Question about EA deferreds

Byerly
Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:53:34 +0000

I get the Harvard numbers every fall at the Cambridge Admissions Conference.

The Yale numbers are posted on the Alumni Schools Committe site.

Without having full stats for the deferred group vs. the RD group, and also stats for the subsets of each granted admission, it is hard to explain why the different admit rates exist at each school.

It is surely true that the deferred pool is a more “motivated” group - since they chose to apply EA or ED in the first place - and that schools may expect a higher yield rate when admitting them.

I have heard that at some schools - Stanford specifically - telephone calls are made to the deferreds prior to formal admission to ascertain their continued interest. (This is somewhat akin to the technique widely used with waitlist admits - which insures a satisfying 100% yield - or close to it - on names taken from the waitlist.)