Re: school counselors -
A friend of mine from college has been a school counselor for several years. There are some years where at the end of the school year, while she’s celebrating the students who are graduating, she’s also worried sick about the safety of other students over the summer…or is trying to get additional services/agencies engaged in order to get support for a student who is a suicide risk, or is at risk of harm/abuse from individuals the student lives with. And when you’re assigned 400-500 students to keep track of each year, it’s a lot to juggle.
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I’m so sorry for your daughter’s loss. 
@heatherroal How awful. I am sorry for your daughter’s loss, and for the whole school community….
Re: the counselor/midyear grades situation, the counselor emailed back this morning, apologized profusely, and explained that (as I suspected) there was a batch push of mid-year grades across the platform. She claims that schools which did not ask for mid-year grades will not look (not sure about that). But hey, what’s done is done. She was super nice about everything and even offered to pull my D from class to talk to her about it.
Counselors at our school are definitely overloaded. I think they have something like 350-400 students (across all four grades) and, while we do have a designated college counselor, they have a ton on their plates.
My vent here helped and I am moving on. It’s so nice to have a place to do it… Thanks
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How horrible. I’m so sorry. 
Hey all - what are you ways of thinking about deferrals? My daughter has gotten 2 from EA. One was from a reach school -and I’m surprised it was a deferral and not a rejection. The other was -from what I felt- was a very likely target - I’d LIKE to think that one was yield protection (haha) - but I’m guessing you are all going to tell me not to overthink it. 
Basially - I should stop trying to use either of these as some kind of predictive tool?
I’m really sorry. Sending hugs. Very hard. 
Yes, this. I feel like a bunch of schools are using deferrals because they can’t get through all the applications in time, so if they feel like they need to read the application more closely, in the context of your school, they are getting deferred. Or they just want to see the entirety of the applicant pool first. Anyway, a deferral is NOT a rejection, except at a small minority of schools and there’s nothing to be gained by overthinking (not that that would stop me…)
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I think I’m going to keep worrying/overthinking until she makes a decision -and then I’ll worry about her being away from home. I need to get a grip -and maybe some therapy. Sigh. I’m truly happy for my children when they fly from home. It’s what they need to do - it’s just hard.
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Trust me. I can dole out this advice, but would I take it, nope! As my screen name indicates, I’m a worrier. My child has made a decision, and I know it’s the best decision for her and still I worry. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that could change that. It’s both exciting and terrifying to watch them grow into their own and leave the nest.
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My kid also received two EA deferrals, one from a reach (
) and one from a target. Both schools are known to use deferrals for yield protection. The reach deferral really cheered up my kid after she was rejected from her ED school. For the target deferral, we were not surprised because my D26 didn’t engage with the school AT ALL and didn’t even submit the optional supplemental essay (LOL). She has decided to submit LOCIs for both schools (pretty much all ready to go, she just needs to copy/paste and press send).
It would be funny if my daughter and your daughter were deferred from the same two schools!
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IMO it depends on how the school uses deferrals. Do the schools deferral a ton of kids because they dont have time to review all the applications, want to offer a soft reject or want to see additonal information by semester end? If the school defers a low pct of kids, that’s obviously better and they may just want to wait and see what the rest of their applicant pool will be. That’s just my thoughts - Im obviously not an expert.
It’s entirely possible that the deferral was about yield protection. Ill do my rant on Case Western.
If you look at their common data set, they consider Class rank, rigor, GPA and ECs as very important. They also consider test scores and demonstrated interest.
D26 got deferred at Case Western.
Class Rank: 1 / 250
Rigor: 12 APs. 7 prior to senior year - All 5’s.
GPA: 4.98 (projected to be 5.01 by end of first semester. It will literally be the 2nd highest in school history). According to the school profile, last year’s Valedictorian’s GPA was 4.90.
She got a 1580 SAT which is well above their 75% of 1530.
They care about demonstrated interest. We flew to Cleveland on open house day. She also applied EA. And they have no supplemental essays.
They care about kids interested in humanities. They even wrote an article this year on The future is interdisciplinary. D26 is interested in classics and engineering. She’s won several Latin awards so it’s not made up stuff for the college app. One of her teacher recs was from her Latin teacher whom she’s known for 4 years.
