CWRU gets detailed treatment in today’s Washington Post story on wait lists.
The relevant part:
Case Western Reserve, a private university in Cleveland ranked 37th nationally, keeps an eye every year on the flow of students to higher-ranked private schools such as Northwestern, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon and Emory, as well as public universities such as Ohio State, Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech and the University of California at Berkeley. Those schools sometimes lure strong candidates away from Case Western.
“What happens there matters to us,” said Rick Bischoff, Case Western’s vice president for enrollment.
To ensure that the university hits its freshman enrollment target of 1,250, Case Western keeps one of the deepest wait lists in the country and uses it aggressively. The school invited more than 9,000 applicants to its wait list last year, and wound up with 5,119 names. Ultimately, it offered admission to 518 of those students. Not all accepted, but the school met its enrollment goal.
Bischoff said that it is vital not to admit too many students through regular admission. In 2012, the university overshot its enrollment target by 30 percent, leaving the school to scramble to find beds for hundreds of unexpected arrivals and to schedule more courses. “That’s bad,” Bischoff said.
Now, Case Western doles out regular-admission offers conservatively and plans on filling about 10 percent of its class through the wait list. Bischoff said that he starts making offers from the list in late April.
“We love our wait-list kids,” Bischoff said, noting that their academic profile is as strong or stronger than the overall entering class. “It’s not that these are sub-par students. These are terrific, terrific kids.”
When the school pulls from the wait list, he said, “we’re making some kids’ dreams come true.”