Hi I was wondering if anyone could explain to me why I was deferred from Tulane. I thought I was a likely candidate for merit aid and got deferred through early action.
SAT: 1540
GPA: 4.07 at a very rigorous, top private school in my city
Class rank: n/a but definitely top 20%
Honors: national honor society and heads list (over 3.9 gpa) every year at my school
Extra curriculars: varsity cheer all 4 years and captain this year, president of lgbt club at my school, big brothers if big sisters for 2 years (paired with u derprivileged buddy from nearby elementary school and play and teach them once a week during a lunch), investment group (take real money from our schools fund and invest, currently hold 33k in stocks), church class ambassador and member of church mission team (both you are selected to be on), volunteer work over the summer at a garden, Girl Scouts since 1st grade
Work: hostess at a local restaurant
Classes: IB psychology, IB calf and stats, IB English HL, IB history of the Americas HL, IB/AP Spanish 5 HL, economics
Recs: did not see them but very close with both teachers, involved in activities with them outside the classroom and they think highly of me and both good writers so I would assume good recs, as well as advisor Rec which I also couldn’t read but I know it was very good because we have a very close relationship (he’s retired now and he still comes to my house and to school to see me) and he always wrote outstanding things
Didn’t do an interview (is this where I went wrong) but visited campus and went to infosession when rep came to my high school
Profile: white, female, income bracket 100,000+
Can someone please explain my deferral??
Hi, I just got deferred from Tulane as well. In the deferral letter, the Dean said to request my counselor to send in an updated transcript of grades and standardized tests so I’m wondering if perhaps my transcript was incomplete or insufficient. I would just contact your counselor first about the deferral if you haven’t done so and then get a hold of a Tulane representative and talk to them about it.
@naenae29 Is Tulane your first choice? You have a very impressive stats and Tulane doesn’t like to be considered a safety school. If you contact your admissions counselor and say that Tulane is your top choice you could probably tip the scales in your direction!
I would definitely contact your admissions counselor your stats are quite impressive!
Thank you guys!! My college counselor contacted the admissions rep and she said they weren’t sure I was interested and assumed it was a backup school for me (it’s actually one of my top choices). I sent an email to her expressing interest and 10 days after the RD deadline I got an update to check my portal. I got in now with a $25,000 scholarship and honors college!! Roll wave!
Congrats. So the Tufts effect is alive and well. These colleges have to protect their yield. In my student’s case something similar had a very different reason. When D1 asked her high school teacher if she could use his rec for a college internship, he said she couldn’t see the letter and no. That set off all kinds of bells and whistles. The other teacher sent her a copy right away and said sure. Look for “hidden” things you have no control over in addition to colleges just can’t take all who are qualified. Tufts effect is a bona fide rationale for very qualified students. This is a good lesson that applicants have to make each college believe they are their one and only.
Tulane is very big on demonstrated interest.
“Congrats. So the Tufts effect is alive and well.”
Bingo!
Tulane deferred you because they think you are too unlikely to enroll. They assume your high stats will get you admitted to several higher ranked schools and that you’ll eventually pick one of those higher ranked schools over Tulane. Admitting many great kids who eventually enroll elsewhere is not what Tulane is shooting for.
Defer gives you and Tulane some time to communicate and see if an enrollment is a realistic enough possibility to justify an admission offer.
The problem with this is the OP was hoping for merit aid, and I don’t think any Uni goes back and gives it to applicants in the deferred category, no matter how much both parties come to agree on the strong interest of the applicant or their outstanding qualifications. So at some level the “Tuftsing” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I used to be against binding Early Decision, but have come to think that its clarity is better than Adcoms trying to divine whether top applicants are really interested or not.
thats not true, @turtle17. In past years, Tulane has given merit to students initially deferred.
My daughter was initially deferred but has since been accepted with a merit package. I think Tulane is very generous throughout ED and RD.
Ok, sorry for the bad info. No excuse for that, but also do feel like a policy where deferral than pleading that one is really interested seems non-optimal.
