Infographic: See How Many Students Were Admitted off Select Waitlists Last Year

Wondering how many students were admitted off waitlists last year? Check out some stats from the 2019-2020 admissions cycle. https://insights.collegeconfidential.com/how-many-students-admitted-off-waitlists

Wondering how COVID-19 will change these numbers this year.

Let’s hope for the best…

It’s a drastically different admission cycle this year. More and more families are favoring gap year or colleges within driving distance. You’ll see a lot of activity on waitlists.

This clearly is a different set of circumstances. Dartmouth has already gone to their waitlist well before May 1st, and last year they took no one off of it.

While I agree that this year is bound to be unusual, every year tends to vary at each school. So even without a pandemic, it’s not unusual to see a pattern like 50, 3, 0, 62. Often, if there was 0, the school ended up oversubscribed and will deliberately under admit the next year with a plan to make use of the WL to get exactly the number of students they want, but no more. It’s about enrolling exactly the number of students they want, and no more.

This info is very helpful for setting expectations.

Hello: that link goes to an article referring to “infographics below,” but I’m not seeing any? Thank you.

ADDENDUM: I am finding individual school’s info via google by adding CDS to search by school name. Thanks!

Out of curiosity, where have you seen that Dartmouth has taken people off of the waitlist? I haven’t seen anything online.

Clearly some of those colleges are using waitlists as a “soft no”. Does UM really expect to have anywhere near 12K extra spots?

@burner267 I know this question was not directed to me, but I’ve seen on CC that Dartmouth has gone to the waitlist but its all hearsay.

Yeah, it’d be nice to get a source before I drive myself crazy

Some of the numbers are eye-opening:

Georgia Tech admitted 632 off of the waitlist

Vanderbilt admitted 453 off the waitlist

College of William & Mary admitted 186

UNC 156

Cornell 147

Carnegie Mellon Univ. 140

Brown 127

Middlebury 111

Notre Dame admitted 108

UPenn 101

Michigan–huge Univ. of Michigan–admitted only 89 from their waitlist

Tufts 84

Northwestern 55

Swarthmore 27

Williams College 25

Stanford admitted 8 from waitlist

Univ. of Virginia just 8 admitted from waitlist

CalTech admitted 5

Dartmouth College zero (0)

Seems to vary widely from school to school even in the same general demographic or size. And probably varies year to year. It’s really a crapshoot. I got off a wait list at a T10 LAC. To this day I have no idea why. Did they really need another white girl from MA from an ok prep school who needed some financial and could do nothing special, but perhaps act ( read:well rounded)? Purely a miracle some have said.

Did you accept and attend? @Charlie2772

I’m on 2 waitlists this year and would accept either offer…UPenn and Harvard and really hoping for the best! And the earlier news comes the better but that’s obvious

@optimisticsenior You bet I did! One of the best things that I ever happened to me :slight_smile: