Waitlists, like ED, are primarily for colleges’ own benefits, but I don’t think they’re unethical. Many, certainly not all, applicants like to be offered spots on the waitlists, rather than outright rejections, even though they understand their chances are remote. If not, they can just turn down the offers. Just as admission is unpredictable, and becoming more unpredictable, on an individual basis, acceptance of a college’s admission offer is also unpredictable, and becoming more unpredictable, on an individual basis. If a larger than expected proportion of students that the college was counting on to fill a particular need, it wants to be able to replace them with students that can fill that need on its waitlist, not any student on the same waitlist.
I dislike how outsized the WLs are. My DD has never received a WL (accepted everywhere, including top schools, for both undergrad and grad), so it’s not personal. I think they should be proportional to the needs of the school, which many are not, and most families do not understand that so hold out false hope. There is no legitimate reason for the size of some waitlists. They are being used for false signaling reasons, imo. You don’t have to agree with me.
Even though Stanford appears to have a “reasonable” number of candidates on its WL, isn’t that also tied to yield? My understanding is that, by far, Stanford has the highest yield of any of the “tippy top” schools. Since their projected yield, y-o-y, is so high, Stanford doesn’t need such a large WL.
Waitlist are a function of ability to correctly predict the yield, not the absolute level of yield.
Agreed that some WL are too long but some do have to be longer. I bet Stanford’s can be smaller because they know when they call someone, they are very very likely to come. For other schools, their yield off of a WL could be pretty low. They might have to reach out to 10 or 20 kids to get a yes. Lots of kids move on and decide to go with where they deposited. It’s hard to pivot.
Great thread; thanks for starting this discussion. I have a few qualms with these massive WLs also…
Take Boston College, for instance: Pulled in over 50% of its incoming class via ED1 and ED2 and still received more RD applications than ever before. They offered more kids places on the WL than they are taking for their ENTIRE first year class. They had over 47,000 applications overall for a class size of 2300. When half was filled by ED, that knocks the number of open seats they’ll have left to fill by RD to somewhere around 1070.
But they put 4500 on the WL.
That’s insane.
If you want to go to BC, you have to apply ED. The chances of getting in RD are ridiculous. There’s no way on earth they need to offer 4500 WL spots (many aren’t taken, I know…but the point is that rather than say a definitive NO, they’d rather take the easy way out and soften the blow by putting a kid on the WL).
(And, yes, my kid is one of those. We were baffled–1570SAT, 3.8UW, 8 APs, 8 Honors classes, deep dives into theatre, community service, you name it, visited campus, gave them the love, made connection with his regional AO…then WL. His 4th WL, for the record. It’s just so defeating when a kid does all the right things for 4 years of h.s. and then gets plunked on WLs because he didn’t apply ED (counselor only mentioned it’s imperative to apply ED2 for BC after the fact…and we were furious that he never mentioned it before because we would have likely used that ED2 magic bullet–if not at BC, then somewhere…but I digress).
So, yeah, gigantic WLs aren’t the most efficient way to handle things. There’s no way BC couldn’t fill those 1070 remaining seats out of the 36000 RD apps they had (and they probably put some ED apps on WL, too).
Didn’t apply to @itsgettingreal21 above, and doesn’t apply to me either as my kids also had outstanding outcomes. Some of us are just against what we consider to be poor behavior by colleges.
I don’t blame a place like Case Western, which has overall yield in the teens, from having a large waitlist. But as pointed out, there is no reason whatsoever for a place like Cornell to have a huge waitlist when it never goes very deep into it.
What would be more transparent, as noted above somewhere, would be for schools to give info on WL eventual acceptance rates when they offer a WL spot. Maybe they aren’t up front about that because they think the students then will not accept their spot on the list?
You don’t have to apply to BC ED if you’re not sure it’s your first choice school. D21 (and lots of others) got in RD last year. I do think that, if you’re from Boston, it’s more helpful to go ED if it’s your first choice. I’m sure they get a lot of kids applying from the local area. Seems like a lot of very high stats kids this year and last year were WL at schools where they felt they should have gotten in but no school is a gimme. Have to plan for not getting in.
And kids weren’t applying to 75 schools either.
