I know the chance of getting in off the waitlist is minute, but I just wanted to double check–a school as large as UM won’t care if you contact them to express interest after you’re waitlisted, correct?
It won’t hurt to express your continue interest but you probably should wait a little bit. Accepting the waitlist offer is already an expression of interest. In the past, UM offered waitlist to around 1/3 of the students with denied admission. Among them, around 1/3 accept the admission offer. The final admission rate off the waitlist varied but usually around 1-3%. This year, they are going to admit more from the waitlist. However, the actual rate may depend on the yield of the admitted students. If they do admit around 13,000 as they planned and the yield rate is around 42% like last year, they would have to admit a lot from the waitlist to fill the remaining ~700 seats.
Huh, thanks.
I hope those numbers end up being in the ballpark, @billcsho. They certainly reflect better odds than in the past. We still have to move forward with the next option but we can still hope. Does anyone know when the first wait-list notifications usually go out? Do you think it will be relatively soon following the May 1 deadline?
how long it takes usually for waitlisted people to know their decisions?
I think you should go with the deposit with your first school, but I don’t think Michigan is planning on taking too much from the waitlist… 
^^^^Who really knows what will happen this year?
I think @billcsho has done an accurate analysis and if yield is consistent with the past wait list admissions should be as he concluded, at a vastly different ( higher) rate than the last few years. That was the plan U Mich announced last year.