So she was deferred. She didnt really care because she was admitted to Brown.
But I know some people will claim they dont yield protect.
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Absent someone sharing an insight I haven’t thought of, yield protection seems the most likely reason for that deferral, they didn’t think she’d come.
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Last year there were a bunch of kids from our highschool that were accepted at UCB but rejected from UCSC/UCD/UCSB. It makes no sense to me at all except they looked at those kids and said you are probably going to pick a higher ranked school so we will reject you for yield protection.
The yield/acceptance rate is the 2nd worst thing to happen to college application after the whole binding and multiple early decision rounds.
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Ha! My D22 had the same experience with Tulane. Salutatorian, 36 ACT, exemplary student, college-level research on synesthesia related to learning English as a second language, Latin book award because four gold medals on the NLE, Harvard Book prize, all-state choir, blah blah blah.
She was genuinely interested in Tulane because she wanted to study linguistics at a smallish school – which is surprisingly hard to find. We toured in person. She was deferred in EA (after the hard sell to convert to ED many times, which she declined to do), then waitlisted in RD. She did not accept the waitlist spot.
She was salty at first, but then didn’t care because she was admitted to Rice.
So if it was indeed yield protection, then it worked – because she would have chosen Rice over Tulane had she gotten into both.
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In the big picture, it’s irrelevant because Brown was always her “dream school” (since 10th grade).
However, it’s contrary to what they state on their CDS as “very important”. Their overall yield is low (around 15%) so they must have PTSD from all their rejections.
For families who have top students looking for merit aid, they probably want that acceptance and merit offer. And they’re not going to ED unless they see that offer.
So if they dont have supplemental essays, and you visited the school, how do they even show demonstrated interested outside of ED. It must be extremely frustrating for families who really want to go there but cant commit to ED.
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haha! For comparison —> Macalester is the reach school (also ), and Union is the target. The LOCI for Macalester is in, and Union will be in today (the website link was broken on Saturday so she has to wait for that to be fixed)
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We avoided Tulane because of all their stupid EA/ED levels, S26 loves playing in jazz bands and being in New Orleans would have been a lot of fun he wants music to be a part of his college experience even though he’s not a music major. But he took one look at all their levels and read about their pressure tactics and it was off the list.
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LOL! My kid’s reach deferral was Case Western. Her target deferral was Fordham. I’ve heard that both are known for deferring lots of students. She would LOVE to go to Case Western, so she worked really hard on that LOCI!!!
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I am exactly the same. I am worried (LOL) that once she is off to college I am going to just find something else to worry about. My DH is concerned about it and wants us to find a fun hobby to focus on to get prepared for it. I only have one child, so it’s going to be a shock when she heads off.
I am so so sorry Absolutely heartbreaking.
I think they are agonizing! D26 hasn’t gotten one (yet) but her friend has and I have been trying to be uplifting and offer good advice. For OOS schools, some are notorious for deferring students not from their state and then many or even most get accepted during the regular round. I think some schools just can’t get through the EA apps so they defer. And some just want to see what other apps come in to compare to. I think writing the LOCI and trying not to then think too much during the agonizing wait is best, although hard.
So bittersweet. The alternative of them growing up is certainly not what we want, but it’s agonizing. I think it also reminds me that I am growing older and that means changes in my own life. So hard!
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Thank you so much for the condolences. I cannot even fathom what those poor families are going through. I remember both of them from when I was working at the middle school- they were both really good kids with very bright futures.
Re: deferrals. The only experience we have is with Marist and I think she was deferred for the “right” reasons; GPA on the lower end of their accepted range and no test scores submitted. They wanted a LOCI, updated activities and awards, and first semester grades. In the end, D26 decided to decline taking her application into RD because she got into other schools that look like better fits. In this case, deferral worked exactly as it is supposed to for both parties.
Speaking of narrowing lists, D26 is pretty much between two now. For me, this goes back to the earlier discussion of being sad to see certain schools go because the one that dropped off is in Pittsburgh- my second favorite city (Austin will always be #1 in my heart!). Plus, both are OOS so there goes any PA state grants to help with tuition. Sigh. Now we have to really focus on scholarship applications, especially the local ones.
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