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I think it helps kids to know that it is not their fault. Life is not fair and college admission is an example of it.
C’mon. Why can’t you imagine a vast slew of high stats, activated kids? And having to cherry pick? What turns that into a slant against them? No need to answer that.
And if it helps kids to face reality, feel it’s not their fault, then don’t go over and over and over this, trying to figure what the kid “did wrong.” And this kid was…not…rejected.
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Kids did nothing wrong. I feel that adults wronged them by creating an unfair experience. Sooner or later, one lawsuit or another, but it will change. Have to.
After reading about college admission, I asked my husband a “tricky” question: “Imagine 3 students applying for college. One is a great poet, another in involved in the social justice movement, and the third one is an underprivileged kid from foster care. Whom would you like to admit”? My husband (an engineer) told me that, “If they are applying to an Engineering school, I will take the best engineer and I don’t care about the rest. When you hire a person, you never ask him/her about EC, social justice, political views, etc. Why should college admission be any different”. I think he is right. Colleges should take the brightest kids and never try to evaluate their souls.
Deferral is not a rejection however he should have some other schools to focus on as reaches/matches and safety. The reality is that elite schools reject numerous qualified applicants. Several years ago our high school as twin boys as val/sal. They were both outstanding students with fine extacurriculars. Upon rejection from MIT, RD the guidance counselor was told that MIT cannot accept every val/sal that apply, simply that. They both did well though, one was accepted with a full ride at Lehigh in an elite very small entrepreneurship program and the twin who was interested in journalism got a full ride at Syracuse.
It seems that there is an expectation that if a kid is val or sal and has 99% percentile SAT or whatever, that they should get into whatever school they want. But the numbers show that even if the schools limited to just those, there are more than enough. And val or sal is not the be-all-and-end-all. Those can be gamed (as discussed much here) and doesn’t necessarily show whatever the schools are looking for. Bitterness is not a good look. We were surprised by some of my kid’s rejections, but he’s turned out well, graduating from Swat this May with a job in hand.
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I truly hope that the OP son will be accepted. I was writing about academically bright students in general, not about him, specifically. My point is that Ivys really need to change their message that “There are too many academically bright applicants, and they are boring”.
@lookingforward That’s why it’s called anecdata. Penn’s strong interest in legacies is well known. The story about who got into Penn from my kid’s high school was meant to be illustrative.
No one should be surprised or angry if their kid is rejected from an ivy or ivy-equivalent school. These schools attract the top talent from all around the world. The only way to approach ivy admissions and retain your sanity is to prepare as well as possible, hope for the best BUT expect the worst. That is the only way. These schools are insanely hard to get in unless you are a major prodigy, a major development case or a legacy/ URM with decent/good stats. For the rest of the qualified kids that have great academic profiles but are unhooked, these schools are practically a lottery. There are just too many such applicants and very few spots available.
The Penn ED rate for legacies was ~ 29-30% this year. The acceptance rate for non-athletes, non-legacy applicants was ~14%. If you exclude the prodigiously talented applicants (major national awards, olympiads etc) and the URMs, I would not be surprised if the ED rate was ~10% or less for the remaining applicants. Still much higher than the RD rate for that group but a crapshoot by all means.
It’s OK to be angry. You’re entitled to your feelings. But if you’re surprised, that means you weren’t as well-informed about the process as you might have been.
It’s not just Harvard and its equivalent schools that are a crapshoot. So are the ever-so-slightly-less-selective big-name schools such as Penn, Northwestern, Cornell, Wash U, and the top liberal arts colleges. All of these colleges get far more applicants than they can accept, and they have to make choices among them. So the question isn’t why student X got deferred or rejected – most applicants do, even though huge numbers of them are very well qualified. Rejection is the outcome you expect. The question is why student Y got accepted, and the answer to that is often a mystery.
And rejection, of some sort, will happen in every young person’s life, even if that student gets in to their first choice college. There will be graduate programs that don’t take them or that don’t work out. There will be jobs they want very much but don’t get. Or they may lose jobs. There may be romantic relationships that don’t work out or moves to cities that they expect to love and turn out to hate. It happens to everyone. It happened to all of us. And as much as we hate the idea, it happens to our kids, too.
(My “kids” are 31 and 28 now and both got into their first choice schools. But that doesn’t mean that their lives since then have been entirely smooth. Of course they haven’t been.)
