<p>So who is pumped to know that you are just a little bit closer to hopefully hearing from your waitlist school? If you were waitlisted, were you waitlisted by your top choice? If your waitlist school contacts you, do you plan on attending? Were you waitlisted by multiple schools?</p>
<p>Not expecting to get off the waitlists (I'm on four...). It's nice to have hope though.</p>
<p>I really don't think the wait lists works the way you think. I think it's more of a system where if a number of students reject a school then they start sending the next best students on the waitlist an acceptance letter. Lets say for example or every 50 students that turns a school down then one student from the waitlist gets in. I higly doubt it's an actual day where everyone gets of from the waitlist. I may be wrong so anyone can feel free to correct me.</p>
<p>That's what I mean. I wasn't saying that there's a specific day but since today, May 1, is the deposit deadline for virtually all colleges, it means that people on the waitlist are a step closer to finding out. When will those waitlisters actually find out? Could be tomorrow or it could be in August or maybe never. It's just that since today was the deposit deadline, people have made their final decisions which can give some hope to waitlisters.</p>
<p>Depends on the kind of school. For the LACs, they want to pick someone from the waitlist who fills the ranks in place of someone who chose to go elsewhere. So-- for a very simplistic example-- a female for a female, a musician for a musician, a URM for a URM. It's not you VS all other applicants-- it's you VS others like you. However, at large universities, this process may be entirely different.</p>
<p>This snippet from the Reed College website kind of sums it up:</p>
<p>Most applicants compete not with the whole applicant pool but within specific categories, where the applicant-to-available-space ratio may be more, or less, favorable than in the pool at large. Categories can exist for athletics, ethnic diversity, international citizenship, institutional legacy and loyalty, musical and artistic needs, component schools or special academic programs, and in some cases, even gender. Students in the selected categories, which vary from institution to institution, have a "hook" because they help meet institutional needs. Books such as Elizabeth Duffy and Idana Goldberg's Crafting a Class, former Stanford admission dean Jean Fetter's Questions and Admissions, and former Santa Cruz, Vassar, and Bowdoin dean Richard Moll's Playing the Private College Admissions Game peer into the hidden reality of category admission.</p>
<p>It is ,unfourtanatly all about quotas. It seems to me that a hookless applicant has an EXTREMLY difficult time getting off the list at competitive colleges.</p>
<p>With that, it seems many people are gaming the system by double depositing. they may not get caught, and it only makes our wait longer :( Yes, i know it is a hard difficult "life changing" descion, and yet how selfish can people be? They have had 1 month to think this over.</p>
<p>What I learned recently is that a surprisingly low proportion of people accepts spots on waitlists even at very good schools. As low as 10% !!!!! of those, who were offered this option. I think CMU was used as an example. This is easy to understand: people go on waitlist either for their absolute top choice school or if they didn't get into any of their top choices (not that common, actually). So even if 2,000+ applicants were offered a spot on the waitlist (a ridiculously high number that is usually published for waitlist info), only 200-300 would accept it (a small number that very few schools publish due to some reason). These couple hundreds are enough for the school to fill the class since adcoms are pretty good at estimating the yield (afterall the yield varies within only a few % from year to year). But barely enough (because it is not easy to find 2000+ qualifying applicants in addition to those admitted).
To avoid overenrollment, the admission goal is set below the maximum possible number: the schools actually plan on taking more than a few people from the waitlist. If they underestimate the yield, only a few spots are left by May 1 (but rarely zero !!!!). If they guess the yield right 20-30% of people on the waitlist are offered admission (this is when they admit 40-50 people from the list). If they overestimate the yield and have 70-80 spots to fill, more than 50% on the waitlist are offered admission (don''t forget that the yield from the waitlist is also not 100%). So even though there is some "class building" here (if they suddenly lost all violinists or most history majors), the process may end up being not that selective when a lot of people are ttaken off the waitlist.
Obvious exceptions to the rule:
1. Small LACs. Their classes are much less redundant. So they really need to fill particular spots. [Don't know how they manage.]
2. HYPs. They have 2/3 waitlist spots accepted and a lot of candidates too good to be rejected. So their waitlists tend to be much longer than needed.</p>