A solid 90% of kids I know who applied ED/EA have been deferred, but I thought that most colleges do not defer people that much. Was the applicant pool just that bad this year?
where are the statistics for this? or are these just kids you personally know?
@lala07 I have no stats to give but from kids I know and posts I have seen on here deferrals seem very common (90% was a bit of an over exaggeration)
You thought wrong.
@marvin100 Most bluntly put I could have hoped for. Only reason I thought that was the naviance graphs from my school showed very little deferrals
possibly because there were more many more applicants this year than previous years.
Let’s say a top school accepts 25% of EDs, defers 60%, and rejects 15%. But those aren’t spread out evenly across high schools. In fact, most admits are concentrated among high-performing high schools (privates, publics in wealthy suburbs, magnet schools in large cities, etc.). So if you attend a mid-performing high school, it’s definitely possible that you’d observe a mix closer to 5% admitted, 85% deferred, and 10% rejected.
Naviance at least for my school is based on self-reported data. If a kid doesn’t check the box that says he got deferred from X school, it doesn’t show up on the scatterplot.
Harvard for example, is one schools that defers a ton of applicants.
MIT deferred 61% this year.
@goldenbear2020 my school is actually a high performing public school in a wealthy suburb which is why there are so many deferrals. The ivies and their counterparts have so many well qualified students from schools like mine that they simply cannot accept them all or they would lack diversity of location
There is another thread here that does have actual data and it is being updated daily
Yes it does seem that the percentage of those deferred is quite high
It almost seems that it is necessary or the percentage of total admits from ED would be well above 50% for certain schools
I would bet that many of those students get in during RD as they are obviously qualified students
Just FYI, @spayurpets is tracking some of this info in this thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19091415/#Comment_19091415. I do think that more and more students feel pressure to apply somewhere, anywhere, ED or SCEA so I wonder if that will in fact drive up deferral rates.
I don’t know about deferrals, but from the year on year data I have seen, it DOESN’T really look like there was a big spike in ED/EA applications - maybe around a 2% rise at most schools, and some even saw drops.
On another thread, there was a discussion of deferrals as a marketing tactic. It’s the ‘soft rejection’ that allows schools to tell students ‘you were good enough academically’ - so they don’t turn off other applicants from the school in coming years. It the bar looks like its gotten too high, people start giving up on what they perceive to be ‘a lottery.’ Schools don’t want that to happen because it hurts their selectivity rating. Meanwhile, there are admittedly paltry bragging rights that go with 'I was deferred at ‘Sparkly U’ implying that you were at least worthy of consideration rather than outright rejection.
If it seems like the deferral rate is increasing, I wouldn’t be surprised. Other schools are probably glomming onto the idea of the ‘soft rejection.’ What deferred has always meant is that you need to move on - your chances are very small to non-existent.
If tons of deferrals are supposed to be a marketing tactic, I think there is some evidence that it is having the opposite effect - lots of people seem pretty pissed off about it.
Our Naviance did not show for previous years whether your acceptance or rejection came after a deferral. So deferrals only show up on our charts between Dec and April after that they all get converted.
But deferrals have always been pretty common. My older son applied EA to three schools deferred from all three, (despite getting accepted to Harvard in the RD round.) Younger son got one deferral and one EA acceptance.
While you should move on after a deferral, different colleges treat them differently. At some, Tufts for example, you really were on the cusp and better semester grades may tip you into the acceptance pile. No one gets a deferral who didn’t have someone on the admissions committee rooting for them. When my son was deferred from MIT, his chances were about 1 in 4 of getting accepted in the regular round, which was considerably better than the RD admit rate. (Still not great odds, and he didn’t get in.) Georgetown doesn’t reject anyone in the EA round, it’s all deferrals. Other schools (Stanford) do most of the culling early, and send out lots of rejections. If you make it through with a deferral, you still have a chance.
Just don’t think you have a better chance than the overall acceptance rate of the school that deferred you, unless you have some inside information about how that particular school handles deferrals.
I think you need to look at the info from the schools themselves. Some are really transparent and tell you exactly what they mean to communicate to you with a deferral (i.e., UPenn’s website has a message from admissions that says if you got a deferral, you have a 10% chance of being accepted in the regular round, so while you still have a chance, as @mathmom points out, you should be “reviewing your list”.) I have read, but not seen back-up, that some other schools, such as Bates, just keep kicking it down the road – they defer a lot, and many of them even end up on the waitlist. With that said, there are stories about kids who were deferred to RD, put on the waitlist, and are now attending.
Personally, I think the toughest part is deciding after an EDI deferral if you should EDII somewhere else and give up that chance, however, small, of attending your first choice school.
The marketing tactic isn’t for the benefit of the person who was deferred (except maybe the aforementioned paltry bragging rights). It’s for the people in the years behind them who would otherwise be too discouraged to apply.
Stanfords usually defers around 10-15% and reject ~80-85%. UMich has been deferring 85%. Different schools take very different approach. I am not surprised for a non-recruited no legacy applicant to have 90% deferral/rejection chance from those top schools.