You applied Early Decision to Amherst because, presumably, you were pretty sure about this one. Amherst wasn’t just another school sitting somewhere near the top of your college list. You signed a binding agreement saying that if Amherst admitted you, you would attend. But then Amherst deferred you.
It’s disappointing. Your application will move forward for consideration with the Regular Decision pool, which means Amherst is still possible. But you cannot build the rest of your senior year around the assumption that the answer will eventually become a yes.
Amherst is extraordinarily selective. For the Class of 2030, the College received 17,784 applications and admitted 1,206 students before the waitlist, for a 6.78% overall acceptance rate. Last cycle, they reported 735 Early Decision applications and 216 ED admits, an acceptance rate of about 29%. The same year, Amherst admitted about 9% of applicants overall.
More importantly, you’re not in the ED round anymore. So, we need a new plan.
If you were deferred from Amherst, the next few weeks matter. We work with deferred students to reassess their applications, strengthen their Regular Decision strategy, and put together the strongest possible update for Amherst. Reach out to us to get started.
START WITH THE REST OF YOUR COLLEGE LIST
Your instinct may be to immediately figure out how to convince Amherst to admit you – resist it for a minute.
Regular Decision deadlines are coming, and those applications are now the most time-sensitive part of your strategy. If Amherst was your clear first choice, there’s a decent chance you built your original college list with an optimistic assumption hiding underneath it: hopefully, I won’t actually need most of these. You might!
Go back through your list and sort your schools into reaches, targets, and safeties based on actual admissions data and your school’s results. Amherst’s deferral should also make you reconsider a list that is overloaded with similarly selective liberal arts colleges. Swarthmore, Williams, and Tufts aren’t really targets for any students these days. You can absolutely keep ambitious schools on your list, but you need options where your academic profile places you comfortably within the admitted range. Popular target/safety schools with Amherst students are places like Oberlin, Reed, Kenyon, Vassar, Colgate, and Haverford.
REVISIT YOUR COMMON APP ESSAY
Now we get to the (maybe?) uncomfortable part: your original application.
Reread your Common App essay as if you’ve never seen it before. Don’t focus primarily on whether the prose is polished. Ask what an admissions officer actually learns about you after 650 words. When you reread your essay, ask yourself what story you are actually telling. Is there a clear beginning, middle, and end? Does something happen? Does the reader learn something about the way you think, interact with other people, solve problems, or move through the world? Or have you written 650 beautifully edited words that essentially amount to “I am curious and hardworking” (a concept they’ve already gleaned based on your activities section)?
This is why our essay process starts with brainstorming. We look for small, personal stories that could only belong to that student. Maybe it’s the elaborate ranking system you and your brother developed for gas-station snacks during family road trips. Maybe it’s the afternoon you accidentally destroyed the first chair you tried to restore. Maybe it’s your ongoing campaign to perfect your grandmother’s dumpling recipe even though she refuses to measure a single ingredient.
Once you have the right story, draft it. Then draft it again. Get rid of the sentence that sounds profound but doesn't actually mean anything. Read it aloud. Have one or two people who you trust to look it over. Editing should sharpen the story rather than sand away your personality. By the final draft, the essay should still sound like you, just with significantly better pacing.
GET YOUR REGULAR DECISION APPLICATIONS OUT
Your Common App essay is only one part of the reset. You also need to look carefully at every supplemental essay you are planning to submit.
This is where students who applied ED can get into trouble. You spent months thinking about Amherst. Maybe you toured, researched departments, read about professors, combed through the course catalog, and spent an absurd amount of time getting your Amherst application exactly right. Then December arrives, Amherst defers you, and suddenly you have two weeks to summon equally convincing enthusiasm for six other schools. Not ideal, but we can help.
Start by looking at the prompts themselves. Every school asks its supplemental questions for a reason, and similar prompts often require different strategies. This is also where individualized strategy becomes particularly valuable after a deferral. At 91̽, we don't just proofread a stack of essays the night before January 1. We look at the application as a whole: what the Common App essay establishes, what the activities section already communicates, what each supplement should add, and whether the final application tells a coherent and memorable story.
Only once those applications are under control should Amherst retake center stage.
YOUR AMHERST LETTER OF CONTINUED INTEREST
You’ve arrived at the most important part.
A Letter of Continued Interest, or LOCI, is your opportunity to give Amherst useful new information before your application is reconsidered. The key word is new. You already submitted an application explaining your grades, activities, academic interests, and reasons for applying.
Amherst does not currently publish detailed universal instructions on its public admissions pages for what every deferred applicant should send. Generally, we recommend a concise (300-400 words) email to the admissions department updating Amherst and reaffirming your interest.
Open with a polite greeting, reintroduce yourself, and explicitly say that Amherst is your top choice, and if you are admitted, you will attend. This is extremely important. You need to specifically spell this out.
Start with the most significant developments since you submitted your application. “Significant” does not mean you need to have won an international science competition since November. Maybe the independent research project you mentioned in your application has developed into a paper that you submitted to a journal, or maybe you were selected to lead your school’s literary magazine after previously serving as an editor.
You should do your best to connect the updates to things you’re looking forward to at Amherst, like their Open Curriculum, small classes, and participation in the Five College Consortium. One or two well-developed connections are stronger than a catalog of things you found on the website.
In your closing, reaffirm again that Amherst remains your unequivocal first choice. Be direct! Then sign off, send the email to Amherst admissions, and then wait. You do not need to email your admissions officer weekly to remind them that you remain extremely interested. A strong update gives the admissions committee all the new information they need.
FINISH STRONG
Another mistake students make after a deferral is treating January through March like a waiting room. Keep doing things!!!!
If your application emphasized environmental research, continue the research. If you founded a community program, improve it. If you’re a writer, keep writing. If you’re taking Multivariable Calculus, this would be an exceptionally bad moment to decide that a B-minus is “basically fine.”
Regardless of whether or not you end up at Amherst, a backslide in grades and activity can come back to bite you. Keep up those grades, keep getting involved, and keep building towards all the things that made your application great to begin with.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW
There is no reliable current public statistic telling us what percentage of Amherst ED deferrals ultimately become Regular Decision acceptances. Anyone giving you a precise number without current Amherst data is guessing.
You cannot change the decision Amherst made in December. But you do have quite a bit of control over what they -- and every other college on your list -- see next.
The window between an ED deferral and Regular Decision deadlines is short, and this is not the time to spend two weeks deciding what to do. Contact us to get started ASAP.