A deferral or waitlist decision does not create one universal next step. This research report compares official college policies on update forms, letters of continued interest, recommendations, and appeals. It also calculates historical waitlist admission shares from five institutional Common Data Sets, with clear denominators and limits. Families receive an original framework for a permitted update, an enrollment-protection worksheet, and questions for evaluating a narrowly defined consulting service. Selected internal planning records illustrate deadline coordination without proving admissions effects. The central task is to follow the actual institution’s instructions while preserving a workable college option.