You did it! Your family got to the other side of the application deadlines, and you survived! But now, if you applied early action or early decision anywhere, then decisions have begun rolling in.
Hopefully there are some thick acceptance envelopes in there, complete with confetti and plenty of cheering. But if your family reached for any colleges (I think of reaches as “just out of reach” not “just within reach,”), then there are likely some denials as well. And while rejection hurts, it is part of life, and so it is a necessary experience and chance for growth here. I was saving it for later, but I’ll just say it again: “rejection is redirection.” It sounds contrived, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
But far more likely than either of those outcomes is the dreaded deferral. And while a deferral may be disappointing, it’s worth remembering that a deferral is not a no! Here, we’ll unpack the difference between a deferral and a waitlist, how deferrals and waitlists work, and where you should go from here.
What’s In A Name: Deferred and Postponed
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Whether the college calls it a deferral or a postponement, the result is the same: your application was not selected for admission in the early application round. Here’s something to keep in mind, however…
A school like USC admits ~2,900 students in their early application round, but ~41,000 students applied! [1] For practical purposes, there’s an endless number of combinations of applicants that USC could arrange to create their incoming class. Many of those would include your application, and many more would not. So long as you were a competitive applicant to begin with, choosing (or not choosing) your application has very little to do with you personally. The college has to choose fewer than 3,000 students from an impossibly large pool of qualified applicants. And sometimes those decisions can feel incredibly arbitrary.
Deferrals happen when there’s not enough space for all these qualified applicants. The college has basically said: “we like you, but we chose other applicants for this early round. But we want the chance to look at your application again with our regular applicant pool to see if your application fits better than the rest of the regular applicant pool.” Your application will be read again, along with the updated transcript your school will send, and the statement or form that you complete updating the college on anything else that’s happened since October or November when you applied initially.
To Waitlist or Not To Waitlist
Waitlists happen later in the process than deferrals do. If your child was not a good fit, then the college would have denied admission outright. Being waitlisted signals that you did not get into the school, but that you were a competitive applicant whom the college is still interested in. The college may decide to make an offer of admission to your child later on, if other students they accepted choose not to enroll. Especially at colleges with low yields, the reality is that a lot of accepted students will ultimately not elect to enroll, leaving the college needing to accept additional students to fill their incoming class.
What is yield, you might ask? Yield is the percentage of students who were accepted to a college who actually decide to enroll in that college. So at a school like Harvard, their yield is exceptionally high, 83.7% in 2023. [2] That means that for every 100 students Harvard accepted, ~84 would actually enroll. This is part of the reason why Harvard’s acceptance rate is low: they don’t have to accept a lot of additional students to fill their incoming classes. At schools with lower yields (i.e., almost all other colleges), the reality is that they will accept as few students as possible to have a reasonable chance at filling their freshman class, but oftentimes they miss those targets. This can happen for any number of reasons, but in a situation where a college hasn’t hit their enrollment target, they will go to their waitlist and select more students to offer admission to. Students accepted off the waitlist will have a limited window in which to enroll and submit a deposit, otherwise they are crossed off the waitlist and other students will be chosen. And the college will continue with this process until their incoming class is full.
Waitlists are inherently precarious. Some years, a college may admit thousands of students off the waitlist; in other years, they may admit dozens. And any data we have on waitlist behavior is always a trailing indicator: like with stocks, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Summary
Deferrals happen when a student applies early to a college but does not get accepted in the early round. Their application is pushed off (or ‘deferred’) to the regular application round, and it will be looked at again. Due to increasing numbers of students applying early, the vast majority of applicants end up being deferred to the regular admission rounds at many colleges. If it happens to your child, don’t worry.
Waitlists, on the other hand, are created after the admissions process has finished. Colleges make waitlist offers instead of accepting some students. This is a sign that the college believes the student would be a good fit at their school, and that your student could be successful there. There just wasn’t enough room to admit them with this cluster of students. Colleges can create any number of applicant combinations to craft their freshman class, and sometimes that works in our favor, and other times it does not. But if other students do not enroll—for whatever reason—that may leave the college with additional seats available, and they will look to their waitlist to fill those spots.
Next time, we’ll discuss what your child needs to do when they get deferred or waitlisted at a college that they are really interested in attending.
Citations
[1] https://www.admissionblog.usc.edu/p/i-was-deferred-to-regular-decision-bbb
[2] https://oira.harvard.edu/factbook/fact-book-admissions/