<p>This might be of interest to some people here, especially since some of you might have kids that are waitlisted at colleges they applied to. I knew some Us were fond of waitlisting students (WUSTL, Villanova, for example) and others where waitlisting mostly amounts to a more polite way of rejecting students (Middlebury, for example)</p>
<p>But are there colleges that admit a high percentage of waitlistees?</p>
<p>Catria, the schools and numbers of students admitted off of the waitlisted vary from year to year. This is dependent on the number of students who actually matriculate. For example, DD’s school typically took students off of the waitlist. BUT the year DD was a freshman, the freshman class was over enrolled by 150 students so NONE were taken off of the waitlist.</p>
<p>Schools that took students from the wait list = schools that overestimated yield that year.</p>
<p>There are questions in section C of the Common Data Set about the waitlist. So you can look it up for schools you are interested in, if they bothered to answer the questions ;)</p>
<p>For example, Union College gave this info:
Number of qualified applicants offered a place on waiting list 908
Number accepting a place on the waiting list 328
Number of wait-listed students admitted 11</p>
<p>Not very good odds!</p>
<p>I mentioned Middlebury as another place where waitlists mostly amounted to a more polite way of rejecting students:</p>
<p>Number of qualified applicants offered a place on the waitlist: 2114 (2012)/1958 (2011)/1527 (2010)
Number accepting a place on the waitlist: 1006 (2012)/865 (2011)/756 (2010)
Number of waitlisted students admitted: 20 (2012)/134 (2011)/42 (2010)</p>
<p>Even if it is highly variable, 2011 was still pretty long odds: 15.5% got off the waitlist.</p>
<p>Compare that to Villanova, which waitlists a lot of people (about 1/3 of the applicant pool in each class):</p>
<p>Number of qualified applicants offered a place on the waitlist: 5063 (2012)/4950 (2011)/5054 (2010)
Number accepting a place on the waitlist: 2232 (2012)/2272 (2011)/2420 (2010)
Number of waitlisted students admitted: 440 (2012)/152 (2011)/494 (2010)</p>
<p>Interesting info about Villanova. I had no idea that school accepted so many off the WL. My son’s friends were WL as well as my son in 2011 but none of them cleared it.</p>
<p>Villanova would be taking fewer people of their wait list if they offered better financial aid.</p>
<p>Some colleges also use wait lists as a face-saving measure for children of their alumni and children of politicians. The family can feel that their kid “almost” was accepted, even though he was really at the bottom of a 4,000 person wait list.</p>
<p>When my son applied to college last year, I viewed the wait list as a sign of how close he came to admission.</p>
<p>If he didn’t even make the wait list, to me, that shows that he wasn’t even close to getting admitted.</p>
<p>Villanova admitted ~1/4 of the last class off the waitlist (if the students that got off the waitlist all attended but I don’t think all students that get off the waitlist actually attend)</p>
<p>Many non totally need blind schools admit the full pays off of the wait list at the expense of better qualified, but financially needy students. I know both Reed and Brandeis do this.</p>
<p>Yes, whenhen, that has been revealed at a number of colleges, and probably happens at many more. The rationale is that the financial aid budget has been used up in the regular admissions, and they need to bring in plenty of full pay students through the wait list to pay the bills. It also means that a student at the top of an applicant pool of a particular college may get close to their full need met. However, if a student is slightly below the average standards for admissions to a particular college, they may not get offered any aid, or may not get an offer of admission, while richer students do. </p>
<p>End result - if you really need and want aid, emphasize applying to colleges where you will be in the top 15% of their applicant pool (unless a college truly is need-blind and meets 100% of need, which are mainly the richest and most selective colleges).</p>
<p>Of course, some colleges love to use long wait lists because it allows them to artificially inflate their yield rate and artificially lower their acceptance rate. Students who had less interest in the college won’t bother agreeing to be on the wait list, and they end up in the denied admission percentage. The college ends up with a wait list of students who would be willing to immediately accept an offer of admission - which means a deposit for almost every offer.</p>
<p>With the common app making it so much easier to apply to many colleges, and the fact that each student can only attend one college, and that the number of actual college students is going down, makes the admissions offices’ jobs a lot harder. Predicting who is going to actually come is getting far more difficult. So the wait list is more heavily used. The other dirty little secret is that a lot of schools get turned down on the wait list. So they may accept a lot of kids off of it and get rejected. I know kids who were on a number of waitlists and cleared a number of them and turned them all down. Also know some who went from one college to another due to the wait list. </p>
<p>And, yes, the waitlist is often the exception at those schools that guarantee to meet need. Plus most of the time there is no merit money either. The kid accepted from the WL generally have to be full pay, or the school has to fool around with getting a package together when most of the money is gone. So those kids whose counselors have written admissions and said they will jump and that it is the only school on the kid’s waitlist, plus,if the kid is full pay, the chances are better. One of the schools where some of my kids went, a highly selective independent school, does very well with wait list acceptances of its kids. The counselors will write ONE school on a kids waitlist with the stipulation that the kid will go there if accepted, and most of the kids who are in that school are full pay. They do quite well with highly selective school wait list acceptances.</p>