You are not likely to hear from anyone who “heard back”.
While it is possible some students will get in off the waitlist, so few, and of those how many are going to be on this thread ?
I can say my S got waitlisted by BU ENG, but since he was accepted to better/higher ranked engineering schools, did not give it a 2nd thought. Not sure if he even asked to be kept on the list. Hopefully by now the OP has made a deposit at his best choice, waitlists are a long shot at most schools.
And this year the acceptance rate was 29%
For all of you waiting to hear back for the waitlist, I wouldn’t hold my breath of getting it before June. Usually, schools that you hear back from within a week of the May 1st deadline will be rejections cause they don’t have the space to admit waitlisted students, so they just mass-reject everyone. Hearing back later can be a good thing, since it means that they’re actually going through our applications again to admit students. I’m expecting BU’s acceptance rate this year to be around 32% after all is said and done with the waitlist.
@blevine
There are quite a few other threads with reports of kids being taken off wl, so not out of the question that you could hear the same from BU
Thank you for encouraging words, we are keeping our hopes up. It’s worth the wait…
I heard back today. Rejected, but ultimately 100% happy with where I am ending up for the next 4 years. Good luck to the rest of you!
@ Kaitlynjoy what college were you applying to?
@BladeHunter: did you get in?
does anyone have BU yield for the class of 2020? how may were accepted from the waitlist?
@biobot Nope, they mass-rejected everyone off their waitlist this year. Seems like they had enough students and the class was full. (at least, that’s what I got from their email).
@BladeHunter, that really sucks. especially when they say that waitlisted students meet the admission requirements and they just don’t have space for everyone. They obviously offer admissions to more people than they have room for. I know 5 kids from my community who were accepted to COE but chose to go elsewhere and a few others accepted to Sargent and CAS of the 10+ kids only 2 are going and I live in a very small town! it seems unfair that they were admitted and chose not to go and I would give anything to be there and I can’t. I wish we could swap admission offers within a community.
Sry I had to ramble, very disappointed. The application process starts all over again… for a transfer
@biobot 57,000 applications, 17,000 accepted, 3500 enrolled. BU and all admission offices accept far more applicants than the class size because they know that only about 20% will actually enroll.
@biobot Don’t worry about rambling, I’m not exactly very happy to hear that they mass-rejected everyone either. Like @TomSrOfBoston said, they usually accept more than they expect to enroll because they have a fairly low yield rate (~20%). Also, think of it like this. If everyone were allowed to give their acceptances away to someone else who wanted to enroll, BU would have more students than the can house. I think there was actually a year where too many students accepted their offers (way over what BU had expected), and they had to house the extra freshmen in hotels near the campus (which costed a fortune).
From personal experience, about 9 kids from my school got accepted but only 1 decided to accept the offer (and he’s doing a gap year as well). I was the only one to be waitlisted. Everyone else either got flat out rejected or was offered a guaranteed-transfer. However, there are other schools that can give you a similar experience to BU as well if that’s what you’re looking for (specifically UMass Amherst). They’re both in the same state, both are considered large schools, both D1, and if you join the honors program at UMass, you aren’t really giving anything up academic wise from going there instead of BU. Not to mention that UMass is about 1/3 of the price if you’re in-state (or 2/3 if you’re OOS). This is actually the reason why I chose to go to UMass after being waitlisted to BU.
In the end, what I’m trying to say is that there are plenty of colleges out there that can be a very good fit for you and not to get too disappointed that you weren’t accepted. Just out of curiosity though, where did you end up deciding to go for this year?
@BladeHunter : thank you! I am coming to terms with it 
it still feels unfair that they choose to put kids on waitlist knowing very well that they have offered admission to 80% more kids than they have room for. Congratulations! you will have a great time at Umass Amherst. I am oos and our in-state university is really bad and I didn’t apply for Umass Amherst. I will be making Northeastern my home for the next 4 years.
It is not unfair! If the yield rate is lower than expected the they will accept students off the waitlist, as they have done already. There is no magical formula to determine how many students will choose BU. it is based on past years.
@TomSrOfBoston “If the yield rate is lower than expected then they will accept students off the waitlist, as they have done already”
Are you referening to this year? everyone who wasn’t offered a spot this year from the waitlist was told that no one was offered a spot. Then I heard of a student who got admitted off the waitlist for the school of Business.
Where do you find the real data of how many they accepted off the waitlist and to which school?
Do they tell those who weren’t accepted that no one was picked to avoid answering the questions about why one was picked over the other when they claim not to have a ranked waitlist? or do they do it spare the feelings of the rejects… I am new to this game and am very confused.
BU has no obligation to explain its admissions decisions to anyone. The stats will be in the Common Data Set which will be published next March online.
Also, people have been known to lie here on CC in reporting their offers. Don’t believe everything you hear.
you are right about not believing everything on CC, you are one of the few people on who reply on Boston area colleges who seems to have your hand on the pulse of what is going on internally. I was hoping you could share your insight as to how many got off the waitlist for class of 2020.We could wait till march, but it is of no use that far down the road. Most of the ivies and MIT has already released their yield as a part of the notification MIT says we have accepted 23 out of 453 or something like that and they also declare their yield was around 76%. wish BU did the same
@biobot Glad you got a backup plan. Northeastern is a fine school and is climbing the ranks as of late, it’s pretty prestigious as is. Only 1 person from my school out of the 30 who applied was accepted. I’m sure you’ll be able to thrive there.
As for what you were referring about before with the BU waitlist, you must have received the rejection e-mail as well. The line “Unfortunately, all openings in the Class of 2020 have been filled, and we are unable to offer you admission to Boston University,” seems kind of self explanatory. If they actually took people off the waitlist, the emails (even rejections) are usually a bit less “decorated” and personalized towards the person. But in this case, the email looks like any mass email that BU would send. Also, there’s no way that they would be able to go through all the waitlist applications that quick, considering the waitlist must have had at least 2,000-3,000 students.
For the business school you were talking about, were you referring to Questrom? Because that’s actually the school within BU that I applied to. Like @TomSrOfBoston said, people could (and probably have) lied about their offers here on CC. I actually kept in contact with my admissions counselor up until the time I was eventually rejected, and even he said that BU was reaching what their expected yield should be this year. Personally, I took that as a “we’re probably not accepting people off our waitlist this year”. But I could be wrong, maybe that person you were talking about was the only person to be accepted off the waitlist this year. There have been years where there were only 3-4 people accepted off it.
@BladeHunter: Yes, NU is climbing in ranks, I am sure I will make best use the opportunities there. When I was applying to universities, I was enthralled by the idea of co-op and 75% of the schools I applied to offered co-op. I was accepted to all of them, I was accepted to only 1 of the 2 traditional schools which offered internship as opposed to co-op. After the dust of the whole admission process has settled and I am thinking more deeply on my career goal and objectives I feel I would be better off in a research-based university with an option of internship during my final year as opposed to taking every other semester off for co-op. A little too late for this to dawn on me, but that’s why BU was such a good fit for me.
As far as the person who got accepted off the waitlist, I heard about it through a college counselor, not on CC. He said it was for a major in business but did not mention the Questrom.