see your senior year grades before confirming an acceptance.
4) If they are unsure of whether you truly find them to be #1, they may have deferred you to test you and see how hard you try to appeal to them (as most of us know, you should get a discourse going with your regional adcom when you get deferred if the school is really your #1).
5) Not getting rejected means that you are in the ballpark for acceptance, so your chances of acceptance are higher than the overall admissions rate for the college.
6) UChicago really has no actual incentive to accept most of us early. In fact, it is wholly in their benefit to defer you and see how you do senior year and consider your app with that information in tow instead of just assuming you perform senior year how you do junior year. If you performed well enough up to this point to not get rejected from UChi, and you perform consistently so in Senior year, then your chance of acceptance is still considerable. Most of the benefit of accepting people early (when it is EA and not ED) is for luring in crazily-hooked applicants, i.e. a genius, low-income, first-generation URM who looks like he will get into everywhere he applies. If UChi accepts this person, they are hoping that person will settle for UChi, get lazy, and not try to apply to other places. If This person doesn't take the spot, then that's still good for UChi because UChi doesn't have enough spots anyway.
7) UChicago still has a reputation of being "where fun goes to die." Think about it. Is getting deferred, causing you to consider other college prospects and look for other colleges that you think fit you well, a bad thing in this scenario? What if you find another college that you think fits you great but actually has a reputation as a fun school? The competition to matriculate at a school "where fun goes to die" is not as hard as it appears to be, it is being masked by UChicago's insane marketing.
8) UChicago may make assumptions in RD admissions based upon whether EA acceptees have accepted their spots by the time RD considerations are underway. If there is someone, for example, who was a good candidate and got accepted EA but still hasn't accepted their place by the time UChi starts considering deferred and RD applicants, UChi may lower their standards (per se) a little and accept you, who they think is more likely to matriculate ultimately.
9) Most accepted students naturally come from the RD cycle at any given school.
10) Read some of these. <a href="http://www%5B/url%5D">http://www</a>. students review .com/IL/UC_comments.html
A lot of us have this idea of UChicago being a perfect fit in our minds. Reading some of those will perhaps create some room for skepticism, which is ironically great seeing as to how UChicago encourages skepticism :)</p>
<p>Woops mistake in the posting. At point 10 skip down to point 10 at the bottom. That is where the post should end.</p>
<p>so edit it</p>
<p>
I would love to but, unfortunately, the edit button disappears in a set period of time after you post a thread and I did not realize my mistake until after the edit button disappeared.</p>
<p>Ok this is going to sound pretty mean and before I get started, I think it’s cool that you’ve given a lot of thought about why it’s not bad to be deferred, however…
- Yes Uchicago’s 4th place spot in US news and whatever is a huge turn on for people seeking ranking, but it doesn’t mean that you should assume everyone who applied and got accepted also had an ED school. In fact if I remember correctly, UChicago recently had a lot of difficulty with an unexpectedly large freshman year because too many people matriculated to Uchicago than expected.
- There is a benefit to Uchicago taking you if they think you’re Uchicago material early. Who would willingly reread 5000 applications again to see if you’re suitable for the school when they already know you are. Honestly it’s a bit delusional to think that they deferred you just to see how much interest you would show for the show during RD.<br>
- Furthermore I’m not a URM, first gen, poor, or a genius. I’m your typical applicant and I don’t plan to get lazy and not apply to the rest of my schools for RD. </p>
<p>Yeah sorry 
I guess I’m still bitter over my MIT deferral lol. I think it’s great that you’re trying to be hopeful to everyone, but honestly ad coms aren’t thinking, hmmm shall I play a game with this applicant’s decision just to see how it goes? every time they read a new app. It’s not really as much of a strategic play as you make it sound.</p>
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<p>This is because of over-yield with regular students, not early admission ones. We can tell this is true from two years ago, when they admitted twice as many students as they had space for TOTAL, but still had room to accept people regular and did not go over their projected limit because they didn’t expect all of the early people to come. Some of those early people didn’t go because they were in binding ED agreements.</p>
<p>This year there were 10,318 applications and they admitted 13.8%, which is almost 1,600 already. Obviously all these people won’t be going, otherwise they never would have accepted them all.</p>
<p>However, the fact that they did accept them raises their change of matriculating – Halenford is right that a lot of people will attend the school they get into first, but the phrasing was a little derogatory in terms of lazy/not - studies on decision bias have shown that people, especially young people, are likely willing to like something (in this case a school) when it liked/wanted them. U of C is playing a yield game, but if they were a student’s first choice for EA, they will still come if accepted RD. There’s no opportunity cost to just waiting until later to issue the acceptance/see if they’d still like to do so, whereas under this theory there’s a lot to be gained for admitting an “overqualified” applicant they assume during regular would already have gotten into a more prestigious institution. Also, with regards to:</p>
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<p>They don’t actually rereview all of these folders, though it’s sweet that everyone thinks so.<br>
a) Many EA applicants are dead in the water but still deferred out of courtesy, to prevent alumni families from getting upset and not donating as much as they would have, or to maintain relationships with certain schools that have historically been of value to them, even though they don’t want to particular applicant. Too many early rejections might be perceived as harsh, and counselors could advise students the next year not to apply because they don’t have a good chance; this is bad both because schools (Chicago in particular) want to max their application potential so they can look as difficult to get into as possible and because that school might actually usually produce students who are well prepared and/or a good fit.
