All the UC’s that have CS programs. It’s just nuts this year.
Hopefully one of the LA schools will come through. Please let us know!
I SO feel for you. I’m not sure why, but waitlists were hard on my daughter too. I guess with rejections she could get upset but move on. Waitlists gave her stress and uncertainty. There were a couple of schools where she was waitlisted and then offered a spot and in both cases she had moved on by then. It’s hard to describe but I think waitlists made her feel a little bitter towards the school.
We are all crossing our fingers that something amazing happens for your daughter. It will all work out but I know that’s not comforting when you feel they have put so much time and energy in and they aren’t getting the results expected. Like others said she obviously is a great candidate and has done it right since she’s getting waitlists and not rejections. Please keep us updated.
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Sorry for you and your daughter. I don’t recall your home state - and if your state flagship is affordable. Having high financial need, as indicated in one of your earlier posts, must have played a role at several of the schools. Your daughter sounds like a qualified candidate and made the academic cut. Waitlists are tough when combined with need too.
Hoping a true need blind school or a school offering merit/FA comes through for your daughter this next round. Hang in there.
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b/c waitlists are the worst possible outcome. No joy of a yes, no grieve and get on with it of a ‘no’. Instead it’s ‘you are 2nd choice, so wait over there while we see how many of our 1st choices choose us’.
In principle, waitlists can be a good thing- but too many colleges use them as polite ‘no’ or to not have to make hard calls. When you haven’t taken more than 50 people from a waitlist ever, and you offer 2K applicants spots on the waitlist for an 800 person class that’s just making your own life easier at somebody else’s expense.
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How do you know if a school has overenrolled a class?
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I’ve heard of a few LACs that overenrolled last year via word of mouth (a good way to confirm is by googling - largest class ever at xyz). I also heard Pitt and Purdue overenrolled last year from folks on CC. If you google a school and the term “housing shortage” that could bring up some places where over enrollment is an issue.
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Schools generally release their admissions statistics but you’ll be looking at what happened last year.
A school that overenrolled last year, may accept fewer this year to better manage their yield and have more on the wait list. IMO, it’s hard to predict.
Waitlists are indeed frustrating. Sorry she is dealing with that.
There will be a knock-on effect for many very selective schools for a couple more years, due to under-enrollment/gap year/deferrals, followed by over-enrollment.
It sounds like your daughter sent out many applications. So did many other kids. Especially kids who are applying to a lot of reachy schools. Yield management is critical to a lot of top colleges that aren’t called HYPSM or WASP. A kid can only go to one college, but kids are increasingly sending 20+ apps. (High school guidance counselors must stop allowing this, but that’s a different topic.) Colleges must have lengthy waitlists to manage yield.
Anyway, you said she has no acceptances, but she has a safety. I’m confused by that, but as long as she likes her safety and it’s affordable, then any acceptances she does get are icing on the cake. She is going to college, regardless!
For now, assume waitlists are a long shot, and don’t waste energy hoping they come through. She should certainly send a LOCI to her top choice to say she will attend if accepted (if that is true), and update with anything notable. Then she should move on and wait to see if she gets in anywhere else. She can dig in deeper to the schools she has been accepted to and find things to get excited about.
At the beginning of May, NACAC will publish a list of colleges that still have space for freshmen. Often, there are some very good colleges on the list, but for whatever reason, their yield didn’t pan out. That’s an excellent place to find some great colleges.
A general note for other readers of this thread about the concerning trend of kids applying to more and more schools, hoping some will work out. Every additional application to a very selective school creates more work, and the possibility of diluting the strength of other carefully thought out applications. It is really difficult to produce great applications for many colleges. Students wrongly assume that if they buy more tickets, they improve their chances of winning. The issue is that holistic college admissions aren’t based on chance.
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Middlebury is one of the schools that overenrolled (by 300) last year. My D was on 2 WLs last year where no one was made an offer.
I feel your pain. Add me to the list of parents of kids who got rejected or waitlisted from schools that were less exclusive than at least one that accepted them. The good news is she has one acceptance in her pocket.
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Agreed. I think they put so many kids on the WL because objectively these kids more than qualify to attend the school using measurable criteria like grades, scores, rank, etc. To reject is to say these elements don’t matter to their admissions process, which they are NOT willing to do. The colleges want their cake and to eat it to. They want to boast of high scores, grades, etc, but also apply their black box “wholistic” criteria for who does or doesn’t “fit” into the class they are creating. They judge our kids based on subjective criteria they choose, and cast judgement when increasingly more of these schools can’t be bothered to even get to know our kids through interviews or supplemental essays. It is incredibly toxic and damaging to kids. And I say this as a parent whose kid is having better luck than the OP’s daughter.
I’m not sure how we make it stop. But the current practices are unsustainable.
