@dgibarra your specific application clearly convinced them to take a second look and hopefully you will be admitted in a later round. Did you switch to EDII or stick with RD?
Generally speaking, colleges do seem to be preferring deferral to outright rejection in the early rounds. Harvard, for instance, deferred 75% of its SCEA applicants and rejected less than 10%. Yale deferred 55% and rejected 29%. MIT (not quite a comparable school) deferred 65% and rejected 26%. Would provide more data but it’s getting a bit harder to find! Columbia, Penn, Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth, NU, and Duke didn’t publish deferred data and/or haven’t released their results yet.
UChicago doesn’t publish this data either (surprise!), but it did seem that last year it deferred a whole lotta applications which explains, in large part, why the RD rate was only around 2%. This doesn’t mean that those candidates didn’t get adequate consideration of their applications nor does it imply that they just defer everybody, regardless of qualifications. But it is a managed rate - more so for UChicago than others just due to the large proportion of early apps. Given the number of surprised posters who were expecting rejection on this and other top threads, it also makes the schools come across as more humane and civilized.