You were a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed prospective college student when you applied to Middlebury Early Decision, or something like that. Now, the struggle of getting into a top college has thrown you for a loop and you’re on the receiving end of a deferral. Boooooo deferrals. A no is at least certain. You know where you stand with a no! This deferral business is so much more unstable, but it’s important to know that it is not a soft ‘no’. A deferral from Middlebury means you still have a chance.
Let’s look at the numbers. Middlebury had 12% overall acceptance rate for the Class of 2028. Last year, they also experienced an increase in early decision applications, despite a decrease in regular decision applications. They haven’t published the early decision acceptance rate in recent years, but we can identify trends from past data. In 2018, Middlebury accepted many more students early decision (45%) than in the regular decision round, for an overall acceptance rate of only 16%. That same year, they deferred 12.4% of early applicants.
Now, a lot has changed in college admissions since 2018 (a global pandemic, a major supreme court decision on affirmative action, etc.), but it’s likely that the core practices and methodologies at Middlebury have held strong. Namely, they don’t just defer everyone they don’t accept early. They pick their deferrals carefully. This isn’t true of all schools, which is why it’s so important to take it into consideration when deciding what to do next to strengthen your chances at Middlebury. Before we get into Middlebury next steps, though, it’s important to talk about your overall college admissions strategy and how this deferral might change things as you approach RD, or even EDII, options.
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Yes, you read that right. Since you were deferred from Middlebury, the Early Decision agreement you signed is no longer binding and you are free to apply EDII to a different college. You cannot, however, reapply EDII to Middlebury. While this may seem like a scary option, we encourage students to consider it. Early Decision rounds, either EDI or EDII, offer your best chance, statistically, of getting into a college. It’s a tool you can use, should you choose to, to potentially gain access to a school you would struggle to get into regular decision. If Middlebury remains your top choice, it doesn’t make sense to apply EDII somewhere else, but if you have a couple top picks a different EDII may be a solid choice.
While considering the EDII option, you also need to review your entire college list.
Review Your College List
It’s possible that you made your college list without a lot of care (you’d get into Middlebury anyway, right?), or that you didn’t make a proper college list at all. Welp. This is precisely why we require our students to have a comprehensive application strategy even if they are confident they’ll be accepted to a dream school early.
If you don’t have a well-balanced college list, though, it is past time to make one. You’ll need a foundation of schools you’ll most likely get into (we call these “foundation” schools, for obvious reasons), then 3-4 ‘target’ schools that you are likely to get into, but that aren’t certain. Then you’ll have a small number, ideally no more than 3, of reach schools — of which Middlebury is one.
Figuring out what a school is for you — foundation, target, or reach — can be stressful, and even make you feel self-conscious. A school that was a foundation for a friend or sibling, or even a parent, may be a reach for you. Sometimes it’s because you’re a different type of applicant, but often it’s a matter of statistics. Once upon a time, Harvard was a foundation school for many students. Was that nearly a century ago? Yes, yes it was. So, use the lens of today when determining what your likelihood of admission is. And if this is overwhelming, we can help.
Reassess Your Common App Essay
Next, you need to take a look at your common app essay with fresh eyes. It may be a super strong essay, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best essay for your application. The Middlebury deferral isn’t an indictment of your essay, though. They defer such a small number of students that it is, if anything, evidence of the strength of your application. We’ve yet to see an essay, however, that couldn’t be improved. Similar to how you need to look at your college list through the lens of today, you need to look at your common app essay through the lens of the regular decision process.
Maybe there are some images you could push further, some ideas you could develop more fully, or some risks you could (carefully) take to ensure your essay makes an impact when being reviewed against the tens of thousands of applicants in the regular decision pool for top-tier colleges and universities. Before you start editing, though, give our guide to the 2024-2025 common app essay a read. We also have example essays you can review to see what’s worked for other top students like you.
Press Submit
The last step of this part of the process should be pretty obvious: pressing submit. Many students put it off to the last minute, though. Waiting until 11:59pm on the deadline does not put you at the top of a pile. It does not ensure your application will be read early, and it does not increase your chances of acceptance. What does decrease your chances of admission is messing with your application until the moment you submit. The worst editing happens in the press towards the deadline, so once your work is done, polished, and ready to submit — submit it.
Now, let’s look back at what Middlebury wants as they prepare to reassess your application.
WHAT MIDDLEBURY WANTS
Additional Materials
Any Middlebury applicant can submit additional materials to bolster their application through the Middlebury applicant portal, within some guidelines. “We cannot guarantee,” they say, “that any additional materials submitted beyond what is required will be reviewed by our admissions readers, but we make every effort to read or view all materials sent to us.”
This underlines for us that more is not, in fact, more. Sending them everything you’ve done in the past few months, plus more, won’t improve your chances of admission in the regular decision round. Instead, you need to take a targeted approach, submitting a curated update that tells them exactly where to look and what they need to know.
We advise applicants do this through a single, one-page letter of up to 350 words. This letter should accomplish two core things:
Update the application reader about anything notable that has happened since you initially applied. This could include new leadership positions, recognitions or awards, new responsibilities at a job, in a volunteer role, or in your family, or anything else that you would have included in your initial application if it had happened in advance of the deadline.
The other key goal of this letter is to reinforce for the application reader that Middlebury remains your number one choice of school. You need to say this even if it is not actually the case — including if you are going to apply to a different school EDII. They will not let you in if they do not feel certain that you will select them back, so you need to convey confidence and clarity in your choice of Middlebury.
Now, you may be thinking, “I should submit a pdf of my certificate, award, or the like as proof!” Wrong. Don’t do that. Middlebury specifically requests that applicants not upload “copies of awards or certificates earned during your high school years” as additional documents.
Middlebury has a strong track record of only deferring a small number of early applicants who they are genuinely interested in getting to know better before making a decision. If you do not send an update letter through the applicant portal, you are nearly guaranteeing that you won’t be one of the few eventually accepted. So, take active and move confidently instead of waiting to see what happens next and risking being overlooked.
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