I am from NC and have been waitlisted. Harvard is my top choice. Who else has been waitlisted? Is there a chance that Harvard will take people from the waitlist this year?
Last year I believe 0 were admitted from the waitlist. It is good to avoid hoping too much, unfortunately. PM’ed you
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Where did you read that?
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Harvard doesn’t release WL info on the CDS. You never know what they’ll do with that. Best to move on and forget about Harvard. WL is a rejection that they think hurts your feelings less.
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I have no insight if they will take from the waitlist this time. Historically, any waitlist movement has occurred in waves, or at least it did when I went through the process. The first wave occurred a couple of weeks after the commitment date and then every few weeks after until the class was full and everyone remaining was released. The only notifications that went out during the waves were either accepts or rejects. No news meant you remained on the waitlist until told otherwise.
It will be interesting to see what happens this year. There’s a huge bulge of extra students going through, since the freshman class had about 15% extra, and every class above it also had more students than had been accepted into it, since so many students took a year off during Covid and hence dropped back a year. The number of students on campus won’t be back to normal until Sept 2025. But since freshmen are housed in the Yard, they should be able to take a full class. I wonder, however, whether they will want a little less gridlock in housing, and hence not go much to the wait list for the next few years.
Not all freshmen are in the yard 
Tell me about it! But I was under the impression that in normal years, they try to house all the freshmen in the yard, or as close to it as possible. This year they overflowed the freshmen even into off-campus apartment buildings which were architecturally designed for maximum privacy, thus providing absolutely no dorm-based social life for those who were assigned there. And with this huge bulge being digested through, I suspect that they will try to limit the class of '26 by not going to the wait list as much as they did in pre-pandemic times. They have to consider how many people they can fit in the upper class houses, too. I have no idea how they are going to manage it for next year, what with the classes of '23, '24, and '25 all larger than they were supposed to have been.
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Hurlbut, Pennypacker and another one I think, are on Prescott Street off Harvard St., and have always been freshman dorms.
heard someone got off waitlist?
In normal years, 4 (Apley, Greenough, Hurlbut, and Pennypacker) of the 17 first-year dorms are outside the Yard.
Wait what? Are you saying someone got off the waitlist?
yes asking for it, if someone has got off waitlist
If one averages the class sizes of '23 (1666), '24 (1420), and '25 (1965), one gets a mean class size of 1684. The nominal enrollment target, traditionally, has been 1665 per class. So, at the current time, these three classes together have about 57 extra members, which is not really a big problem per se. Yields were a bit stronger than expected for '24 and '25, thus the extra 56 students ('23 was only one student more than the nominal target.)
This year’s covid-crunch for first year space is eventually going to migrate to the houses, but will not have a big effect until the class of '24 (a small class) is graduated and out the door, and the class of '25 (a big class) are seniors. When they are, instead of an extra 57 across the houses, which is almost in the noise, there will be approximately 300 more than the norm to accommodate in the houses. Three hundred students is almost having an extra house for one year.
Many students have to be located into swing spaces anyway because of the house renovation program, but the overall situation will not get really challenging until this year’s first years are seniors.
Fortunately, Harvard has plenty of time to figure all of this out.
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This seems rather unlikely to be true given that the reply deadline for admitted students is still four days away.
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So will they go to the waitlist this year?
Who? When? And, from where?
@tamenund Do you think it’s likely they use the waitlist this year, considering the excessive number of students in class of 2025?
The problem is that not only incoming freshmen took a year off during Covid. The upperclassmen did, too. So a chunk of '21 joined '22, '22 to '23, '23 to '24, in addition to the more than 15% of '24 that joined '25. That means that '23 and '24 may be larger than they would have been, too. Does anyone know what the numbers are now in '23 and '24? I doubt that Harvard is planning on cannibalizing traditional freshman housing for the swing housing needed for the upperclassman bulge, but I suspect that they would welcome a slightly smaller '26, based upon not filling every seat from the wait list. There are issues with every facet of student life being overcrowded - the health service, classes (my kid was told right up until the last minute that they would get a seat in a class they needed, no problem, and then was told at registration, “Sorry, full up. Try again next year.”
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It is impossible to know at this point.
Many schools purposely create waitlist pools for post-deadline selection flexibility. Harvard does not do this.
If the projected number—or more—of admitted students accept offers, there is little reason for Harvard to go the waitlist unless it is unexpectedly missing a desirable skill set.