There are a few posts about reaction videos. One thing that surprised me is how happy the students were when they got a waitlist response. Many schools, especially the elite ones, have huge waitlists. For example, Cornell sent out 5,514 acceptances and offered 6,750 waitlist spots. As a comparison point, Ohio State sent out 33,619 acceptances. Their waitlist was 1,412. What do people think about this practice of offering waitlist spots to people that have a 0% chance of getting an offer?
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I think it’s wrong because most students don’t realize it’s a soft rejection.
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Every acceptance, rejection and waitlist decision (and accompanying stats) is entered into Naviance for future admissions cycles.
Maybe some waitlists are being used to send a message to high school guidance counselors and potential future applicants about who might be accepted in the future.
Cornell, for instance, might be saying we consider these waitlisted students to be qualified but just missing the mark this time around, but future applicants with these stats should continue to apply. A flat rejection sends a different message.
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Those numbers are crazy and I would be a bit upset if my kid got a WL with those numbers. Maybe at the least, colleges should include the number of WL they send out on the WL letter.
As for Naviance, that doesn’t help anyone if student X has a good probability at being waitlisted but yet 0 probability of ever making it even close to coming off the list.
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Understood. But, applicants really have no idea how long school waitlists are.
It’s not advertised and not included in Naviance. Perhaps if they see their stats mirrored in the waitlisted students vs. the rejected students, they take that a positive sign to apply. Just as the schools intended.
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Many schools don’t have Naviance. And many that do don’t have accurate stats because students voluntarily enter their results.
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I thought it was all about yield? To some significant degree, colleges take a risk when they send out admissions decisions. If the college doesn’t get enough acceptances from their admissions decision(s), then they go to the waitlist for a group of students who made the cut, so to speak, but didn’t get the initial admission decision.
I agree that this totally favors the college, but I wouldn’t view it as unethical. Especially given the turmoil of the last few years, I probably would do the same if I were running an AO: I still have a pool to choose from even if I were to undershoot my yield estimation.
For that reason, I don’t think it is unethical, and I don’t view it as a soft rejection either.
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For the highly selective schools, it IS a soft rejection, a way of not angering the legacy parents in the hopes that they’ll continue to donate, and a consolation prize for all the highly qualified students who applied but weren’t accepted. Students need to understand this as such, need to move on with their lives, make their choice and put down a deposit, and then just forget about it, since the odds of getting in off the wait list are miniscule at the highly selective schools.
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If I were running an admissions office, I would hand out enough acceptances to fill 95% of the class at the expected yield, and use the waitlist to fill in the rest.
If my yield estimate was spot on, I would need enough wait-list slots to fill the last 5% of the class. If yield was higher than expected, I wouldn’t touch the wait-list, and if yield was lower than expected, I would need to dig further into the wait-list.
Using this approach, the right number of wait list slots varies greatly according to yield. For simplicity assume colleges A and B both want 1000 students per year.
College A expects an RD yield of 75%. They filled about 40% of their class early, and therefore offer 550/0.75 = 733 admission offers during RD to target getting to 950 students (95%) by 5/1. But suppose RD yield is only 70%, meaning that they only got 400 + 733 *0.7 = 913 students committed by 5/1. Assuming the yield on the waitlist is the same, they would need a waitlist of (600 - 513 ) / 0.7 = 125 students to be pretty safe in being able to fill the rest of their class.
College B on the other hand expects an RD yield of 20%. They also filled 40% of their class early, but now need to send out 550/0.2 = 2750 admission offers during RD to target getting to 950 students by 5/1. But if their RD yield is instead 15%, they only got to 400 + 2750 * 0.15 = 813 students by 5/1. So they need a waitlist size of (1000 - 813) / 0.15 = 1247, or about 10x the size of College A’s waitlist, to be safe in being able to fill their class.
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There is nothing unethical about WLs regardless of size. They have always existed solely for the school’s benefit, not applicants. Anyone who doesn’t understand this or the odds of coming off one hasn’t been paying attention. Size is not the issue—accepting that a WL decision means moving on with plan B is.
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I agree that it’s a soft rejection for legacies and donors. No need to make them/their families mad.
But for the other students, it’s the yield that’s driving it. If the college misses tits yield, it has a large enough pool of students to go to who are qualified for admission and MIGHT meet whatever criteria the college was missing that caused it to go to the WL.
If I recall correctly based on something I recently read here, a great school like Columbia had a yield in the 60s% (excuse me, please, if I am wrong). But, assuming that yield percentage is in the ballpark, there is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty for a school like Columbia. Having a large WL pool of qualified students DOES help the college.
