@turtle17 Try to understand it by putting yourself in their shoes. They have tens of thousands of applications and way to many of them have 32 or higher ACT with 4.0 or higher GPA for you to be able to take them all. If they did take them all right away, they would over-enroll and end up with way more kids than they actually have room for(this happened for them last year and they had to scramble for housing in the honors dorm). So inconvenient or unfair as it seems, some very high stat kids have to get deferred. The process is part art and part science. You are correct in that it may be “non-optimal”, so what would you sugggest?