Hi, I come bearing (unofficial) good news for those on the Cornell Waitlist. Since 2009 number of students offered admission has ranged from 0 to 260, with numbers as low as 24 just 2 years ago. So with my son on the waitlist, the question was how many will be offered admission off the waitlist in any year, and 2023 in particular.
Cornell currently ranks third among Ivy’s with retention rate of around 67.5% last year. With 4994 admitted, and using last year’s retention rate 67.5%, they retain 3371. As their stated class size is 3441, a paltry 70 lucky souls would be admitted (and even less if the retention rates go up as it has in the past decade). But in fact there’s a bit of noise in the yield rates, check out this graph in this article in the Harvard Crimson: " As American Colleges Struggle to Fill Classes, Ivy League Yield Rates Continue to Rise" [sorry won’t let me place a link]
I got to thinking the use of published retention rates are an inaccurate way to predict number of waitlist students offered admission, because they don’t consider early decision and waitlist acceptances which have yield rates close to 100%. Below are Regular decision yield rates from which acceptance offers can be calculated, assuming 100% of Early Decision and Waitlist offers are enrolled. Regular decision yield rates (Regular decision acceptances/Regular decision offers) are not published but can be calculated by the following formula=
(Total enrolled- early decision admission offers-waitlist offers)/
(Total admission offers- early decision admission offers- waitlist offers)
The Regular decision yield rates have much less variability that other factors, with essentially the same yield rate in the past 2 years, while the difference in waitlist acceptance differed more than a factor of 10. The predicted waitlist acceptance for the current year according to the published class size of 3441 is 245 students using linear regression (r2=0.74; P<.0001), with a range of about 220-270 accepted off the waitlist, which is higher than normal and potentially a record breaking year in terms of numbers accepted with a likely higher than normal percentage of acceptance. The right hand axis below shows the number of waitlist acceptances based on the yield rates of 35-50% (ranging from 109-600 waitlist admissions), but this year’s is predicted to be highest ever at 45.92%, but I predict the overall yield rate to dip a bit and settle at 65.7%. Of course the 245 coming off the waitlist is a good thing, but doesn’t take into account the college specific operations that Cornell carries out. Good luck Y’all!
[I have a nice graph here, if any one knows how to get around the upload block tell me and I’ll post it, a tiny pic is in my profile]
Data used:
- Waitlist letter
- Institutional Research and Planning site at Cornell [sorry won’t let me place a link]
- Cornell Sun article, “Nearly 5,000 Students Admitted Into Cornell for Class of 2027” [sorry won’t let me place a link]