Waitlists have a double yield issue. Not everyone offered a place on the list accepts it. Usually only half or less do. Then there is the yield when applicants on the waitlist are accepted. I haven’t seen any data on it but I’d assume it’s lower than the regular admission yield rate.
Still the size of some waitlist offers is huge.
I haven’t heard of anybody applying to 75 schools… yet. However, most on CC swear that the average college applications is 5.4 and is not vastly different than 20 years ago, so actually that shouldn’t be the issue. Regardless, that shouldn’t matter. If you typically move 0-10 applicants off your waitlist, there is no good reason to have 10,000 kids on your waitlist. If your male, left handed underwater, piccolo playing fencer from LA decides to not take your offer, nobody is going to notice if you don’t have another one of those on the waitlist and decide to take a female, right handed llama counseling, sousaphone playing, rural kid from North Dakota instead. They don’t have to treat it like an elaborate collection on the waitlist. Because in the end it’s a lot of wasted effort when they pick 0-10 in most cases and 10-50 in better cases, 50-100+ in rare cases.
Needing to use the waitlist is based on whether the predicted yield of regular admits is correct.
However, the needed size of the waitlist is based on the following:
- The worst case regular admit underyield estimate.
- The first waitlist yield (whether waitlisted applicants stay on the waitlist) estimate.
- The second waitlist yield (whether waitlist admits matriculate) estimate.
It can also matter for specific subgroups of applicants (e.g. to particular divisions or majors, or other subgroups of interest), so that the above may need to be considered by subgroup of interest.
On the other hand, it would not be surprising if huge waitlists were mostly composed of “polite rejections” for various reasons other than any possibility of the applicants being admitted. (Similar to many ED or EA deferrals at colleges that rarely reject ED or EA applicants early.)
Also a function of the size of the college overall. At a huge university, a shift in the M/F ratio from year to year will not be noticed in any meaningful way. At a small college, the composition might already be baked-in, so that a shift based on the initial yield cut may need to be balanced out with a robust waitlist which offers TWO bassoon players (m/f) and TWO cellists, TWO (or more) students who seem interested in history or Classics, TWO (or more) dancers, etc.
I don’t find WLs unethical, either - it’s just that people have wildly different expectations about what “being on the waitlist” means, and I agree: being transparent with the data is most useful suggestion.
Some folks will take the time to look up the CDS for the school and see what the rates are going several years back, but most people will not know that that data is available at all, nor how to look for it.
It would be helpful for kids and parents to know the WL rates going back 5 years (or more) when they are offered a WL spot. Temper expectations.
I’m a big fan of Michigan, but most years, their WL size is quite comical. From last year’s CDS (2021-2022):
Offered WL spot: 17,805
Accepted WL spot: 13,063
WL offers: 68
I don’t think it’s unethical, but maybe overly conservative? 
I don’t think waitlists are unethical, but whenever I see a college running a huge waitlist (in comparison to the number they actually make offers to) I assume the vast majority are simply soft rejects.
And I’m ok with that as well. A lot of kids would rather get this soft reject (“you were qualified and we’d have taken you if we had more seats”) vs a straight out reject.
Let’s look at Michigan waitlist for the last 5 years:
Offered WL spot: 17805, 20723, 12527, 14783, 11127
Accepted WL spot: 13063, 9856, 4922, 6000, 4124
Admitted from WL: 68, 1248, 89, 415, 470
You can see how large the variation is.
Actually no, I can’t see the variation, IMO, but I’ve also looked over a much longer period than 5 years. And the 1,248 was 2020, the early stages of the pandemic, when a lot of OOS’ers stayed home, and many in-staters and OOS’ers took gap years.
ETA: And I’m beginning to suspect that 2022-2023 will likely be under 50, since there’s been very little Michigan WL activity. And the WL #'s could maybe go higher, since more applicants on CC were WL’ed this cycle.
Although we all think that life is going on as normal and covid is behind us, I am guessing that one of the hangovers of covid will be big WLs Schools have learned what a difference a few months can make, and whether it’s covid or something else – visa bans, war, natural disasters --, this is a good backup for them.
I am guessing that few schools in 2020 fully imagined as they released decisions that students were going to get sent home at spring break and weren’t going to be returning for graduation that year. Or that fall 2020 would be so different that huge numbers of students stayed home. The unforeseen happened and it has validated this practice.