Why do deferred students have the same chance as fresh applicants?

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of Virginia
1

Source: http://admission.virginia.edu/sites/www.admission.virginia.edu/files/Defer%20Chart.jpg

2014 stats

Total Deffered = 3742
Total Deffered Offered Admission: 790
% Offered Admissions: 28.8%

Um… isn’t being deferred a way of saying “We’re on the fence about you, so we’d like to see you compared to the RD pool”. Shouldn’t a student already deemed “on the fence” have a better chance than any old fresh applicant? Meaning the above % should be somewhere more generous, perhaps around 50%?

Also, the engineering school’s deferral stats are really brutal.

2

Deferral admits in 2006 (when I was admitted after deferral) were 10%, so I’m glad to see that it’s gone up since then. I basically assumed I wasn’t getting in. That was back when it was ED and not EA. Deferral today doesn’t seem like such a “death sentence” per se.

3

By definition, the RD applicants are not the same as the EA applicants.

In practice, the applicants who tend to have their s* together the most, and whose applications are in great condition at the beginning of autumn senior year, will generally tend to apply EA. They can expect a “bubble” or cluster of outstanding applications in the EA round. Which means that admissions can fairly easily pick out those exceptional applications and give them an early admission offer.

Applications that are not exceptional get deferred to the RD pool. These are often applicants who apply EA mistakenly thinking it is easier to get an admission offer, when their application really isn’t exceptional.

No, there is no reason to think that an application they are less than sure about should have a better chance than an application that hasn’t been seen before, because (again, by definition) you have no idea how good or bad the next application you look at for the first time will be. If an application wasn’t deemed good enough to merit an offer in EA, why would you expect it to be better than most of the RD applications? Submitting an application by an earlier date does not do anything to make the application itself any better or worse than submitting it later.

If UVA received fewer (or more) EA applications than expected, or if they found fewer (or more) exceptional applicants among them to admit EA than expected, they might need to see the rest of the RD applications before they can really be comfortable in putting together the incoming class they seek.

These are not spins of a roulette wheel. These are unique applications, each one representing a unique applicant. Ordering them would be a Sisyphean task is they tried to do it straight up. But they’re not even doing that; as you can see, each college (engineering, architecture, etc.) is looking for some target number of new students; someone trying to get into engineering is not compared directly to someone trying to get in to architecture. Or maybe the marching band needs 10 new trumpeters, and the orchestra already has too many violins; the next violinist might get rejected even if he has better grades and test scores than the next few trumpeter applicants.

If they’ve already blown past the (post-yield) quota of new engineering students, well, it’s full. If not, they’ll take the best applications for engineering they find among those remaining. And no, it won’t make any difference that they already looked at the application once a few months ago.

4

I believe one of the main reasons why deferrals occur is to see how well you did in your classes in the first half of your senior year. If you did really well, the odds would be better. However, if you slacked off, your odds in the RD pool get weak. You’ve made it through the first 3 sets of cuts, which is an achievement.

5

My thought is that UVA defers many students hoping that their MY reports are solid, but then find out that senioritis hit them hard. Especially if you applied EA to UVA, odds are that you applied EA to other schools as well and have heard back. Knowing that you’re in college really claws at any motivation you may have had.

6

“Shouldn’t a student already deemed “on the fence” have a better chance than any old fresh applicant? Meaning the above % should be somewhere more generous, perhaps around 50%?”

Your assumption is wrong. Deferred kids should do about the SAME – not better and not worse. The deferred pool has been depleted of the strongest applicants (who got admitted) and also the weakest (who got rejected). So the deferred pool (as a whole) should actually be about average.

For in-state A&S (the largest component at UVA), 45% of the deferreds got admitted. Overall the offer rate for that group was 43%. Which is consistent with my assumption that deferreds do about the same.

For out-of-state A&S, the overall offer rate was 23% and the deferred offer rate was 17%. My guess is that the difference there has to to with something else going on – like legacies or recruited athletes or other hooked applicants who are less likely to be deferred. My guess is that 17% is probably not much different than what the offer rate is for unhooked OOS applicants.