My student just got deferred from Harvard. There are so many applicants in the RD process why is there this status? whar should he be thinking about asides from taking the subject tests? Does anyone know the statistics of students getting accepted after being deferred at this school? Thank you.
The statistics are low, but I know a student who was deferred last year, then waitlisted, and finally accepted to Harvard, so anything’s possible. The fact is, though, that Harvard defers most of its candidates in the EA round, which suggests to me (and others) that it uses deferrals mainly as “polite” rejections. @Sharples
My dad is a Harvard alumnus, and he’s told me before that deferrals and waitlists are also often used as a form of polite rejection specifically for legacy kids that aren’t up to par…I think their logic is that they’ll continue to receive donations from the parent if they defer/waitlist rather than reject.
Deferrals and wait lists are also used to round out the class. For example, if you’re from, say, Minnesota, and they do not get any qualified applicants from the upper Midwest during RD, they might choose to offer a spot to the deferred applicant from Minnesota.
These statistics exist, and for most schools it turns out the percentage of deferred students that are eventually accepted is on par with the admit rate of the RD applicant pool.
That’s the answer to your question. However it is also completely meaningless if you think you can use it to predict the chances of your student. They are reflections of the odds of the group. In other words, if we had a list of all the deferred applicants and picked names at random, the odds that the ones we picked were later accepted are the same as the odds of a randomly chosen person from the RD applicants.
This does not mean the chances of your student are the same as the RD admit rate. To think so is to make what is called the “ecological fallacy”. As the Wikipedia entry notes
So at this point we know nothing about the chances of your student.
Here’s why. A school like Stanford defers less than 10% and rejects 80% of its ED applicants. Harvard rejected less than 10% of ED kids. Is Stanford that much harder to get into? No. A school like Harvard is proud of its low admit rate, that’s why they and their brethren are beating the bushes sending out misleading letters encouraging kids to apply. If they reject kids ED then other kids at their HS with similar or lower stats will realize they have no hope and not bother applying. Much better to “defer” the kid. Stanford is more admirable here, telling a kid they know won’t get in right away and letting the chips fall where they may.
There are 2 sub-groups in the Harvard deferals. Those similar to the Stanford deferred that have a decent chance of getting in. And those that have no chance. Taken overall, the admit rate may indeed approximate the RD acceptance rate. But unless the OP has some way of knowing what sub-group their student is in, being deferred carries no information about subsequent chances.
Harvard defers about 75% of their REA applicants. Only about 10% are rejected outright. If the 15% or so who are admitted, a large number are hooked in some way (legacies, donors, URMs or athletics). There are really only a small number of available REA spots for unhooked applicants. Just take a look at the 2020 REA results thread. Without knowing the specifics about your student it’s hard to say what the factors were in his/her case, but it certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t qualified. There have been some ridiculously qualified applicants who didn’t get in REA in the past.
I’m guessing at least 75% of the students who apply to Harvard SCEA are qualified. I don’t think for a minute that Harvard defers students so that other students won’t be discouraged. I just don’t think they are that Machiavellian. (I do think legacies, in particular, may get a soft rejection via deferrals or waitlists, but rarely. Most legacies are not big donors. I don’t think for a second Harvard cares that I give them $100 a year. They didn’t care that my son told them they weren’t his first choice either.)
All that said, given that Harvard doesn’t reject much in the early round, your chances are pretty much the same as the overall admit rate. Harvard has always rejected plenty of “ridiculously qualified applicants” including my niece who was a double legacy to boot.
Unlike mathmom, I think Harvard is absolutely that Machiavellian. They are signaling to other students in the classes behind the students who get deferred that they shouldn’t assume they won’t get in and thereby priming the pump for next year. It’s virtually costless compared to the cost of sending out all those letters expressing interest in kids who have no chance at all but are encouraged to apply so as to keep the selectivity rating high (and provide application fees which add up to quite a lot of money at the end of the day.)