<p>I’ve known a number of students who were waitlisted at their top choice (myself included). Based on what I’ve seen, the vast majority of students pay a deposit at one school and then hope to get off of the waitlist at the first choice. Not paying the a deposit at a school which accepted the student would be idiotic, particularly when the waitlisted school in question is Harvard.</p>
<p>I see that according to [Application</a> Ethics](<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/portal/site/Professionals/menuitem.b6b1a9bc0c5615493883234011a161ca/?vgnextoid=da4ccf9a10494110vcm-02000000aaa514acRCRD&vgnextchannel=ae62247eb2814110VgnVCM200000121a16acRCRD&vgnextfmt=print]Application”>http://professionals.collegeboard.com/portal/site/Professionals/menuitem.b6b1a9bc0c5615493883234011a161ca/?vgnextoid=da4ccf9a10494110vcm-02000000aaa514acRCRD&vgnextchannel=ae62247eb2814110VgnVCM200000121a16acRCRD&vgnextfmt=print) it is considered unethical to double deposit to negotiate financial aid but acceptable if one deposit is going to a waitlisting school. Of course, colleges will create “ethical codes” that are in their own interests.</p>
<p>Do you typically need to pay a deposit to get on a waiting list?</p>
<p>No wait lists are free.</p>
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<p>That is a no-no, according to the professional body of college admins.</p>
<p>[The</a> Waiting Game: What if I Am Wait-Listed?](<a href=“http://www.nacacnet.org/studentinfo/articles/Pages/WaitListed.aspx]The”>http://www.nacacnet.org/studentinfo/articles/Pages/WaitListed.aspx)</p>
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<p>It’s possible that it helped. Firm stats are impossible to know, but there has been talk among some in the Harvard community that many of the prospective students were impressed with the way Harvard handled the the Visitas cancellation during the marathon bomber crisis. By time the city-wide lockdown was declared many prospective students (“prefrosh” in Harvardspeak) were already on planes en route for the big time at the college. The Admissions office mobilized and nearly the entire staff including Dean Fitzsimmons himself camped out the airport and train stations to meet every student and find accommodations for them in good hotels until arrangements could be made to fly them back home.</p>
<p>In a somewhat related note, the food service workers in Annnenberg Hall, the freshman dining hall, braved the lock down to come in to work and prepare and serve the dinners on Friday evening. And the grateful freshmen all stood and and gave them a standing ovation for their courage and dedication to duty. And this also proved quite useful beyond feeding the students, because once Annenberg was up and running it also provided many meals to police and other first responders taking part in the bomber manhunt.</p>
<p>Hey, coureur, way to defuse my snarky comment!</p>
<p>Tufts also had an admitted students day when the area went into lockdown during the bomber manhunt. Nice article on how they coped…
[Boston</a> Strong · Inside Admissions · Tufts University Admissions Department](<a href=“Boston Strong · Inside Admissions | Tufts Admissions”>Boston Strong · Inside Admissions | Tufts Admissions)
I can’t imagine a student admitted to Harvard would decide not to go to Harvard because their admitted students day events were compromised. </p>
<p>RE: waitlists are free - Carnegie Mellon has a free waitlist but also a PAID priority waitlist. It is essentially a large deposit to guarantee you will come if you are granted a spot off the waitlist. You get the money back if you don’t get off the waitlist.</p>
<p>It’s funny, if you listened to all the people who claimed to have gotten into Harvard but declined for “insert reason” you’d think Harvard’s yield was 8%!</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>And USC’s and Chicago’s yield might be 180 percent! :)</p>
<p>In support of the theory that Waitlists are bloated in order to garner cheap positive PR, I would point to the equally bloated EA/ED deferral rates. This year for example, Harvard deferred more applicants from their SCEA than they accepted in their RD round. Even if they accepted no one who applied RD, they still would have rejected EA deferrals.</p>
<p>Does a school with a 60-70% yield rate really believe that they will need thousands of waitlisted applicants to fill a handful of slots? My guess is that many students who refuse to accept a waitlist position do so because they realize the odds are exorbitantly against them and simply want to get on with their life. If waitlists actually worked as advertised and offered a reasonable chance of admission, then significantly more applicants would accept a place.</p>
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<p>What’s surprising to me is how many people do accept places on waitlists despite the minuscule odds of admission. In 2012, Princeton offered 1,472 applicants places on its waitlist. More than 2/3 of them (988) accepted. Zero were admitted off the waitlist.</p>
<p>I guess some dreams die hard.</p>
<p>I can’t see any real downside to accepting a spot on a waitlist, if you think you’d rather go to that school than the one that accepted you. There’s no obligation–you don’t have to go, even if you’re taken off the list. The only downside I can see is psychological, and a realistic applicant should be able to get over that. Similarly, I can’t see any real downside to the college having a big waitlist of all students who they might possibly take if an appropriate space opened up. The only people harmed are the unrealistic students, and that harm is just emotional as well.</p>
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<p>If you accept the spot the worst that can happen is you get rejected anyways. If you decline there is a 0% chance of admission.</p>
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<p>I do not endorse the huge WL, but if you believe that a school carefully selects its freshman class by taking 8 to 10 percent of thousands of applicants AND builds a well-balanced class of students (as opposed to simply X number of students,) it might make sense that they use the large WL to replace a left-handed waterpolo player who also plays the oboe with someone of similar qualities. Hence, they maintain a large pool of possible replacements for their initial choices. </p>
<p>And, like it or not, the schools cannot TOTALLY predict who will leave them at the altar.</p>
<p>xiggi wrote:
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<p>I can’t believe they get to that level of detail in admissions unless adcoms have a predefined checklist describing how they will fill all 2,000 slots. If this was the case, adcoms would effectively be forced to conduct nationwide recruiting efforts to ensure that they had adequate applications from qualified left-handed water polo/oboe aficiandoes.</p>
<p>Instead, adcoms could define a couple dozen broad categories in tough-to-fill areas of need(underrepresented states/foreign countries, rare artistic ability, unusual academic interest, etc.) and have a handful of waitlisted applicants in each category. That would mean one or two hundred, not thousands. After all, they can always admit two applicants the following year instead of one to make up for any deficiency.</p>
<p>How many school’s yields are boosted by high ED admissions, where presumably close to 100% will (must) attend when admitted? It would figure that their yields strictly from the RD round are much, much lower than the average presented in these figures. ED would seem to be a great yield advantage to colleges who get the benefit of locking in students who may frankly fear facing the full RD admissions competition face on. So, I’m thinking that looking at yield numbers without seeing the ED percentage gives a false sense of how desirable that school is. Or am I getting confused?</p>
<p>A school has to be pretty desirable to get a lot of ED applicants in the first place…</p>
<p>It is pretty much common knowledge that the wait-list is just a polite rejection.</p>
<p>I think that depends on the school. S12 was accepted off of one wait list last year.</p>
<p>Lehigh - could you please give a reference citing your “common knowledge”? I have never known an adcom from any university to make such a bold statement. Perhaps a high school GC might state this trying to soften the blow for a student who was not accepted from a waitlist, but that would not qualify as common knowledge.</p>
<p>In fact, the reality that almost all schools with waitlists do accept some students from it every year would appear to refute your assertion.</p>