Musings of a Waitlistee

<p>reptil who told u that?is it someone from the admissions office?
operadad could you explain us why wud they waitlist 2000 ppl if they only need 100-200 or in the extreme case you presented 700? Thanks</p>

<p>I do not remember exactly but it was someone from Harvard.</p>

<p>Has Harvard ever explained why they – unlike Yale, Princeton and Brown, for example – will not divulge their waitlist statistics on the Common Data Set?</p>

<p>i have the same question hudsonvalley but i am unable to find an answer!!</p>

<p>Beause they want you to get up false hopes :evil:</p>

<p>Alright first of all, the waitlisted letter said that the group is "representing a small percentage of all our candidates " then that definitely means that its less than 7% since that figure was their acceptance rate… im assuming its around 2.5-5% maximum which is around 700-1500 students. This also means that in the end, around 500-1000 wish to remain on the waitlist… and if the yield rate is around the same as every other year, which is around 75-80% then they will admit around 200-300 from the waitlist (this year many will turn it down because they got accepted to Yale and other competitive schools, declined financial aid, picked other programs, etc)</p>

<p>so to sum it all up, the best thing that can happen is that there will be around 500-600 remaining on the waitlist and around 250-300 admitted which gives us around 50%… and the worst case is that there are around 1000 students (NOT MORE) on the waitlist and they admit less than 200 (possibly 100, 50 or even none)</p>

<p>and about the people that they will select from the waitlist… obviously they will not rely a lot on who has the best SATs, GPAs, essays that much since they already placed us on waitlist because they liked our performance and all of us on that list are in a way distinguished to be on the waitlist and not rejected (since many qualified were rejected), that means that they will pick certain students based on gender, ethnicity, school, and most importantly, region/state/country if international, to kind of compensate for those that rejected their offer because Harvard is one of those schools that cares about maintaining its enrollment statistics and stuff, which is often around diversity… and so im basically saying that if ppl do turn down Harvard and the admissions office decide to take people off the waitlist, it will not be a competition, it will be more of a chance thing because if 20% of the athletes that they admitted rejected their offer, then they would need to take around 20% (or even a little) to have enough athletes next year, same thing goes for musicians, artists, etc… so this is another thing that they would consider… the waitlist to them, in my opinion is unranked because we are like TEAM B… every single player on the waitlist falls behind a player from TEAM A… if TEAM A is suddenly short on African Americans or musicians, they would take Team B’s African Americans or musicians to end up with a diverse student body…
so in the end, Harvard wont be picking its top 200 waitlisted students academically or based on their extracurricular achievements, they pick people that complete the pool because they wont rank them and go like “alright first on this 800 or so list is person A with GPA of __<em>, rank of _</em>, SAT __ bla bla” they will say, oo look, theres an international student from Europe, lets take him to make up for the two europeans that rejected our offer</p>

<p>anyways, I hope this makes sense. Its after midnight here and I may have said stuff that I even dont agree with so feel free to criticize me this is just my opinion and dont go on telling your parents or friends about this and putting your hopes up or down… </p>

<p>but good luck to everyone and if you really want to get in from the waitlist, convince the admitted students that are just like you in terms of ethnicity, location, gender, social activities to not go because if that happens, i think your chances will be higher haha</p>