Has anyone seen acceptance rates and deferral info for Williams? I can’t seem to find it.
It’s ridiculous. They should be more in line with the other top schools in this regard - only defer those you would honestly consider during RD instead of virtually everybody.
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I don’t disagree.
What we can take away from this is that the admissions processes at highly rejective colleges are NOT necessarily alike. That’s why I’ve always objected to people extrapolating Harvard lawsuit data to other schools. Not to mention Harvard’s own admissions process is dramatically different from the years included in the lawsuit data.
When you hear an admissions person talking about the process at their school, that process may not be similar to any other school, and that person is sharing exactly what they want to share to the public.
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Yeah, I do not at all support what Harvard is doing with deferrals.
The Yale Admissions Podcast discussed their move away from a Harvard-style approach to deferrals. They explained frankly that the usual attitude is deferrals are “cheap” meaning it doesn’t really cost the college anything substantial to defer a lot of people. But they recognized that was unfair to a lot of applicants:
MARK: Some schools in their early rounds, they defer almost everyone. Others defer very, very few. Yale falls somewhere in the middle typically. I will say in recent years, we’ve been deferring a smaller group of students. Even though it’s really painful for us to do this. But we’ve actually thought of it as a wise thing to be denying more students early.
HANNAH: Yeah. And I mean, it’s painful, because a lot of those students are really academically competitive. But we have been doing this a long time. We know how selective our process is. And we just know when a student is not really going to have a chance of admission. And for those who apply early and are rejected, I can understand that it feels like a slap in the face that you’re outright rejected.
But as hard as it is, at least you have some clear information as part of your application process. You’re not waiting another few months. And we hear a lot of feedback from students and especially from their counselors that they would rather a student be denied outright if there’s really no chance then just deferred and strung along for another few months.
MARK: Right, exactly. So full transparency, we struggle with this. It is sometimes really hard for us to deny a student. Because we worry that it’s going to be perceived as, well, you weren’t a realistic candidate, and then that might be perceived particularly in a community as like, oh, no, students like this shouldn’t apply. But it’s really not that simple. Right, we’re trying to make a good prediction about what will be coming through our regular decision pool.
And when we’re making this decision about whether to defer or deny a student, we’re really asking ourselves, OK, what do we think is going to be behind curtain number two when we get tens of thousands of regular decision applicants? And if we have a pretty good sense that even though your application was strong and academically competitive, if we just know that it’s almost certainly not going to emerge, we will go ahead and deny that student.
If there’s any question, though, on really either end– if we say the student is close to being admitted but we don’t know if they’re going to stand out when all those other applications come along, we’ll defer. Similarly, if we’re saying, this looks strong, but we’re not quite sure if it’s going to emerge, but listen, this student might actually stand out depending on what comes in the regular decision pool, a defer is relatively easy for us.
You’ll sometimes hear a committee say, hey, a defer is cheap.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: We can punt this decision until later in the spring with the benefit of more context.
OK, so more than the 29% total of the Yale SCEA pool (9% accepted, 20% deferred) was deemed academically qualified by Yale, because Yale said it is rejecting people who they deemed academically qualified. But not all those people were truly competitive for admission, hence why it was only 29%.
And these are fuzzy categories but roughly consistent with, say, the Harvard litigation data. But Harvard’s deferral decisions are not similarly consistent.
I am not a mod but maybe move this conversation to the Yale or Harvard pages?
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I think the challenge is Williams is not so forthcoming, so we are trying to work out some possibly-relevant general concepts by looking at other very selective colleges where we have more information.
I fully agree reasonable people could question the utility of that sort of project, but at least I was always still thinking about Williams, albeit in this indirect fashion.
They have always released in the past, not sure why they have not done so yet. When they release their data then it will be more relevant for this page.
Hey! Does anyone know if Williams offers free summer bridge programs for admitted students? I know schools like Columbia are making pre-frosh students attend their bridge program so maybe Williams does too?
Williams has two targeted at fgli and students of color. One is for humanities/social science one is for stem both are free. Summer Humanities and Social Sciences Program – Pathways for Inclusive Excellence
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Ok, thank you!
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249 students admitted out of 1,068 applicants, for a 23.3 percent ED acceptance rate. This is the lowest ED acceptance rate ever.
Here is the announcement:
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Is there any way I can know whether my deferral was a soft rejection or a legitimate chance? Like whether it’s a demographic thing or a profile thing?
This is a significant jump given that ED is binding, given that the pool was extraordinary as they say, it seems going test optional is allowing the school to pull in more first gen and diverse applicants. Suggests that test optional leads to greater access and more applicants that would not have considered Williams previously. Looks like test optional could be adopted permanently, would it makes sense to be test optional for ED only vs. RD? As in require scores only for RD.
There’s no way of truly knowing this. The Williams Admissions Office would certainly say that, if you truly had no chance of getting in RD, you would have been rejected (not deferred). In other words: everyone deferred has a change of getting in. You have a legitimate chance.
Perhaps more helpfully: deferment is one of the tools that Williams (and other schools) uses to “balance” a class. That can mean demography, but one of the really big ones is also intellectual: they’re looking for kids to fill out their underenrolled departments like classics, the languages, the arts.
But overall, there’s no real way of knowing why you were deferred. Fortunately it shouldn’t change how you approach the rest of the app process.
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Your GC might be able to find out if they have a relationship with the AO
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Wondering if anyone who was accepted got a financial aid letter and what they are saying is cost of attendance for 2024-25
2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Williams College Class of 2028 Official Thread
Just met the Jazz director who said the same thing… but still wondering if they need a trombone for four years, can they treat the applicant like an athlete?
Yes. I think they can. After he was accepted the teacher implied that she had pull.