Deferred from Bowdoin College: what are my chances of acceptance now?

Bowdoin and most colleges do not publish deferred rates from ED to RD but they do publish waitlisted applicants which is not the same thing. Maybe the respondent was thinking about that. (Bowdoin typically pulls like 12-15 tops off the waitlist in any given year).

Since you were deferred, on the plus side you were not rejected. But on the not so plus side, it means that you are now competing for a spot with about 9402 applicants or more (Class of 24' figures) for an acceptance rate of 8.3%. The RD is a more competitive pool because the ED rate is about 15% and we expect there to be more applicants for the Class of 25'.

I would focus on other schools because what most counselors and advisors fail to communicate is that once you are deferred, your bump or boost for having someone read your file once or twice only to learn that you were passed over becomes just a small bump or none at all. If Bowdoin Admissions reads 2 files that are similar to yours with no previous comments, and then compare them to yours with comments, they may scrutinize yours more than necessary because deferment comments (or supporting evidence there was a collective passed over vote) has a built-in negative bias.

In conclusion, the fact that you made it to deferment means that you are somewhere between applicant 168 and applicant say 368 (arbitrary for argument's sake since I don't know if Bowdoin defers 100, 150, 200?) out of 1126 (using Class of 24' data ) because 167 were admitted ED. But when they get 9402 applicants for RD, those 200 deferments get blended back into the 9402. We know that last year 780 were admitted RD, so the best I can say is that you are going to compared and contrasted with those 780 finalists because you already made it through some preliminary filters or thresholds. If it's a really strong RD applicant pool than, then Bowdoin is not going to convert too many deferments. If it's a weaker pool than the ED pool, then the probabilities are improved. But it would irresponsible to think that 1/4 - 1/2 the deferments will get converted. I think the real acceptance range for deferments is between 8.3% and say 25%, given the strength of the ED pool.

Thanks for bearing witness to this opinioned analysis. I might be wrong but I wanted to put my thought process down for you to decide for yourself.

A Common Data Set is typically published on college websites. This takes the guess work out of wondering if you'll get accepted; you get the actual numbers. It's under the Admissions part of the document.