Are you guaranteed deferrence if you apply EA?

JHS
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:31:56 +0000

No, but many more people are deferred than rejected. I don’t know if I could duplicate it, but at one point I thought I had deduced the rejection percentage for EA in (if I recall correctly) 2005, and it was around 10%. The number for 2007 was almost certainly higher – maybe as high as 25%.

If the real underlying question is, can a student be disadvantaged by applying EA, I think the answer is no. Many EA applications are deferred and then rejected in the RD round. If a decision is made to reject an application in the EA round, it’s really a substantive judgment that there is no additional information that could possibly change the outcome.

Some colleges have a practice of deferring very few EA/ED applications, but Chicago is not one of them. This year, deferral was the most common outcome for EA applications.