<p>Can anyone tell me the stats (accepted, applied) for the 2015 class? I was waitlisted at Chicago and Washu, and I want to send a letter to one of them to express continued interest. I want to send it to the school that is more likely to actually use their waitlist so that the letter can potentially do me the most good. Besides stats, if anyone has any advice based on old stats or experience as to which of these would be a better bet off the waitlist, feel free to post! Thanks.</p>
<p>of course, i would rather go to chicago (definitely) but if they never use the waitlist…</p>
<p>It’s really impossible to tell which would pull more from their waitlist. I don’t see why you wouldn’t contact both colleges, though.</p>
<p>Honestly, you’re probably more likely to get off the waitlist at WashU.</p>
<p>Why? A few reasons. Firstly, they’re kind of known for waitlisting applicants to boost yield. (Waitlisted apps have 100% yield, since they call you first to ask if you’re still interested, and then inform you that you’re off the waitlist.) Secondly, they admitted WAY fewer students this year than last, under the apparently silly expectation that their yield would rise by 7 percentage points. Which it won’t. So they’ll probably be using the waitlist like crazy this year.</p>
<p>Chicago will probably use the waitlist a bit, too. Though I expect them to admit 50-100 students, which is what, less than 1 percent of waitlisted applicants?</p>
<p>phuriku: Are you trying to give a living example of how you can be a math stud at the University of Chicago without actually being good at arithmetic? Or, putting this another way, of what number is 50 1%? 100? How big is the Chicago waitlist?</p>
<p>Seems to me that Chicago’s waitlist is pretty big. Wouldn’t you agree? If 3400 were accepted, that leaves about 18k who were either rejected or waitlisted. Wouldn’t surprise me from the information presented here if 5k-10k were waitlisted. (So yes, I can do arithmetic. It is not my calculations, but rather, Chicago’s admissions trends that are odd.)</p>
<p>Of course, we’ll never know since Chicago is so secretive about its information, but it seems to me that there were more waitlisted than actual rejections. You can say that CC is a limited sample from which we can’t extrapolate, but even by what I’ve seen from my old high school (which is not elite by any means of the word), there were quite a few waitlisted apps and comparatively few rejections. 5k-10k, perhaps closer to 5k, is a good estimate.</p>
<p>You’re right about Chicago not publicizing this sort of information. But I have never, ever, seen data from a college that waitlisted a lot more people than it accepted, and usually the waitlists are much smaller than the accepted pool. In fact, the highest ratios of waitlist to accepted I have seen were at Harvard and Yale a few years ago, but both of them have since cut their waitlist length by more than half, and their ratios are affected by the fact that they accept so few people relative to class size in the first place. I don’t believe there’s any chance that Chicago has a waitlist as big as 5,000. 2-3,000 tops.</p>