If Your Application is Deferred

If your Early Decision application was deferred to the Regular Decision round, we provided instructions for what to do next in your decision letter. We also linked to our deferred student website, which restates this information and answers the most common questions we get about deferral.

To have your application considered again in RD, you must complete two steps.

1. Complete the deferral form in your MyUVA Applicant Portal by January 15th.
2. Submit your fall trimester/semester grades by February 15th. 

On the defer student page, we explain that midyear grades can be submitted either by the student using their portal or by the school counselor. We aren't picky!

That is all you have to do. 

What else should you send?
Nothing else. We know there are third parties urging you to do other things. I strongly suggest that you follow our instructions instead of theirs. We specifically address Letters of Continued Interest (LOCIs) on that deferred student page. Please take a moment to read it if you haven't already. You're a senior and you have a lot on your plate. We are trying to help you use your limited time in the most productive way.

 

How many people will get offers in RD?
I can't predict the offer rate for the defer group. I've seen it as high as 16% and as low as 4% in recent years. Our decisions depend on midyear grades and how the rest of the applicant pool looks. 

It's now the Early Action students' turn to have our attention. Your application will get a second turn during RD if you choose to continue in the process. 

Unofficial 2024-2025 Early Decision Statistics

Early Decision students, you all gave us some great apps! I smiled a lot, I laughed a bit, and I shed a few tears, too. My favorite essay folder is certainly a little bigger! You're pretty amazing and I look forward to seeing some of you propel UVA forward in the next few years. Now, on to the numbers...

These statistics aren't all that different from the ones I shared last year, so I don't think anyone should be surprised by this data. 

Early Decision Applications

Total number of Early Decision applications: 4,971 (4,465 last year)
Total number of VA apps: 2,795 (2,573)
Total number of OOS apps: 2,176 (1,893)
We use completed applications in our statistics.

Early Decision Offers

Overall offers: 1,282 (1,133)
Total VA offers: 825 (29.5% offer rate)
Total OOS offers: 457 (21% offer rate)
Averaging these offer rates together is misleading because residency is a major factor in our review. If you are going to share these numbers, cite BOTH offer rates and not an average. Last year, we made about 9,500 offers overall to reach the enrollment goal.

A few notes:

1. I do not have additional statistics. I report the data I'm given. We are already immersed in the Early Action review process and I have files to read tonight!

2. Decisions will be posted in the applicant portal tomorrow night. You got login credentials back when we received your Common App. If you never logged in before, do it now so you know how it works. 

3. Admitted students will get a paper copy of their admission letter by mail. It will take a while for us to get those out. I can't really predict when the USPS will get that into your mailbox. Your enrollment deposit is due by January 15th.

4. Defer letters have a link to the deferred student website. Please go over the information with your parent(s) and counselor. If you'd like to be considered for during the Regular Decision review, complete the reply form in the portal by and upload your semester grades and any other updates when they become available. This takes the place of writing a Letter of Continued Interest (LOCI). Our instructions are clear that updates are uploaded in your portal, not emailed to admission officers. 

5. The Echols, Rodman, and College Science Scholars program invitations will be extended at the end of  the Early Action and Regular Decision processes. Early Decision students will be considered in both of those rounds. Echols and Rodman also allow self-nomination after your first semester.

6. Remember that these numbers are unofficial. Institutional Research and Analytics is the source of all official statistics about UVA. They take a census to determine the final statistics for the class in the fall. I wrote a big post about all the great sources of data last week that you may find helpful.

If you are a reporter, please contact the Office of University Communications for current, official information.

An Early Decision Update

Early Decision notification will be 

Friday, December 13, 2024 

This is official. Please do not call our office to confirm it. 

What time will decisions show up?

The decisions get posted all at once in around 5 PM. There's a technical team that runs through several processes to prepare for the release and load the decisions. I can't predict the exact moment when they will finish their work.

Where are the decisions posted?

You will see a place to review an update in your MyUVA Applicant Portal. You received login credentials for the portal back when you applied. Remember that your applicant portal is different from SIS, which is used for the financial aid process. 

The portal emails you when there's an unseen status update. Decisions are not given out by email or phone. 

Are there early signs of my decision anywhere?

The portal will look different leading up to the decision release as the technical team does their work. These changes are not tied to your decision.

Are scholar notifications coming?
The first round of review for Echols, Rodman, and College Science Scholars will be completed after the Early Action process in February. A second round will occur in March and decisions will go up after the Regular Decision process is completed.

When will statistics be ready?
I usually receive admission statistics for the round a day before the decision release. As soon as I have data, I'll share here. 

 This post is about Early Decision. Please consult the chart of dates for other rounds.

UVA Admission Data is Plentiful!

 

"Beyond our in-state to out-of-state ratio (2/3 of our students are Virginia residents), there are no restrictions on how many students we may take from a high school, town, county, or region."

I say this sentence during every information session, evening program, and high school visit. I say it regularly during live q&a sessions. I post it regularly on social media. I've been at UVA for 19 years, so you can imagine how many times those words have come out of my mouth! 

Rumors of regional quotas are a common concern among college-bound students. At UVA, we don't have them. We're large enough that can have many students from the same high school/town/county in our class. There's no directive that we must have someone from every state or county in the incoming class, either. With close to 18,000 undergraduate students, we have geographic diversity here. 

Having some numbers can help manage expectations about the admission process and prepare you for admission decisions (no update yet, ED applicants!). Let's go over some places where you get get factual information about UVA's enrollment and admission.

1. The Enrollment Maps

The Office of Institutional Research and Analytics publishes enrollment maps and charts that show the home countries, states, and counties/cities of UVA students. They are on the third tab of the Enrollment Data page on their website. At the top of the tab, you can switch the view from the world, the United States, and the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

You can zoom in on the maps and hover over an area to see the number of students at UVA from that specific country, state, or county/city (in Virginia, cities and counties are separate).

Below the maps are charts with raw data. You can export those to see them in a spreadsheet. Here's just a snippet of one:

You can use the drop-down menu to look at specific populations within UVA (undergraduates, graduates, different schools/colleges). 

2. Official UVA Admission Data

The Office of Institutional Assessment & Analytics also has pages of admission data that you can view using the same system of drop-down menus. The data goes back to 2016 and can also be seen by school of entry.

One piece of data that gets a lot of attention is the rank-in-class statistic. The Assessment team includes important contextual information that never seems to get reported. The rank statistics is only about the students who had a rank reported. We do not assign a rank if the school doesn't report it. I've seen some people claim that we do on social media. They are incorrect!

3. Official SCHEV Admission Data

The State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) collects admission data for all of the colleges in Virginia. There are all sorts of charts on their website. Some items of note:

Chart B10 General Profiles 

This chart has a general profile for each school. Just remember that GPAs are not standardized in Virginia, so the average GPA stat isn't all that significant. It's better to get data from your high school. Remember that at UVA, we are more concerned with coursework and grades than GPA, as you can have students with the same GPA and very different transcripts. 

B10 also shows you how many first years submitted an SAT score. Remember that we are still more concerned with sustained classroom performance at UVA and that many of our students have surpassed the material on the SAT (especially the math section). 

Chart B15 Regional Data 
These charts show first year admission and enrollment data by nine regions: Greater Charlottesville, Shenandoah Valley, Northern Virginia, Greater Fredericksburg, Hampton Roads, Greater Richmond, Southside, Roanoke/New River/Lynchburg, and Southwest. Enrollment data is at the top, but scroll down for admission data.

It's not all that surprising...densely populated areas have lots of high schools, so we wind up with lots of students from NOVA, Richmond, and Hampton Roads. 

Chart B08A1 County/City Data

This page has admission data for all of the Virginia colleges broken down by county/city going back several years. The raw numbers are helpful, as there could be a county with a very high admission rate, but only a few applicants. For example, Mathews County had a 100% acceptance rate in the 2023-2024 cycle. We admitted the one applicant from there. 

Note: SCHEV's Chart B08 and B08H is very buggy and is showing me incorrect data. I'm guessing it's  combining first-year and transfer data (maybe even graduate student data?) in some of the charts. I'm not in Institutional Assessment, so I can't be sure. I just know that their numbers are higher than the ones I have.