I’ve never heard of this and the deferral letter makes it sound like it is something new. DD’s letter said something like “because of the extreme number of applicants this year to the College of Engineering we are deferring you to the regular decision pool but will allow Eng applicants to switch their applications to a different College, like A&S etc”.
Has anyone ever seen them do this before. Is it their way of saying that you would have gotten into A&S but you are borderline for Eng?
I have not seen them doing this previously.
I don’t think so. I looked at the stats for 2014 admissions - if I’m reading this correctly, out of 5715 completed applications, SEAS offered admission to 1699 students. 631 accepted admissions.
A&S received 23798 completed applications. 6880 received offers. 2889 accepted.
http://avillage.web.virginia.edu/iaas/instreports/studat/dd/adm_first.htm#clas
I think it’s numbers. There are more spots available in A&S. I also suspect the SEAS applicant pool is increasingly competitive.
We’ve always allowed students to request school switches. When we moved to Common App, we did away with the “wrapper” of instructions that used to be around the application and streamlined the instructions, but it was still allowed.