Harvard is a pie-in-the-sky dream for most students, but you did the work to make it a possibility. You got the grades and scores, you developed your interests, and you applied Restrictive Early Action. But now you have been deferred, and you are absolutely allowed to be frustrated. What you shouldn’t do, though, is to throw up your hands. This is still your application process, and you need to stay in the driver’s seat.
Harvard does not explain themselves about much of anything, and definitely not why a deferral decision was made. They made their choice, and they don’t tell you anything else. This isn’t because you simply haven’t asked the right way. Please do not call or email, or even show up on campus, looking for an exploration: they won’t have one for you, and it will not positively impact your eventual odds of admission. The only explanation Harvard offers for why an application may have been deferred is extremely general. They get a lot of strong applications, tens of thousands of them, and can only accept a small number of them, so not everyone can get through even if they are qualified.
The good news is that your application is strong enough to trigger them to want to look twice. It would have been really easy for them to say no, but something made them want to keep your application around a bit longer, so they deferred you to the Regular Decision round. The acceptance rate in the Regular Decision round is significantly lower than the REA acceptance rate, and getting in as a deferred student requires some extra work, but we can help. The statistics, to be honest, are rough. Historically, Harvard has admitted about 9% of REA applicants but only 4.2% overall.
First, though, there are some other things you need to do. Namely, all the other things for the college admission process. So, let’s get into it.
Getting in is possible after a deferral, but it doesn’t just happen. Get a personal strategy.
Before you can address anything for Harvard, you need to make sure that you have a great school to attend next fall. This may sound counter-intuitive, as Harvard is still your focus, but Harvard isn’t going to even glance at your application again for at least a few weeks. So, you need to take this time to focus on regular decision applications while also continuing to be the awesome leader and community-member who held Harvard’s attention long enough to get to a deferral. Now, let’s talk college list.
Review Your College List
Being deferred by Harvard does not mean that you are not Harvard potential, so we aren’t going to suggest that you need to throw out your college list and only look at options that are much easier to get into. You do, though, need to make sure that your list is balanced. Having a few reaches, maybe as many as 4, is reasonable, but most of your college list should be focused on targets, schools that clear fits academic profile-wise, and safeties, schools that you are significantly over-qualified for. We advise our students to keep their entire college list to 10-12 schools. More is not more when applying to college, and sending out more applications does not, in and of itself, increase your chances of getting in anywhere.
This is why balance is so critical, and why making sure the schools you are applying to are strong options for you is incredibly important. Do not simply make your college list the rest of the Ivy League. That is not balanced, that is not the way of making sure you have a place to go in the fall, and Ivy League schools are not interchangeable, so even if you do get in you might not be able to pursue what you want to study. That would be a bad deal, even if the diploma looks fancy.
Once you have your new college list, it’s go time. You’ll have supplementals to write, possibly many if you didn’t start with a strong college list and do the work early, and each piece matters. There is one piece of your applications, though, that is critically important for every Common App school you apply to: The Personal Statement.
Reassess Your Common App Personal Statement
When we are asked to look at deferred, or even rejected, Harvard REA applications, we’ve gotten really used to seeing one glaring problem. If the grades and the scores were where they needed to be to get into Harvard, it wasn’t that you didn’t want Harvard enough. Harvard doesn’t even ask you why you want to go, anymore. They are Harvard, they know they are the biggest of big deals. The problem, then, was how you told your story.
Most students try to use their personal statement for Harvard to look like someone who is ‘Harvard material’. They cloutmax at precisely the moment when you should actually be showing how you are a good human.
When we work with students after a Harvard deferral, the first step is to strip back all of the bragging and trying to make you look fancy. Then, you need to start from the drawing board with a new, more human idea. We steer our students to prompt #7 on the Common App, the write what you want prompt, but we break down the pros and cons of each question and how to answer them in our free college essay writing guide.
With your new essay in hand, you’ll be ready for the most important step in this entire process: pressing submit.
Press Submit
We advise our students to submit their Regular Decision applications before doing anything else for Harvard. Part of this is good sense, as your making sure you have many fishing lines in the pond before rebaiting an early hook, but it’s also strategy. Harvard is unlikely to reassess your application before January 1. Why, then, would you rush a timeline that may, by being patient, offer more exciting things to share?
You are going to have one go at making your case to Harvard in the RD round, and deferred applicants don’t get bonus points for sending things in early. What can get you additional consideration, though, is having great updates to share. So, give yourself the time to build up those wins that Harvard will love to see.
What Harvard Wants
Harvard is pretty transparent with deferred applicants about what they want to see from you following a deferral. The first is obvious: keep your grades Harvard caliber. They will receive your midyear report from your school counselor by February 1st — you should remind them about this, though — and that is undeniably the most important piece of any updates you send to Harvard after a deferral decision. If you have new, higher SAT or ACT scores, you should send those two.
There is one other thing, though, that Harvard accepts, and it’s the vague category of “Additional Information.” Some deferred applicants see “Additional Information” and jump at it as an opportunity to send Harvard a mountain of supplementary recommendations, writing, certificates, and evidence of success. We’ve even seen students propose sending PowerPoint presentations aggressively pitching themselves to Harvard. Nearly all of this is a bad idea, not in intention — an update is good — but in execution.
What you need to do for Harvard is a Letter of Continued Interest, a one-page (seriously) letter focused on reinforcing that Harvard remains your first choice and sharing a small number of truly impressive and important updates that underline the focus you emphasized in your application.
That last bit is key. You do not want to make your application broader at this point. A new leadership position totally irrelevant to what you want to pursue at Harvard or what you emphasized in your application does not help your case with Harvard. Instead, go deeper. In your letter, which we can help with, provide a small number of updates (max 5) that show how serious you are about the things you underlined in your application.
This letter should be just that, a letter, “Dear,” and “Sincerely,” included, and should be submitted through the applicant portal. In the opening and closing paragraph, restate that Harvard is your first choice and why Harvard is the best place for you to pursue your prospective major. The middle of the proverbial sandwich should be your updates.
What you shouldn’t do as you prepare your LOCI is to contact Harvard admissions to ask why you were deferred.
You do not need to contact them, and they don’t want you to contact them except through the updates that they request and allow for: the updated grades and the LOCI. There is still a chance to get in, but you can blow it really easily simply by being over eager.
Getting into Harvard after a deferral is possible, but pulling it off requires also stepping up your game for the rest of your entire college application process. Again, this is possible, but having help helps. We guide driven students towards outstanding acceptances even after early disappointments.
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