@turtle17 Try to understand it by putting yourself in their shoes. They have tens of thousands of applications and way to many of them have 32 or higher ACT with 4.0 or higher GPA for you to be able to take them all. If they did take them all right away, they would over-enroll and end up with way more kids than they actually have room for(this happened for them last year and they had to scramble for housing in the honors dorm). So inconvenient or unfair as it seems, some very high stat kids have to get deferred. The process is part art and part science. You are correct in that it may be “non-optimal”, so what would you sugggest?
Binding ED.
This isn’t about Tulane in general, but all the schools at their “level.” They could accept all the high stats kids who apply and statistically correct for lower yield. They already have yield models. They don’t do this partly because it will introduce more uncertainty, but also because they don’t like to lower their yields overall.
I’ve been impressed by the cases of schools like Northwestern (admittedly more highly ranked) how increasing use of ED has eliminated a whole bunch of guesswork on the part of adcoms about demonstrated interest, and therefore eliminated a whole bunch of extra stress for applicants about whether they demonstrated sufficient interest or not. I used to think forcing kids to choose an ED in early fall was not good, but I think it is less problematic than the attempted divination of demonstrated interest (e.g. the original OP).
@EDHDAD I see it a different way. It’s all about statistics. They could accept all those with high ACT and SAT scores but most of them would not go, thereby making the yield very low. They defer the students and, if they are accepted to a higher ranked school the student removes themselves from the pool. Tulane wants students who want Tulane, not students who think of Tulane as a safety. If these highly ranked students are not accepted at their ED school then Tulane might move up in their list.
But why have non-binding EA at all in this model? If you want the students who ED’d somewhere else and didn’t make it, just have them apply RD to you. I don’t get the advantage of getting high stats applicants to apply EA, deferring them, and then accepting a fraction of those you deferred who profess great interest. My guess is you will turn off more of those applicants by deferring them when they really were sort of interested, than any gain you might get. Why not skip the whole EA step? There must be a perceived advantage for the university to do it this way, but I’m having trouble seeing it. The only one I can see is it might make the students you do accept in EA feel more special, but that seems a reach to me.
@DebmomNY What do you consider high statistics?
My son and his friends who were accepted to Tulane EA all have 34 to 36 ACT, perfect or almost perfect grades with 10+ AP’s, etc. They all have the opportunity to go to higher ranked schools if they want, or to go to lower ranked schools for little to no money. Why they were picked while some of the other high stat kids that they know were not picked I have no idea. Maybe they did not like their extracurriculars, essays, letters of rec, etc as much. Demonstrated interest does seem to matter. Can you blame them for that?
Non Binding EA worked well for our daughter, She was deferred but had not been able to visit because of a family situation - elder care. Once she was deferred we had a window to visit - she loved the campus and was excited to apply ED2 and was able to fully commit to Tulane without hesitation. We were lucky we could get in for a visit but it made all the difference in the world. She is excited and has full confidence she ended up where she was meant to be.
@turtle17 I agree with that. EA seems to have lost its meaning in the world of ED1 and ED2. For us, the advantage is that for the schools we are interested in that accepted our son EA we will actually have time to visit before The decision deadline. Some of the schools he applied to RD won’t have a decision until April 1st which won’t give us time to schedule a trip before decisions are due. So if my son wants to pick an RD school he will have to do so without ever having seen it in person.
@EDHDAD So in this case it seems to have given the school an advantage in recruiting your son. It seems to me the low yields at the schools that both have EA and are roughly 25-50 in USNWR suggests that it doesn’t work for them with most kids. This is also the response to the “demonstrated interest does seem to matter” - there is a pretty good correlation with the importance of demonstrated interest and low yields. This tells me adcoms aren’t very good at divining actual interest.
Clearly there is some perceived advantage for the university or they wouldn’t do it. Do they think their overall yields would be even lower without it? On the other hand, Tufts seems to have gone with ED1 and ED2, so there should probably be a new term for yield protection in early admissions.