"Bad News for Wait-Listed Students"

Parents Forum
1

<p>From today's Wall Street Journal (excerpt):</p>

<p>
[quote]
Bad News for Wait-Listed Students</p>

<p>Amid a Surge in Enrollment,
Top Colleges Offer Few Slots
To Applicants Put on Hold</p>

<p>Students still hoping to get off the admissions wait list at some of the country's top colleges may want to start settling on their safe school.</p>

<p>A number of the nation's most-selective universities, including Princeton, Yale and Johns Hopkins, aren't admitting any students at all off their wait lists this spring. And many others are taking only a handful.</p>

<p>The months of May and June are the time when colleges nail down their incoming freshman classes by filling any empty seats with students they neither admitted nor rejected, but put on hold. This year, amid a record flood of applications at some schools, admissions officers added slots in their freshman classes and extended more acceptances and wait-list offers than the year before, offering hope to an unusually large number of students.</p>

<p>But in the end, some of those schools wound up being unexpectedly stingy in admitting wait-listed students. The reason: Many admissions officers were caught off-guard by the large number of students who accepted offers of admission made earlier in the spring. Every year it's a gamble as to how many students will accept, and this year, slots at highly competitive schools filled quickly, leaving little or no opportunity for wait-listed applicants. In fact, some schools are finding their incoming freshmen classes a little crowded.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The article specifically discusses Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, P'ton, UofC, Penn and Yale. Most took many fewer this year; Hopkins and P'ton took none.</p>

<p>For those who subscribe:</p>

<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111888042358561000,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111888042358561000,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

2

<p>Just heard from the Dean this week that the Engineering School overshot it's target and is overenrolled for next year. That's coming on the heels of a 30 student deficit for last year's freshmen.</p>

3

<p>What's interesting is how many of the schools in the article reported higher-than-usual yield which the schools had little warning of. </p>

<p>That was a problem at Michigan, too.</p>

4

<p>So what does that mean for kids applying next year? Will schools admit less students and be even more selective? Do they usually admit a set amount each year and hope the numbers work out?</p>

5

<p>The article opined that it probably will be better news for WL next year, worse for RD as schools try to avoid overenrollment.</p>

6

<p>Tufts also took none this year.</p>

7

<p>What a tough year. I really fear for my rising junior. Don't the numbers peak in 2 years?</p>

8

<p>I think it a good idea to not over-react to these things. The fact is that it has always been hard to get into selective colleges. After all, that's what makes them selective and attractive. Given the reality of the stats, if the acceptance rate for Yale goes from 6 to 4%, you could argue that it is 50% harder to get in. But I'd argue in response that it is still a 20:1 shot within rounding error.</p>

<p>Using the same logic, a drop from 50 kids off the wait list to 5 off the list doesn't affect the chances of any one student much if the wait list is 1000 kids. The odds were, and are, very small. </p>

<p>It is for these reasons that the concept of match and safety school arose. Why sweat the long shots? Why sweat winning a lottery? Better, IMHO, to focus on what we can influence.</p>

9

<p>Yes when schools over-shoot their enrollment goals one year they usually scale back the next. They only have so many dorm rooms and so many classroom seats. The revearse is true too. If a class is underenrolled this year they will try to do something to make up for it next. Empty dorm rooms and classroom seats are bad for the bottom line.</p>

10

<p>Unfortunately, U Mich did not learn their lesson last year...overenrollment required housing undergrads in family housing and booting families. It has happened again this year.</p>

11

<p>Maybe their new holistic admissions policy needs a little tweaking. Maybe some unintended blowback from the Gratz v Bollinger decision.</p>

12

<p>what is this summer melt?? can kids change their minds about college and call up one of the schools that they turned down and ask for their spot back??</p>

13

<p>I doubt colleges got that much more selective. they probably just accepted more people in RD than usual and waitlisted (and accepted from waitlist) less.</p>

14

<p>Stanmaster
I believe that a few students send in deposits to multiple schools, as they are unable to make up their minds. When the larger amounts come due in July/August, some of these schools will never receive the first installment of tuition, and that's when the school actually knows someone is not attending.</p>

15

<p>ashernm, that's one possibility. But there must be other factors at work here in some cases. For instance, at MIT, because of higher than expected yield last year, they accepted 200 fewer students this year and kept the wait list roughly the same. Yet again this year they had their highest yield ever and were still not able to go to their waitlist, and are slightly over-enrolled again. Something about the yield algorithms need to be recalculated in a big way at a lot of schools, I think...</p>

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<p>mootmom, there is no yield algorithm, its just simple division. Do admissions officers just use last year's yield, to calculate the number of matriculants?</p>

<p>I cant really explain why its like that at MIT. Maybe its peer institutions (Caltech, Stanford, Harvey Mudd, Olin, Berkeley) were also very selective this year, so there was less overlap between, less acceptances sent out, and thus greater yield. Kinda hard to tell.</p>

17

<p>I don't think you're right about "simple division" -- I think there <em>are</em> formulas many schools use to predict what fraction of which sorts of applicants are likely to accept their offers of admission, based on historical admissions trends at their institution. Now, the schools you list may not be among the ones that use such formulas, but there are some that do.</p>

18

<p>Well, for calculating the yield of previous years, you just put amount matriculated over amount accepted.
Does yield differ that much from year to year? Why not just take the yield, set it a couple percentage points lower, then accept enough candidates to get 100% full classes, then waitlist some.
If yield was say 60, use a yield of 55.
.55X=Optimal Class size, say 1000.
Amount to admit=1000/.55=1 818, then just admit the deficit from waitlist.</p>

19

<p>No, U-M did not "boot" families out of housing. No one who had signed a contract and wanted family housing was forced to leave. That's misinformation. They did MOVE some families, and gave them incentives to do so. But those families were moved to other housing. </p>

<p>They mainly wanted to keep families grouped together and allow them to be further away from upperclassmen (who moved in underutilized family housing). </p>

<p>Do you know what one of the biggest stink was about? Families who had chosen to live in the nicer, more expensive housing got angry that the families who were moved from cheaper housing to the nicer housing still got to pay their cheap rent from their original contracts.</p>

<p>Also, if they're moving families this year, that's news to me, but contrary to how I sometimes type I don't know everything. LOL</p>

20

<p>I think yield is slow to change, but in a given year a change of a couple of points is certainly possible. If your yield is typically 40% and you accept 3000 to get a class of 1200, and your yield blips to 41.5%, that's 45 additional students, and there goes your wait list. One thing that might have changed, though, is the size of the wait list. I frequently read of waiting lists of a thousand, 750, etc. As the article points out, the move to SCEA by Stanford and Yale last year introduced a further element of uncertainty about yields that had a ripple effect throughout all top tier schools: no one knew for certain what the effect would be. It would theoretically be possible to follow Ashernm's suggestion to underadmit and make up fro the wait list, but that might have yield consequences that the colleges don't want to take on.</p>