Why would a grad school not want me to defer admission?
The MIDS program at Berkeley is an unusual special case among graduate programs.  One clue is the use of admissions counselors, which are almost unheard of in typical graduate programs but are widely used in for-profit education.  (This doesn't mean there's anything intrinsically problematic about relying on admissions counselors.  They are used because they are an effective recruiting technique and can genuinely help everything work more smoothly for applicants.  However, it's a cultural difference in how recruiting is done.)

In fact, the MIDS program is run by the I School at Berkeley in partnership with a for-profit company called 2U.  See here for a description of how 2U and Berkeley are collaborating on this.  In particular, the key sentence is "2U's marketing and recruiting team supports the I School's goal of finding students who are most likely to succeed in the rigorous Master of Information and Data Science program."  The admissions counselor you've worked with is presumably a 2U employee from the marketing and recruitment team, whose job performance is based on getting people to enroll. Deferring at least means you won't be enrolling now, and you might change your mind about enrolling at all in the meantime, so it would not be considered a good outcome by 2U.

So why is Berkeley working with 2U if it could lead to awkward situations like this?  One reason is 2U's educational technology platform, but frankly I think it's primarily the prospect of making money.  The I School is descended from Berkeley's library school, and this has never been a lucrative field.  I'm sure the idea of running a professional master's program (in which people's employers pay a lot of money) is very attractive to the I School, especially if 2U takes care of recruiting students and managing the online program itself.  This seems to be a common pattern in 2U's partnerships with universities.

This situation actually gives you a little more leverage than you might normally have:


Feel free to be firm (but polite, of course) with the admissions counselor.  This is someone who is trying to sell you something, and you don't need to worry that they have some wise but inscrutable motivation for trying to get you to enroll now.
The I School really doesn't want 2U to embarrass them.  If you have a bad experience with 2U, I'm confident that the I School would like to know and will try to keep 2U in line.
In the worst case scenario, you could try complaining to the Berkeley administration (outside of the I School), or even doing something like bringing problems to the attention of someone at the Daily Californian.  I'm sure many people at Berkeley dislike the idea of partnering with a for-profit company, and this gives the I School and 2U a strong incentive to address complaints effectively.


It sounds to me like you have a legitimate complaint.  Either the admissions counselor is trying to keep you from exercising a legitimate option, or they misled you about what your options would be.  It doesn't sound like a simple miscommunication, since the counselor could have easily addressed that by providing the correct information or context.  It's not clear how things will play out, but you shouldn't give up just because the admissions counselor is uncooperative.