No, You Are Not Taking Away a Deferred Applicant’s Seat 3/3/25

As the class of 2025 awaits their regular decision results, students who have been deferred from their top colleges in the early rounds are getting anxious from their extended wait. Early decision and early action acceptances may have given you the chance to go to your dream school. Now, if you don’t pull your remaining applications, are you taking a deferred student’s spot away? 

No. Colleges are always managing their enrollment. This is reported as yield - the amount of enrollments divided by the amount of accepted students. Colleges want this percentage as high as possible, of course. Harvard enrolls 84% of their accepted students and MIT 87%! So they need to accept very few extra applicants as most will enroll.

However, the average yield for all schools is 37%. For example, if an average school wanted to enroll 800 freshmen, it would have to accept 2,162 students. And let’s say they got 10,000 applications and deferred 20% of their applicant pool for early action (balance it 50/50). So they deferred 1,000 of the 5,000 from early action. Now, their regular decision round has 6,000 applicants. So, if 100 kids had made up their minds to not attend before decisions came out, that’s still 5,900 applications for those 2,162 spots. It’s nowhere near a 1 to 1 basis. 100 people removing their applications will not affect their 36.6% admissions rate.

Am I saying you should let things roll to see if you can get in just for the sake of ego? No, not really. Removing your application from consideration is the nice thing to do, especially for those accepted via Early Decision. And it’s not hard - most schools allow you to withdraw applications easily through their portals.

Just remember: you’re not holding onto someone else’s seat by keeping your application active.