b) They make notes on the applications and review the notes AND, because it’s the same person each time and they try to balance workloads in the office, if they are going to walk back through everything they can skim because they’ve read it before. If you’re memorable they don’t need to; if you’re not memorable you probably weren’t going to get in anyway.
c) I don’t know that the particular “test” the OP described is applicable to everyone who was deferred, but knowing that UChicago cares so much about yield, it’s possible in some cases they were wondering. Their reasons for caring about yield are legitimate (though I think, typical of an institution known for theory over practice, that they’ve gotten the execution all wrong) - they want to repair their reputation as a safety for the Ivies, among other things I can detail later if you’d like. Even if it’s illegit, the fact that they think it’s legit will drive them to do extreme things, possibly like sentencing themselves to read weekly emails from some borderline kid who just really wants to go.</p>
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<p>I agree here, I guess. Reading the decision thread and knowing what happened at my school, the (GPA)(% possibility of yield) formula seems to have generated more than a few mistakes. If you’re trying to feel better about yourself after MIT, I don’t know that inviting us to place you in that category is the best way to do it.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I think “8” is either ridiculous or the premises are true and the conclusion wrong. If anything, an early admit who doesn’t come gives them the idea that discussion of Chicago at your high school isn’t favorable, meaning they don’t think you would come either. I also don’t think “5” is necessarily right - EA is super political, and because the upswing in apps at Chicago has been so sudden, their RD prospects are volatile. They’ve given themselves a big safety net in case only marginally more people put in RD apps than did EA or if a lot of them are poor quality (a lot of trying to decrease your acceptance rate is enticing people who don’t actually have a shot to try anyway).</p>
<p>“7” might also be wrong. Chicago isn’t as hard as they like to claim it is, at least in the early years 
By the time you’re an upperclassmen, you probably have the skills to perform.</p>
<p>I do think the fact that they’re trying to max GPA is helpful to RD people in general, including those deferred: They’ve built the average well enough by this point that they have a fair cushion to add a couple of lower but definitionally less significant numbers to their statistic (more inputs means less weight for each).</p>
<p>So saying, I think your analytical skills are pretty good and that passion about topics of current interest is a pretty strong indicator of future success (not in college admissions, more like in life). You’ll be fine whatever happens, but good luck nonetheless (and you should send them a link to this post to show them how much you care… Just kidding)!</p>
<ol>
<li>A looot of ED kids got rejected/deferred. I was deferred by Brown. Spots will open up, but not to that extent.</li>
<li>Applying early and then getting deferred does not give you an advantage over RD kids. About 10% of deferred kids get accepted.</li>
<li>Nope.</li>
</ol>
<p>I dunno. Seems like there are better reasons to encourage deferred kids. A lot of this is true though- a deferral usually means that you were close but had a soft spot somewhere in your app. Now is the time to find that spot and correct it.</p>
<p>I find what’s most encouraging about the idea of a deferral is that you now have time to improve your app and put some really cool stuff in your admissions counselor’s hands (such as new rec letters, some new achievements, some things you didn’t get to mention, ect), and at a time where your app will probably be in admissions’ hands. For RD, they have one shot at one deadline and that is it. For you guys, send stuff around early to mid-early February and that’ll give your admissions officer something to rally for you with. You’ve already qualified yourself as UChicago material. Now’s the time to do a little extra, and that’s pretty sweet.
Goodluck, all of you.</p>
<p>In response to a number from Post #6:</p>
<p>Early acceptances from UChicago are 1380, not 1600; early admitted rate is 13.38%, not 13.8%. I feel that a discrepancy of 240 admitted applicants is too big not to point out.</p>
<p><a href=“Early Admissions Statistics 2013 - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com”>Early Admissions Statistics 2013 - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com;