<p>I know this is a noob question, but please help me out. If someone is "waitlisted," what's the deal? Are they able to reapply?</p>
<p>anyone???</p>
<p>i think if you’re waitlisted then you can try to make some sort of appeal to get the acceptance. you aren’t rejected, they just tell you to wait so they can amke a decision.</p>
<p>Schools let in more students than they expect to matriculate because they know they may not have been the student’s first choice. If a school has 1000 spots and expects 50% of accepted applicants to attend, they’ll accept 2000 students, thereby filling all available seats. If however only 40% attended (800 students,) they’d have 200 open seats. To fill these seats, the school would begin accepting students off the “wait list,” until their seats were filled.</p>
<p>^ Right. “Waitlisted” means “we’d accept you if we had enough room.” Colleges try very hard to figure out what their “yield” will be – that is, the number of accepted students who will matriculate and attend. If they come up short on May 1st (or afterward, through the complex process of students’ enrollment decisions that they call “summer melt”), they may offer admission to students from the waitlist.</p>
<p>If you’re waitlisted, they’ll ask you to contact them (usually with a reply-mail postcard) to confirm that you want to stay on the waitlist. If you make some significant personal improvements over the year, you can send periodic updates to strengthen your case for being the student to admit from the waitlist, if they go to the waitlist. But no, you can’t re-apply in the same admissions cycle. You could take a gap year and apply the following year, or attend somewhere else for a year and apply as a transfer student.</p>
<p>Do they rank students on the waitlist?</p>
<p>Depends on the school.</p>
<p>Do Yale and Harvard rank?</p>