What do you do after a deferral AND a waitlist?
Hi! Was recently waitlisted by Boston College after a deferral a few months prior. As far as I know, procedures for deferred/waitlisted students in relevance to LOCIs, EC updates, etc. have remained the same over the years, but what’s the ideal course of action for when they happen in sequence for someone?
Earn karma by helping others:
1 answer
To answer this question, let me first point out one large difference in college admissions this year from in previous years. Many more students were deferred and/or waitlisted this year than in previous years. This is due, in a large part, to the effects of covid on college admissions. The increase in deferrals was caused due to a drastic increase in the number of applications (40-60% in some cases), which was a result of test optional policies. The increase in the number of waitlisted students was caused by the uncertainty of the yield rate at a given college (due to covid related factors such as students wanting to stay closer to home, financial constraints due to job loss, increase in gap years, etc.).
In a "normal" year, a deferral might indicate that the college is unsure of whether they want to accept you or not. Generally, they want to see the application strength of more other applicants (usually from RA or RD) before making a final decision on a deferred student. However, this year, many colleges deferred students simply because they did not have enough time to do a full holistic review of every applicant in the EA timeline. I’m not sure if this was the case at BC, but at many colleges, students were deferred so that the college had time to do a full holistic review of the student after seeing more context from the RA student pool. Boston College specifically reported a 36% increase in the number of applications for the class of 2025. Because of this, I would treat the waitlist in the same way that you would if you had not previously been deferred (since being deferred could simply be a result of Boston College wanting to do a more in depth holistic review after seeing the RA student pool).
With that said, I expect that the majority of decisions made on the waitlist will happen later this year than in previous years (mid-late summer). This is because of the uncertainty caused by covid that may cause students to unexpectedly un-enroll from the university very close to the start date. For this reason, I would recommend accepting an offer of admission at another college (and submitting your deposit), so that you have your spot secured. Then, you could send a LOCI, EC updates, test score updates, mid-year transcript (if you didn't already have to send this) to Boston College. I hope this helps. If you have follow up questions, please feel free to ask.
Your chance of acceptance
Your chancing factors
Community Guidelines
To keep this community safe and supportive:
- Be kind and respectful!
- Keep posts relevant to college admissions and high school.
- Don’t ask “chance-me” questions. Use CollegeVine’s chancing instead!
I severely severely doubt a school such as BC just didn't read an application more likely they wanted to compare @Jetches to more applicants so you were deferred. If on Waitlist you scantly get in but that's more saying you are a good replacement if we don't get as many enrollees as we would have liked. So I second the fact act as if you weren't deffered but the reasoning behind it I disagree with.