Macalester Waitlist

<p>My apologies if you felt chastised. The length of my post was only meant to correct misinformation that might mislead future readers. The apparent redundancy is due to cross-posting. My first goal as a poster is usually to be helpful and not to remonstrate.</p>

<p>Sorry Descartesz, my post above was directed to finalchild, not you. I appreciate your response.</p>

<p>I’m not in a twist. I just think it’s important to have accurate information available to those who want it. OKthis, I have some experience with this situation at Mac and other schools, so I wanted to share what I know. It’s easy to find fault. College admissions are difficult on all sides. Before you pass judgement on how well Mac admissions is doing its job, I suggest you look at their common data set from the last 5-10 years and see how their world has changed. I think you’ll find applications are way up and the stats of their admitted and matriculated students are up as well. The college is well-run and its reputation is on the rise. Could they do better, yes, and I think you’ll find they will.</p>

<p>OKthis1, I am in a twist, I confess, because your logic twisted me. You still have said nothing that is peculiar to Macalester but you continue to suggest that you have. Too many off the waitlist, except of course for the years when they take none. Ideas for better targeting who will attend? Sure, I’m sure the admissions department would love too hear your ideas for that…which are???</p>

<p>IMHO, if Mac’s yield is lower than you think it should be it is because it draws applicants who apply to Ivies, the non-Ivy Ivies, and almost every ultra-competitive LAC in the Midwest, and in many cases, also the Northeast or West Coast. It’s called overlap.</p>

<p>Better to take more off the waitlist than to over-enroll and end up with a lot of students in forced triples… That is the choice a college has. I think they would LOVE to take the students who most want to go there, but to be fair it is very difficult for a college to figure out who those students actually are.</p>

<p>Wow, a very impassioned exchange. I guess I see this as systemic. A truly amazing set of choices in public and private higher education in this country (with government money fading from both sectors despite all efforts to the contrary), a painfully squeezed middle class, US News-type rankings that tempt colleges to game the criteria, a recession that has panicked the most ambitious and well-connected in the college search while leaving everyone else behind…it’s a huge mess with admissions committees everywhere caught in the middle.</p>

<p>I think okthis1 has a good point. According to the numbers on Collegeboard, Mac’s yield on its RD acceptances (get this by backing out ED and waitlist acceptances out) was 15%, 300 of 1980 accepted RD said yes, which I think is not very good. 116 enrolled off of the waitlist, out of an enrolled class of 534, 22%, which is a pretty high percentage of a class to come from the waitlist for a school the quality of Mac. 236 of the 469 applicants offered a place on the waitlist turned it down, in theory Mac lost out on some really good students. So, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Mac did not do a great job of judging the kids for whom Mac was a first or second choice. A hypothetical–Mac gets an app from an East coast kid who is applying to a bunch of top East coast LACs. It should not be hard to figure out that kid is very unlikely to go to Mac, assuming they will get in to one of the East coast schools. That kid may be fine adding it as the 15th school applied to but really have little thought that he or she would ever go there. I think this is particularly a problem for a second tier type school (I absloutely do not mean to insult by that, I mean it only in a relative sense, comparing Mac to say Williams/Amherst/Swarthmore) in the Midwest, that school will be a “safety” and down the list for a very large % of kids from one of the coasts who have a chance to get in to a first tier LAC on one of the coasts. Again, I think Mac is a great school, no insult is inended here, my point is that the point I think anyway that okthis1 is making is not crazy.</p>

<p>So you think Mac should turn down good New England applicants because they might go elsewhere? What if Mac is my top choice but the college tries to outthink it and turns me down because they don’t think I’m coming? And when you waitlist those waitlisted how do you know ahead of time that Mac would have been a 1st choice? Plus, you drew from one year. What about the years where none are taken from waitlist? BTW, Mac does ask where else you are applying “for research purposes only” in the supplemental app.</p>

<p>I don’t know what Mac and similar schools should do. If Mac is a kid’s first choice, the answer is pretty easy–early decision. This trend has shown up the last two years (I think the previous year Mac took 198 off the wait list, so an even higher number), along with the big spike in apps. It will be interesting to see what happens this year, i.e., have Mac and similar schools figured out how to handle the big jump in apps? And rather than say they are not doing a good job, it might be more accurate to say that for the past two years they had not figured out to handle the explosion of applications. And there has been an explosion of applications, not applicants, as kids apply to more schools. I have a colleague who was an admissions counselor at a LAC similar to Mac up until about 5 years ago, she says that it would have been veiwed as a failure if they had a 15% yield from their RD pool and had to have 22% of their freshman class coming off of the waitlist. She just shakes her head at the numbers out there today, in terms of the number of apps schools get and the number of schools kids apply to.</p>

