What's the logic behind being deferred?

mikemac
Fri, 09 Aug 2013 13:14:59 +0000

IMHO its largely a marketing ploy. Students who are deferred think they “still have a chance” and that the school will take another look at them. Okay, maybe, but there are schools such as Stanford that flat-out reject most of the ED applicants they don’t accept. Is the applicant pool so different?

I think many kids that a selective college knows are never going to get admitted manage to convince themselves that if only they were judged against all the applicants instead of just the ED ones they’d have a “chance”. Its a convoluted story, but when your dreams are tied up in believing it then somehow you believe. (See global warming, the Laffer curve, etc. for other examples of self-serving denial).

So rather than fight and suffer a decline in ED because kids think they weren’t given every chance, many colleges just send out polite “deferred” letters.