Rejected or Deferred? It's not personal. (No, really, it isn't.)
“What was wrong with my application? Was it my essay? My recommendation letters?”
When the deferral, denial, or waitlist letter comes in, these questions are inevitable. But they are almost always the wrong ones to ask.
We get it; rejection stings. And it’s hard not to take it personally, especially when you've put months of work into your applications and bared your soul in your personal statement. Still, here's why those questions aren't the right ones to ask, and why it's not really about you.
First, some caveats:
Admission starts with the numbers. To “get to the table” you need to have a competitive GPA and test score (in the context of a school’s GPA and SAT/ACT ranges for admitted students) and strong rigor (heavy on all five academic solids and a strong AP/IB/honors course list relative to what your school offers). Sure, there are exceptions, but you should plan to be the rule.
Your candidacy will be impacted by red flags in the form of disciplinary incidents, grade volatility, health issues that may put you at risk on a college campus, or tepid recommendation letters.
But, assuming you have competitive numbers and a clean application, you are likely still destined to experience some rejection over the next weeks and months. And your natural instinct might be to ask the questions at the lede. But the (usually unsatisfactory) answer to the inevitable “why didn’t I get in?” is that institutional needs and priorities weigh heavily in admissions outcomes. For one, colleges want to admit a balanced incoming class. This includes:
Gender balance.
Geographic balance.
Academic balance.
Extracurricular balance.
Socioeconomic balance.
(We would traditionally list racial balance here, but given that colleges can no longer formally consider race in admissions, they can’t explicitly seek this out. But that doesn’t mean that colleges no longer care about diversity. Their toolboxes are just limited in terms of how they achieve it, so they must rely on proxy indicators like geography and socioeconomic status.)
In short, colleges are striving for a pretty even mix of students. As they should. A vibrant college campus should feature diversity of thought, background, and interest. It should have neither an oversubscribed engineering department nor an undersubscribed humanities program. It is vital to campus life and culture to recruit students who want to play in the various bands on campus, sing a cappella, perform in drama productions, contribute to the F1 design team, and so on.
And, whatever it is, your profile might just be overrepresented in your specific admission round of this year’s cycle. That is not to say that it’s bad. It’s just not helping to further that institution’s needs as it relates to balance.
There is another iteration of balance at play here, and that is a balanced budget. Congress might not need to balance the budget, but colleges do, so they have to be attentive to financial need and to accepting a mix of full-pay, partial pay, and 100% need students who will together not blow the balance sheet. How much need your family has is also, unfortunately, outside of your control.
Finally, you are competing in context, so if students from your school or region that match your profile have been admitted in the early round, this might skew the balance out of your favor come regular decision. Or, if you are competing with students with comparable profiles in that early round who are legacies and/or meet an established institutional priority, you might just be out of luck.
Institutional needs are hard to game. Strategically pivoting away from the computer science major? This is probably smart … unless AI renders the computer science major obsolete, and the school to which you are applying is actively downsizing it. Putting your finger on the scale by applying ED2? How could you know about the kids with similar profiles who were accepted in round one from your rival high school?
While there are always some who will take all this to mean that they should apply to MORE SCHOOLS, we would instead encourage you to take it as a reminder that you should embrace your authentic self in your application. Who knows what they might be after? You might just be it. And if you aren’t, say all together now: it’s not personal.