You’ll never know why someone is deferred, but I firmly believe that is rare that an unqualified student is deferred. My older son was deferred from two schools (MIT and Caltech) and ultimately rejected from both of them. He ended up accepted by Harvard and Carnegie Mellon (School of Computer Science) and ended up attending CMU. It really was the perfect place for him, so the story had a happy ending.
I do know that U Penn specifically prefers legacies to apply ED, and most schools accept a lot of athletes ED as well. So it can be tough to get in ED - tougher than the admissions statistics make it look.
I could write a book on this, but I won’t bore you. I’m sorry. Deferrals are purgatory for some kids. My son was deferred, then waitlisted, then rejected from Brown. It’s an awful feeling, but it helps to start loving your second and third choices. What does not help is wondering why he didn’t get in. Really, the process is not transparent. If he applied in 2016 or 2018, he might have been accepted. Your son is not deficient.
Deferral means different things for different colleges. For example, a few years ago Princeton and Stanford had the following stats for their early applicants. Princeton only rejected 1% of applicants and deferred the rest. The deferred applicants likely included many who were unqualified and had essentially no chance of admission. In contrast, Stanford rejected 81% and only deferred 8%. This suggests the few deferred at Stanford truly were borderline decisions that had a significantly better chance of being admitted in RD round than the average applicant.
Princeton Early Applicants
714 accepted (19%)
49 rejected (1%)
3042 deferred (79%)
Stanford Early Applicants
743 accepted (10%)
~5900 rejected (81%)
562 deferred (8%)
Some universities, like Georgetown, state very clearly that they do NOT reject at all during EA round, You are either accepted or deferred. They do tell you in the deferral letter that only 10% of applicants deferred are accepted in the RD round which seems like their way of telling you to make sure you have other options. I do think perhaps it is kinder to reject those truly unqualified students who have no chance during the RD round so they are forced to cut their losses and move on.
@Marian Of course everyone is entitled to their feelings, i am just saying there is no use being angry, Imo the only way to do this is not adopt a very zen attitude about it. you try your best, apply and then you let it go. If it happens, it is like getting the lottery, if not it is business as usual. Easier said than done of course.
If anybody thinks that only HYPSM are crapshoots and that the non-HYP ivies and less selective elites like Duke,Chicago, NU etc are not, then they are in for a rude awakening. I can’t imagine anyone who has done basic research thinks that.
People think it’s a crapshoot when they haven’t done their due diligence. For highly selective colleges, not the best mindset, imo. You don’t want to be the one blindfolded, throwing random darts.
“there is no dream school, dream job, dream spouse, dream anything. HE is the dream, not some external marker of success.”
@blossom - thank you for your response to the OP. My son will probably be deferred from his top choice tomorrow…more than qualified, but like others have said it’s basically winning the lottery. I’ve been talking to him for weeks/months about other options and I hope I’ll be able to model the appropriate disappointment tomorrow, if needed, and celebrate the acceptances has had and will receive from other wonderful schools!
@Data10 rare. So you gave me an example. I can give you another Georgetown doesn’t reject anyone EA. I don’t know why since there must be some people that they know they’ll never accept. Still the numbers don’t surprise me, at either Stanford or Princeton, I think most students who apply to the super elite schools and have their act together enough to also apply early, probably are qualified. I don’t know any college that actually tells you how many they accept from the deferral pool. Many eons ago (2007) MIT actually published that number and at the time it was 25% of the students who were deferred eventually got accepted, which was somewhat better than the acceptance rate at the time.
I agree that most applicants are qualified at Princeton, but only 1% were rejected. Are all of the other 99% of applicants all qualified?
The post immediately below my earlier one mentions Georgetown’s letter gives a 10% admit rate for deferred applicants. If you search around you can find info for quite a few other colleges. For example, the article at https://www.boston.com/news/education/2015/12/11/harvard-accepts-record-low-percentage-of-early-applicants mentions 2.3% of SCEA deferred applicants at Harvard were accepted in RD in 2014. The figure is probably lower today.
If you want to feel better about not getting into UPenn, I highly, highly recommend the book “What Made Maddy Run” by Kate Fagan. It’s ultimately a very sad and tragic story about a female athlete whose dream school was UPenn. She wasn’t good enough to get there through soccer, her first love, so she went as a recruited track athlete. Maddy was suffering from mental illness (depression) and that is what ultimately led to her suicide, but I learned enough about Penn Culture (ie “Penn Face”) that it made me grateful that my DD chose not to go there. I don’t think she would have done well with all the pressure at such an intense school.
Just remember, deferral is not rejection. It leaves a door open- and meanwhile, gives you a chance to open other doors.