<p>It all depends on what “doing a good job” means in terms of admissions practices–this was my point earlier. If their goal is to maximize their yield, then perhaps they are falling short. But at all but the highest-ranked schools this often means rejecting candidates who are highly qualified but deemed unlikely to come and thus not worth the risk of offering admission. For example, their data might show that (to make-up an example) none of seven Vermont female who has scored over 2200 on the SAT and who intends to major in Economics have ever come to Mac. Thus future such applicants are rejected. Would they make good Mac students? Probably, but why waste an offer on them if they aren’t likely to come. Such “admission management” gaming is prevalent at some schools today.</p>

<p>If, however, Mac is simply preferring to admit the most qualified students over the most likely then it could be they are doing an excellent job. Now it could be the consequence of this is that get highly volatile yield numbers–some years lots of their admits commit and some years they are well shy, in which case it would behoove them to be conservative in their offers and rely on the waitlist to fill. As was already posted, it’s better to end up backfilling to make quota than to overadmit beyond capacity.</p>

<p>Really the only motivation for doing the first is to look good to rankings (“see how many of our admits actually want to come!”) but not to actually be good. Personally I prefer the straightforward approach and, if that is what Mac is doing, they ought to be commended.</p>

<p>Edit:
Early Decision is, IMO, a poor alternative. Having a pool of applicants who have “promised” to come is, no doubt, an effective way to raise yields, but I believe far too few ED applicants are optimizing their college search process by committing so early and completely.</p>

<p>nepop, more applying ED and taking more ED would just exacerbate the problem you are concerned about. And other than a general sense that it “looks bad,” what is your concern about a low yield? Worried that the school won’t seem prestigious enough? </p>

<p>I prefer to see the gerat opportunity. Because many may decline or not even apply because of the location/weather/distance, this in my view creates an opportunity for kids to attend a phenomenal college just as good as the Eastern elites and for some of us preferable.</p>

<p>Also, what you are not seeing is what colleges kids are choosing instead of Mac. Some may choose similar level schools in the Midwest or Northeast based on fit, but perhaps a high percentage choose Ivies or the very, very top small Ivies. The company you keep from an overlap point of view, even when not selected in the end, tells you something about the standing of the school.</p>

<p>Aloha, This is a great lively discussion and probably should be linked or moved to the Parents Forum because it really is not entirely Mac-centric (I hope I just made that up, but I doubt it). </p>

<p>Here is my two-cents.<br>
This is what we know: The common app is absolutely the main driver behind the explosion of applications to all schools.<br>
This is what happens when the application pool stays constant, but the number of applications increases: deserving students don’t get in to quality schools, waitlists, etc (see previous 3 pages of threads).
This is what I propose to remedy the issue: Modify the Common App and introduce a hard limit on the number of schools one student can apply to. I don’t know, pick a number. Let’s say 5. (NOTE: as I recall, I believe the FAFSA app has a limit of 10 schools, but you are able to circumvent that system by removing and adding schools and resending). </p>

<p>Limiting the number of schools to five puts the onus on the student earlier in the process to whittle down their intended school list and not waste some much time (the colleges, the parents, the high school counselors, etc).</p>

<p>Nepop, I respectfully disagree with your analysis. Schools play all kinds of games to show good yield numbers - especially those that fill up their freshman class with early admits. You really can’t equate a school like Mac, that doesn’t do that, with a school that does. And really, as a parent of a Mac student, I don’t care about yield numbers. That whole business is a product of the ranking obsession. That argument doesn’t have much weight since Macalester has been doing very well in the rankings of late. Mac yield really isn’t that low. I think the waitlist situation of the last few years is a blip - a product of increasing national popularity. I do care that my daughter’s classmates are intelligent and engaged students who really want to be there. And they are. So this all seems to be very inside baseball. I can see why the admissions office would be interested, but since the school as a whole is thriving all around - what’s the problem?</p>

<p>If any students come here looking for insight - you may want to start a new thread.</p>

<p>Interesting discussion…pretty much agree with everything Descartesz has said. My analogy is that Mac is like a professor who gives an A to each student who deserves it - their method for handing out acceptances is honest and straightforward…if they think a student will be able to handle the workload, thrive, and contribute to the campus community, he or she is accepted. I think this is a plus and makes me like Mac more. There is nothing wrong with taking wait list students…in fact, I think it’s ridiculous when schools have wait lists but virtually nobody is taken from them. It’s better to simply be rejected and move on.</p>