Alright! Thank you! Do you also think my other efforts might potentially improve my chance of seeming committed enough to the school to the point where they potentially get me off the waitlist?
I would provide what they ask for, and then choose another school to commit to by May 1. A lot of time waitlist activity doesn’t happen until the end of summer, if at all. If that happens, you can withdraw from the school you committed to and accept Barnard instead.
But I would not keep reaching out to them beyond what you have already done. Instead, please get excited about one of the schools that has already accepted you.
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I think you have done what you can to get your name/file noticed as someone just waiting for that opportunity - which, I suppose, is handy for them to know.
For your own sake, maybe now it’s time to let it go for two weeks.
My best guess is that there’ll be a flurry of activity once the enrollment deadline has passed, and admissions has an exact count, how many people they do need from the waitlist.
After May there’ll be a trickle here or there, whenever someone who had enrolled at Barnard, suddenly gets off a waitlist elsewhere, which had always been their first choice.
I was looking at the yield rates and the % of class filled during ED. Say 60% of the class is filled during ED and say 60% is the yield rate. For the candidates admitted thru ED, the yield is 100%. So the implied RD yield rate is 40%. If 300 candidates are offered admission during RD, 120 will actually enroll and for the remaining 180, Barnard might dip into WL. Of 2K WL candidates, 40% of them will remain active (applying yield rate) so the effective WL will be 800. Not sure if I am thinking right.
This is what I am thinking: If the class 2027 size is 800, 60% admitted through ED, it means 320 would be expected and eventually admitted from RD. The school accepted 770 students from 2027 RD (11803*6.5%) , the expected yield rate would be 41.5% (320/770). If the actual yield rate is lower than expected , school would dig into the WL.
In theory this all makes sense, however the admissions committee accounts for the yield rate of RD. This year the acceptance rate of RD was 6.5% out of 11,803 applicants so they accepted 767 RD. With a yield of 44% (I did the math it’s more like 44% rather than 40% for RD), 337 students enroll RD on top of the 428 students admitted ED this year which makes 765 total. This is the class size they are aiming for (give or take a few applicants). So really, they will only be taking people off the waitlists if they overestimate yield and this year’s cycle has more fluctuation than they predicted. They don’t want to go into the waitlists, they want to have a prediction that’s as accurate as possible, so the past two years have truly been an anomaly because it’s not normal to have that much of the class from waitlists. I think schools like Barnard were especially conservative due to the pandemic and not knowing how it was going to affect yield, but who knows if that will apply this year :((
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The class of 2026 was 713 enrolled (https://barnard.edu/class-2026-profile).
I don’t think so.
For the class of 2027, the TOTAL admittance (ED+RD) was 6.5% out of 11,803 applications, so 767.
So - regardless of the precise number of ED acceptances, or assumptions about yield rate, once they learn about 50 or so of young women not enrolling, they would start reaching out to the waitlist.
If you go back to pre-pandemic years, enrollment has been around 700. So MAYBE last year they over-enrolled with 713, because colleges didn’t quite know how the pandemic backlog and test-option would work out, and this year they lowered acceptances to prevent a recurrence.
That would explain the significant drop in acceptance rate (from 9% to 6.5%) even though there were 1.7% less applications!
Yes - using the assumptions above, if more than approx. 50 accepted students do not enroll, then any number beyond 50 would be filled from the waitlist to reach the target class size.
So if 55 do not enroll, 5 would come off the waitlist.
Of course, if their class target is only 700, then the number gets pushed out further.
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Got it. I always assumed that the RD acceptance rate that they publish doesn’t include ED but if it does than that changes a lot of things.
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The right EDschool holds the key - too late to learn the lesson🙁
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I was looking at the common dataset for Barnard. In 2018 they accepted 602 first year admits and in 2022 they accepted 760 admits. Every year they have accepted more students as compared to the year before. This year the number can be close to 800.
Not bad though. But putting 2000+ applicants on Barnard WL is really bad . I know other LACs accept much more students (2 or 3 times) than the class size. I think the typical yield rate in those LACs is relatively low.