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I couldn’t disagree with you more about this last part. Applying to more colleges is the only rational strategy to deal with this, especially when the extra work to apply is minimal because of the common app and lack of supplemental essays. If the criteria colleges are using to select students who otherwise qualify is unknown, you don’t have a choice. Your comment suggests that the OP’s daughter is at fault. Had she spent more time wooing the school of her choice and polishing her application maybe she would be in somewhere - and that’s not true. She could just as easily gotten into all of the WL schools as none. How else do you explain a kid who gets into a Williams or Amherst, the most selective of the LACs, but is rejected or WL from a Bates? And then of course you add in yield protection, and schools that are not need blind, and you create the perfect toxic soup. And look how many LACs don’t interview or ask for supplementals? The fact is that when schools make final selections based on things like “we need another chess player” or “oboist” , there is nothing a kid can do to better prepare her application. So she has no choice but to place as many likely bets that she can, hoping she matches someone ‘s magic formula for acceptance that year.
I totally agree that when kids apply to many schools it creates more uncertainty for all. But applying to so many is a rational response to a broken system. Don’t blame families for doing what they need to do. Blame the colleges that broke it for them.
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@Lindagaf. It was the string of waitlists all in one day—the “interesting day” of watching her open one after the other after the other of waitlist decisions from a range of schools all at once. No acceptances that day. No rejections that day (or at all so far). I mentioned that the acceptance to the safety had come a few weeks prior.
We are not holding out hope for any of the waitlists. She hasn’t even decided whether to stay on any of them or not.
Regarding the number of applications, yes, it does seem crazy. But it is easier to say they should be limited/guidance counselors should not allow it, etc., when you have a range of options that would be affordable for your family. But when almost every school that guarantees to meet need is a “reach for everybody,” it makes sense to apply to a lot. My daughter didn’t apply to 20 schools, but now I wonder if she should have.
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Students do have a choice, they can choose to apply to target and safety schools that they would be happy to attend and/or apply to rack and stack (non-holistic) schools. Most four year colleges accept most applicants…this fact seems to get lost often in these discussions. IMO students and families (not saying this is the case for OP) are as much to ‘blame’ as colleges.
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You’re reading way too much into my comment. As I stated, she probably didn’t get accepted due to reasons beyond her control that she will never know about. My final comments were, as stated, directed to CC users in general.
@Cascadiaparent , just realized I was confusing this post with another. So I will put part of that here, for context, because it’s relevant to this discussion.
“In all likelihood, you didn’t get in due to the college’s institutional needs. These are factors that are totally beyond your control:
- Financial needs
- Needing to admit more URM students, or first generation to college, or low Socioeconomic status students.
- Needing to admit an oboe player, or an extra recruited athlete, or the child of a large donor, or the child of a professor….
- Needing to admit more students from geographically diverse states. Maybe this year, the kids from Arkansas and Missouri got the spot that might have been yours.”
It’s a fact that kids are applying to more and more colleges. We are going to see a lot of kids in the coming weeks who will wonder why they didn’t get in. For some of them, it will be entirely possible that they simply didn’t present the best app they could have, perhaps because they applied to too many schools.
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@BirdintheHand I hope she can get excited about her safety that she has been accepted to.
Re the number of applications, my D22 only applied to 5 safeties. One school I thought might be a target, but it had >50% acceptance so I wasn’t surprised she got in there. No reaches. She applied EA to 4 of them and got in them all. One of the schools doesn’t do EA only ED and RD, so she did RD there. I guess that is to manage their yield better? I got the feeling that they might’ve had a lot of EA applicants who were accepted but turned them down in the past. Not sure.
Anyway, best of luck to @BirdintheHand’s D and all others on waiting lists. 
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I agree.
But this is wrong. There are so many applicants who all could fill the ranks. Popular colleges have to sift through them somehow. They can’t accept everyone who reaches X bar because they don’t have room for them all. So yes, they figure out what fits them best given their needs from those oodles of applicants.
It’s a lot like a student getting accepted to 20 colleges, but they can only go to one. That student is then figuring out their best fit even though all 20 passed their X bar to be applied to in the first place.
Hiring managers do the same with all the applicants they receive.
Who fits best? There many be many who qualify based upon the basics, but only one is needed to fill the position.
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I have no idea how many colleges this student applied to, and I agree that waitlists are the pits. My own kid was waitlisted at three colleges back in the day. She applied to twelve. In retrospect, she could have applied to fewer and she still would have had great choices. She did not nail her supplements to a couple of the tippy tops she applied to and with hindsight, realizes she should have concentrated more on doing a great job with those.
The OP stated that her child applied to colleges ranging from #1 to #40, and is still waiting on T20 colleges. There is no question that those apps required a LOT of work, because apps for most top schools absolutely require supplemental essays, and those essays need to be great. Applying to more top colleges is not the ONLY rational strategy.
Applying to a selection of colleges, ranging from safeties to reaches, is a critical strategy, not just applying to more of them. That list of colleges should be based on affordability and be within the realm of possibility of getting in, based on stats and other factors, most of which can be found in a college’s Common Data. When a top college could fill every seat ten times over, it is imperative that the student nails the supplements. Doing that is a more effective strategy than applying to more and more colleges.
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The college admissions version of blaming he victim.
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