<p>I was just wondering after going through the decisions thread. It seemed everyone got accepted or rejected but barely any waitlisted. Do they expect not to take many people off the waitlist this year?</p>
<p>I doubt it, I guess (and it is a guess) that the waitlist this year will be similar to its historic averages, rather than the huge waitlist of last years class. MIT has often (but not always) taken tens of students off of the waitlist, so it seems unnecessarily cruel to waitlist thousands given those numbers. The stats will be out soon, but I do not expect this years waitlist to be unnaturally small.</p>
<p>PS: Last year’s class had a huge waitlist as there were substantial changes at other competing institutions (eg doing away with Early Decision) which meant that MIT’s historic projections of yield were expected to be much less accurate than normal.</p>
<p>I would not advise taking CC’s decisions thread as a representative sample of the applicant pool, for this purpose or ever.</p>
<p>Mollieb is invariably right, but here she is hugely right. CC is a wildly disproportionate slice of the applicant pool, and what gets discussed here is even parts “inside baseball” and complete malarkey</p>
<p>Why is this surprising? Numbers-wise, it’s “hardest” to get waitlisted - obviously, more people are accepted than waitlisted, as no situation would ever arise where an entire class would have to be replaced with waitlistees, and the number of rejections is far greater.</p>
<p>Just to throw out some numbers, the waitlist rate this year was 2.9% - that amounts to 454 students.</p>