The last CDS is for 2021/2022 instead (https://barnard.edu/institutional-research). See section B-1: As of October 2021, there were 760 first-years enrolled in the class of 2025, out of 1,192 admitted (section C-1).
Actually, the year later, in 2022 they enrolled only 713 students out of the admitted 1,080 to the class of 2026 (https://barnard.edu/class-2026-profile).
I would not be comfortable trying to guess their target enrollment for this year. However, I take note of the fact that this year they only extended an offer to 767 students with the knowledge that a relevant percentage of those will not enroll.
If with “accepted”, you really mean “admits”, then the numbers have also been decreasing over the past 3 cycles:
2021 (class of 2025): 1,192 (11% of 10,395) - enrolled 760
2022 (class of 2026): 1,080 (9% of 12,009) - enrolled 713
2023 (class of 2026): ≈768 (6.5% of 11,803) - enrolled ???
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So does that mean our odds for getting off the waitlist is worse or around the same as previous years?
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Really impossible to say, as we don’t know who many were offered a waitlist or even what the target class size is (although there has been no discussions/announcements in recent years, that Barnard is planning to increase enrollment).
The other factor is how successfully Admissions has gotten in identifying students for which Barnard was their top choice - even if by now some of those young women might have been getting other great acceptances they could choose instead.
And the same is true for those on the waitlist. Some students might be on multiple waitlists, and there is no way to predict how many on the Barnard waitlist at the end will not accept being admitted (which is why a waitlist has to be so big).
Sorry - there really is no good basis to offer any speculation. But keeping my fingers crossed for all of you here, who clearly are extra committed! 
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Wait but if they have given out less offer knowing that the yield rate would be around 65% ish, doesn’t it mean that there’d be more places left for waitlisted people to fill up? The class of 2025 and 2026 number of admitted students, I assume, includes those who were accepted thru waitlist while the 2027 data is fully made up of straight-up acceptances thru ED or RD.
The ED&RD yield rate (straight-up acceptance) for 2021 according to the common data set (assuming that all waitlisted acceptances committed to Barnard) would be (760-258)/(1280-258)=49.12%. Let’s assume it’ll be approx. the same this year, so that out of the 768 acceptances they have given out, around 377 will actually accept their places.
I’m guessing the target class size this year to also be 700 ish, so they’ll probably pull 323 people off the waitlist…? Usually they put around 2000 skull people on the waitlist according to their 2020-2021 common data set. So the WL acceptance rate will be approximately 323/2000=16.15% ish? Which does’t sound too bad.
Or am I just really bad at math.
760 - 420 ED = 340 from RD * 65% yield rate 220, 420+ 220 =640 60 needed from WL this is what I am thinking
Let’s make sure we’re using the same language/terminology:
- Admitted: ED+RD applicants who were not rejected or waitlisted.
- Enrolled: ED+RD+Waitlist admitted students, who actually enrolled at Barnard.
I don’t know how to define “acceptances”?
If class size is only 700 (as it was pre-Covid), 60% of which were admitted ED in December, then 420 students were effectively already enrolled.
So out of the 768 admitted total (RD+ED), minus the 420 ED, would suggest 348 were offered admission via RD.
From 348 admitted RD they need 280 enrollments to fill their (hypothetical!) class size of 700. In that case, once more than 68 admitted students don’t enroll, they contact a person on the waitlist.
NONE of that is going to give anyone clarity, how likely they’ll be the person getting a call.
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Here’s an optimistic take on your numbers 
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340 from RD * 40% yield rate 136, 420+ 136 =556 144 needed from WL for 700 admit number. If that number is 760, then another 60 added to 144 = 204 from WL.
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Too optimistic😁 really hope so! the yield rate from past two years was about 65%. Guessing Barnard must have given very generous financial aid package at RD round. The yield rate of 65% for LACs is very high.
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According to alumni correspondence received this week:
In FY23, Barnard will provide approximately 25% more financial aid than last year - nearly $60 million - representing about 21% of the College’s operating budgets.
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