<p>All this came from my non-school college counselor who used to work in admissions at a very selective school. You can read about brenzel’s decision about the makeup of the class openly at YDN.</p>
<p>The reason why some kids are deferred rather than accepted SCEA has to do with HOW much yale/stanford likes them in relation with other political dealings as mentioned before in keeping the SCEA rate down. We are not talking about the majority of RD accepts being in that first group, just a handful. I cannot tell you why yale/stanford defers these kids specifically, but at the end of the day they are more concerned with their stats than possibly getting this one student, who they do not have a commitment from and will not alone turn the incoming class in to the best class ever. Schools care immensely about their stats (admit rate, yield, and others) and their ranking in US News despite what they may say publicly (eg. tuft’s syndrome or princeton breaking into yale admits acceptance decisions). While UPenn is the worst cheater by far, Harvard improved their ranking (2->1) by cutting out their largest classes and describing class sizes differently (according to my friends at harvard). </p>
<p>In turn, people educated enough to get into these schools mostly know that these rankings are bunk. It is why cross-admits continue to mostly prefer dartmouth over upenn and duke in sometimes extreme numbers despite dartmouth being in lower in the rankings. Lies, d*mn lies, and statistics (which turn into rankings).</p>