This is what they said in the Yale Admissions Podcast (after they changed their policy to defer a lot fewer people):
So that’s another question we get from students who’ve been deferred. They say, hey, what are my chances? And we’ve generally found that these students do about as well or even maybe a little bit better just from a pure numbers standpoint in terms of the admissions rate as our regular decision students.
So we do find every single year there are dozens of students who are deferred from early action who are admitted in regular decision. We were cautious the first time around, and then at the end of the day, they really did emerge. We hoped that they would, and they did. And then we go ahead and say, sounds great. We’re happy to admit you through regular decision.
Of course Yale necessarily has a very low RD admission rate, so doing only a little bit better than that still implies a very low admissions rate. That is consistent with the number of deferred who are accepted being in the “dozens” and not say the hundreds. Like hypothetically, suppose a little bit better meant around 6-7%. They deferred almost 1600 out of REA, so maybe that would be 100-110 deferred-accepted. That is plausibly “dozens”.
But the actual information is not that precise. And for that matter, it may vary year to year, and specifically may vary this year because of the Supreme Court decision or other factors.