<p>Why don't they just WL everyone (wustl?) and accept those who stay on and have a 100% yield... I don't even get why they care..</p>
<p>Intuition tells me it’s just a bit more complex than that.</p>
<p>They could call it “late decision”. The final safety school.</p>
<p>I’ve wondered about the same thing. I think that for other reasons next year will see a lot more ED and WL admissions.</p>
<p>Accepting those who choose to remain on the waitlist does not guarantee 100% yield – some people get off multiple waitlists.</p>
<p>More ED admissions = harder to accept more qualified applicants during RD cycle.</p>
<p>Do you realize that the solution you just described is, in practice, exactly the way admissions are right now? They would just be calling it by a different name.</p>
<p>Right now, Washington University in St. Louis accepts a certain amount of people. Some decide to go there, others decide they would not like to, and WUSTL packages the ones who do accept with financial aid and they start their school year.</p>
<p>With your proposed plan, WUSTL would be doing the same thing. They would have a certain amount of people they want to accept, they put them all on a waitlist, which means essentially they really have no waitlist, because all of those students could potentially get in, they just don’t know if. The students who decide to stay on the waitlist are, in the current model, the ones who accept the admissions offers, whereas the students who leave are the ones who decline. The only difference is by calling it something different, the university is able to evade the system and deceive people about its actual yield.</p>
<p>It’s essentially the same thing, except WUSTL loses out big time. First of all, students who are “waitlisted” will believe that they will not be notified of their place until after May 1, and a large proportion of them may assume that they won’t get into the school, so they will put their deposits in somewhere else and come off the waitlist. Even those students who do stay on the “waitlist” may not be willing to forfeit their deposits to other schools once WUSTL comes back and tells them that they are indeed in, or there may be other reasons why they decide not to go (financial, they’ve already settled with the idea of going to their other school, they’ve appealed and were awarded more funding there, etc.)</p>
<p>Furthermore, this would cause a logistical nightmare. WUSTL needs to know by May 1 (like most other schools) what their freshman class is going to look like, at least roughly, in order to plan resources for the next year. If they artificially extend their process by doing something like this, they also mess up their budgeting and planning.</p>