<p>Question says it all. Other Ivies have like 20% defer rates. Why is Brown’s so high?</p>
<p>I would imagine so. The alternative is to briefly glance at them and what? Hold off to read them thoroughly later? After the 25000 RD apps come in? Of course not. They have to thoroughly scrub the ED apps now – just to spread out their workload.</p>
<p>Nope, they absolutely read them all. In fact, they read each of them longer during ED than during RD. The difference comes in the role of ED to the schools. Brow uses ED as a means to lock in students Brown knows it wants, no matter what the rest of the applicant pool would look like, and it rejects those it knows it would not accept in any Brown applicant pool. But most ED applicants have the academic and personal promise to succeed at Brown, but whether they are accepted depends on the makeup of the rest of the applicant pool, so they are deferred so they can be looked at give the unique makeup of that year’s pool. This differs markedly with say UPenn, Columbia, Duke or Dartmouth, who all use ED to try and ratchet up their matriculation rate and lower their acceptance rate, as these things are major components of the college rankings; Brown - which patently does not derive its prestige from its US News ranking -doesn’t have the same incentive to boost ED acceptances. Indeed, you’ll notice the percentage of these other school’s classes filled by ED are MUCH higher than Brown’s. Finally, because they give an advantage during the ED process, the students they don’t accept are far less likely to get in RD (otherwise because of the advantage, in most cases, they would get in ED), hence more are rejected, hence the lower deferral rate. You’ll note other schools uninterested in using early apps to ratchet up matriculation rates, e.g. Harvard, also defer the great majority of their students.</p>
<p>I question the validity of your assumption that brown’s deferral rate is 3.5x the other ivies. Back when I applied in 04 they all had very high deferral rates and low rejection/acceptance rates.</p>
<p>@i<em>wanna</em>be_Brown, look at the deferral rate of Columbia and UPenn.</p>
<p>You are right. I guess it’s different approaches for different schools. Harvard’s is similar to ours at 68% [Early</a> Action Acceptance Rate Increases to 21 Percent for the Class of 2018 | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/early-admissions-rate-rises/]Early”>Early Action Acceptance Rate Increases to 21 Percent for the Class of 2018 | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>