<p>So I've been wondering: why do colleges defer some early applicants to the regular admission pool? </p>
<p>Considering the fact that early admission letters come out around mid-December and most regular applications are due around January, there would be no time for the individual to improve much. The most I can think of is taking one last Sat/Act and rewriting college essays. If you're deferred, what do colleges expect you to do?</p>
<p>I don’t think colleges expect deferred candidates to do anything. It just means they will review your application along with that of the RD applicants. ED applicants tend to be better qualified, so it’s harder to stand out. But plenty of deferred people do get in eventually, depending on the school. I suppose you could send in supplemental material, such as an arts portfolio or a clip of you playing an instrument, but most of the people I knew who did this were people who wanted to get off the wait list.</p>
<p>Oh, and getting deferred does not mean you weren’t good enough to get in. One of my daughter’s friends was deferred then rejected at Yale, but got into Harvard and Stanford.</p>
<p>Sometimes they just want to see if the student is performing well as a senior (perhaps in comparison to a bad semester earlier).</p>
<p>IMHO its largely a marketing ploy. Students who are deferred think they “still have a chance” and that the school will take another look at them. Okay, maybe, but there are schools such as Stanford that flat-out reject most of the ED applicants they don’t accept. Is the applicant pool so different? </p>
<p>I think many kids that a selective college knows are never going to get admitted manage to convince themselves that if only they were judged against all the applicants instead of just the ED ones they’d have a “chance”. Its a convoluted story, but when your dreams are tied up in believing it then somehow you believe. (See global warming, the Laffer curve, etc. for other examples of self-serving denial). </p>
<p>So rather than fight and suffer a decline in ED because kids think they weren’t given every chance, many colleges just send out polite “deferred” letters.</p>
<p>At selective schools, ED admits go to the legacies, athletes, development cases etc. and truly superstar students. If you are just good enough to be considered, but not bad enough to reject, they prefer to wait and see how you compare against the RD pool of applicants.</p>