And, yes, I totally agree: a WLs should cause the student to look elsewhere.
Hold on there. We on CC sometimes forget that we have a distorted view as to how much the average person knows, or can reasonably expected to know, about how college admissions works.
A reasonable person might mistakenly think that a college would not string out students unnecessarily during what is a stressful time in their lives. Little do they know.
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Based on what I’ve heard from a couple of former AOs, that’s exactly how it works at most schools.
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It is likely that most colleges estimate an individual yield for each admit, since they know that the top admits will have more and more attractive other choices → lower yield, while admits at the margin will have fewer and less attractive other choices → higher yield. Merit scholarships or preferentially packaged financial aid, if offered, can be used to influence estimated individual yield for the students who are awarded them.
Yield of admits off of waitlists may also be affected by the following factors:
- Those admitted from the waitlist are at the margin of admission → higher yield.
- Those admitted from the waitlist may have already moved on and committed to other colleges → lower yield.
Colleges that start admitting off of waitlists before May 1 are probably doing the following:
- Tracking running yield before May 1 to estimate whether they will fall short of the desired class size when offers expire on that date.
- If they project a shortfall, then they may be trying to reduce effect #2 above by admitting from the waitlist before May 1.
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Based on reading waitlist threads, it sounds as if there is not a lot, if any, movement. This seems to be a strange result given applications are record high again. Or did the AOs just do a good job picking students they knew would attend??
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Yes, it is. But the waitlist doesn’t seem to follow the same math.
A school that has averaged fewer than 120 waitlist admits over the last seven years, never more than 200, has no valid need to be offering 6,750 waitlist slots, IMO (yes, looking at you, Cornell).
Stanford is the one school that, iirc, states that they size the waitlist to meet their admission needs, not to make students feel better about not being rejected. 42,500 students were’t admitted. Only 850 offered waitlist slots last year. And 259 were admitted.
Yes, anyone looking at a few years of CDS forms, or actively following CC, know the odds. Unfortunately, reading posts on r/A2C, it’s clear that many students think their waitlist chances are quite good, even at the most elite schools.
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A couple of points - first of all, I don’t think in the 70s, 80s, 90s or even 00s, colleges were putting 8000 kids on the waitlist. I think that is a very recent phenomenon. All you have to do I ask around or remember how many people you have known who were waitlisted in the past at one school and now everybody a kid knows is waitlisted by at least one school if not 2-6 schools.
Second - while I wouldn’t say it is unethical, I would say if colleges didn’t think what they were doing was at least a little shady, they would freely advertise number of waitlist offers, number of waitlist offers accepted and number still holding on to those offers by May 1st. But they don’t, most schools closely hide that data. The only school I saw that put it out there was Yale. 1000 applicants waitlisted. Which clearly shows they waitlisted a lot of students but they also capped that number at 1000, out of over 50,000 applicants and I don’t recall how many accepted.
But all that being said, I agree that it is in many ways a soft rejection. But it would still be a better soft rejection if the applicant knew how big that soft rejection was. Were they one of 10,000 waitlisted? One of 100? One of 1000? Out of 50,000-70,000 applicants with 1200-1400 accepted, I would feel pretty good about being 1 of 100 or 1 of 1,000, not so sure about 1 of 10,000. 
. Also if an applicant knew they were one out of 10,000 or 1,000 it would help them to close that door really quickly, but if they were 1 out of 100 then it might be ok to hang on to a little hope even after committing to a different school and hopefully trying to fall in love with that school. Without knowing where they are, many applicants tend to hang on hoping for an acceptance. After all, these waitlists are usually to an applicant’s top choice, not their safety or some throw away application. So the way it is done doesn’t make it easy for the students to just move on. I think they try, but I think many are secretly hoping that they will be the one to get the call or the 10 or the 50 to get the call - because you have no idea from school to school, how many will get the call and how many are on the list.
But 259 out of 850 at Stanford? Those are good odds
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Agreed. I was responding to @hebegebe’s point about making offers to 95% of the predicted yield. The waitlist sizes are no doubt crazy at a lot of colleges.
Because they think a waitlist spot means “they almost made it”, and will make it as soon as someone else gives up their spot. They don’t realize there are a thousand others just like them waiting for that spot.
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Isn’t that directly related to the massive increase in applications to the “top schools”?
Also, what purpose is served in giving a “soft rejection” to anyone except legacies, donors, and children of faculty? By that reasoning, anyone applying should get put on the WL? I am just not sure that any of these schools owe anything to WLd students to “let them down gently.”
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Source please.