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As one of the major leaders in soybean production, the USA generates a huge amount of defatted white flakes (WF) as a by-product of solvent extraction of oil from soybeans. The primary purpose of pretreatment is to make the cellulose in the feedstock amenable to the action of the cellulase enzyme. The objectives of the study were to determine the effect of microwave pretreatment on improving the enzymatic hydrolysis of feedstocks, and to determine the optimum pretreatment conditions. The power level, processing time, and solid loading rate were the parameters investigated. Microwave pretreatment recovered 76% of the theoretical sugars from WF after its hydrolysis with Novozym 960, Cellic CTec, and Cellic HTec with the pretreatment conditions of 20% solid loading rate, 900 W power, and 3 min processing time. No fermentation inhibitors like HMF and furfural were found in the pretreated samples. The results suggest that microwave processing can be an effective pretreatment for the conversion of sugars in WF to ethanol.