Case is also in a tough position. They’re in a state with a declining population and have within a short distance, NU & ND to the west, UMich to the northwest, Cornell to the northeast, and CMU to the southeast; all schools perceived to range from a bit better to a lot better than Case. Also, their strength is in engineering yet UMich, Purdue, and UIUC (all giant publics great in engineering with far cheaper list prices at in-state rates) likely shut down the student pipelines from the 3 states to Case’s west quite a bit. Which is why Case relies heavily (besides OH kids) also on PA and NYS applicants (because not all the good engineering applicants in those states can get in to Cornell, UPenn, or CMU). Howver, the Northeast HS population is declining now as well.
Tulane has both EA and SCEA, where choosing SCEA shows a higher level of interest (which is considered by Tulane) than choosing EA.
Of course, if the school experiences a higher than expected yield, then it may not admit anyone at all from the waitlist. Then the result may be that the school loses a top candidate, while the top candidate starts at a community college after getting shut out.
ED & WL wd seem to b an efficient strategy for not offering merit and for lowballing FA
I hear you @ucbalumnus. But they seem to be stuck with a mid-teens yield, which seems very low for such a great school.
I would want to get that up over 20% if possible. When you are in the teens or lower, I think that just screams that you weren’t anyone’s first choice. There should be tons of students who would be thrilled to attend Case, but I think @purpletitan right about geography and competition. Maybe the need a Wash U style marketing campaign/makeover.
Is it that big a deal if the school is not the student’s first choice, if it is a high enough choice that the student was willing to apply in the first place and later attend?
For students applying to highly selective schools, isn’t it quite likely that they will not be admitted to their first choices, so that they will later have to attend a non-first choice school?
Note that some schools offer ED-2, which means that they are happy being the second choice school for students who got rejected (in ED-1 or EA) by their first choice schools.
@ucbalumnus, (private) schools want kids who have them as a first choice because the thinking probablis that that leads to a more enthusiastic student body more willing to sell the school brand, help each other out, and donate more when they become alums in the future.
@Much2learn, I actually have WashU and Case on the same tier (because by alumni achievements, they’re very similar), but note that WashU is a much richer school, so they can keep pumping money in to marketing, student amenities, etc. to attract students.
Case does have a bigger endowment than Georgetown, Tufts, BU, and (on a per capita basis) NYU, but it doesn’t have the locational advantage that those schools have.
When D1 was offered to get off the WL at 2 top ranking schools in 2007, she was asked if she would accept the offer before the official offer was given.
My ORM/high stats kid got WL at most T-20 privates this year. She was in the upper 25% of scores at all schools. Then, came this weird interest dance of continued marketing from schools after admission decisions were out. Unfortunately/fortunately, she treated the WL as a rejection. The door literally slammed shut in her mind when the WL offers were made—even at her former “first choice.” She let it go. I made her sign up on a few WLs, just b/c I thought she might regret it later. All this subsequent re-marketing by schools, “Don’t you want to stay on the WL, Are you sure you don’t want to sign up for the WL? File your letter of interest yet?” crap. It definitely felt there was a second RD decision campaign going on. Got an email from the former first choice school again today . . .“Don’t you want to stay on our waitlist???” Nope—Happily settled in at a school that actually accepted her.
Yep, the WL is/will be the 3rd round at many schools going forward.
The remarketing to WL’ed students only makes sense to kids they can see themselves make offers to, however. Not sure what good getting kids who they will definitely not accept on to the WL does a school.
However, as reply #28 shows, getting waitlisted may be taken as an insult by a student who originally had the college as his/her first choice, so the college loses out on someone who was formerly interested enough to have it as his/her first choice.
Realistically, from an applicant’s point of view, a waitlist is still best thought of as the same as a rejection, since colleges tend to put far more students on the waitlist than they will eventually admit. http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=966 indicates that CWRU put 6,651 applicants on the wait list. 3,004 of them accepted spots on the wait list, but only 480 of them were eventually admitted from the wait list.
@ucbalumnus, certainly.
That is part of the risk-reward trade-off that schools who play the yield management game have to weigh.
I would like to know how many kids turned down the offers to get off the WL. THAT would be a quotable stat.
I have to disagree with some of the assumptions made here. I have had 2 kids accepted to CWRU. One has accepted this year. He turned down UIUC, Purdue, and Wash U - to name a few - that folks here perceive as better schools. Not better for him as a double major. And as a parent, hard for me to believe that one school is $100,000+ better than another for engineering. It is about gpa and work experience after graduation. My other S turned down CWRU, CMU, Lehigh, Purdue and other highly touted schools on this forum for Rose-Hulman. Sometimes it really is about fit. Or for some about fit (geography, ECs, co-op opportunities, size of the school) and/or money.
Been through this process 3 times. I absolutely see a difference this year. I think it is harder to get into many to the “top” schools. And they all want diversity. Certainly not all about merit. Not sour grapes because except for one Ivy my kid did very well and had many great choices. I suspect schools like Case will be moving up on many lists. Just my two cents.
Schools use all kinds of tools to winnow the funnel down to the kids who actually enroll. CWRU gets 21,733 apps and enrolls 1,282 kids. So they get 1 enrollee out of every 17 apps submitted.
A low percentage of CWRU’s wait list kids got admitted, so for the students a WL most often equals a rejection. But from the school’s perspective, a high number of its accepted offers are made to WL kids.
792 offers to WL list kids. At a 15% yield, that’s about 10% of the class. At a 50% yield, that’s one third of the class.
Using the WL presumably gives the school some additional leverage/control in filling seats. But without driving its admissions percentage sky high and its yield way low.
“I think there is something wrong with that list. The one school I am familiar with is Tulane. They announced they are taking no one off their wait list this year, yet that link says they took 327. See the post below saying they will not be using the wait list:”
No problem with the list. The wait list data is for the class of kids who just finished their freshman college year. Tulane offered 327 wait list kids last year. They don’t plan to offer any this year.
Case does get high stats kids even with a yield rate in the teens. The high average scores of the student body is what attracted our attention when looking with our son. Maybe part of the strategy is to BE the backup and snag the smart kids off the waitlist who got burned in RD.
I am not sure how to interpret most of the numbers quoted above. Offering 792 admissions for an enrollment of 1282 is a very high number. As I wrote before, they might NOT engaging in what has been widely reported (see Oldfort’s post about being offered a spot only after agreeing to committing to a WL admission) or simply not being VERY good at picking probable enrollees, and this in all their rounds. There might be good reasons behind such a middling performance, but getting only 10 to 50 percent yield on WL is hardly stellar, Not I buy it being that low!
This practice may have been going on for a few years. When I was applying to schools I was WL’ed at CWRU, eventually accepted, but then turned them down in favor of another school. Even though my SATs and ACTs were good, my GPA was far below their average although I was a full pay student.
Edit: Never mind. Seems I was one of 39/1737 students accepted according to Section C2 of the [school’s common data set](http://www.case.edu/ir/cds/)
@almostdonemom, I’ll add the clause “perceived by most people” if it makes you happier. Certainly, people may disagree on how they tier/rank schools. BTW, I have Case and WashU on the same tier.