<p>Lderochi, I hope you did not think I said that Wait List Admits (WLA) did not exist. It is a given that wait lists constitute an important element of enrollment control. With many schools experiencing a 30% yield, it would be very hard to predict the exact enrollment number when sending out admissions. </p>
<p>My main criticism stems from the SIZE of the wait list pool. It is impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from the analysis of many data point. For instance, let's compare Princeton and MIT for the past 2 years:</p>
<p>Princeton
Apps = 13 to 15000
Admits = 1733 and 1601
Enrolled = 1172 and 1176
WL = 1045 and 471
WL Admits = 79 and 27</p>
<p>MIT
Apps = about 10,000
Admits = 1665 and 1735
Enrolled = 1077 and 1019
WL = 604 and 491
WL Admits = 1 and zero</p>
<p>However, unless the data was not reported correctly, Princeton did not admit anyone from the WL in the two years prior to the data reported above. </p>
<p>The question still remains if it is necessary for any school to have a wait list that approaches the size of its expected enrollment? In this regard, one has to acknowledge that from the 604 WL offers that were made, 524 were accepted by students. This means that over 500 families remained in limbo as well as the 500 colleges that offered admission to the same students. The domino effect of the delays in finalizing the rosters must not be for the faintest of heart as we move down the admission food chain!</p>
<p>Well, UChicago accepted two kids from my S's school off the waitlist a couple of years ago, my S being one of them. They sent a letter very much like the one epiphany describes above, giving the number of kids waitlisted and the chances of being taken off (they said they accepted between 9% and 20% of kids off the waitlist, if I'm remembering right). They were the most informative of the three schools S was waitlisted at, as far as giving some idea of his chances. S filled out the postcards for two of the three schools asking to remain on the waitlist (decided to not pursue the third), and I took them to the mailbox. I remember thinking, on the way to mail the cards, that I could just throw them in the garbage, and end it right there!!--after all, he was accepted at a school that S and esp. my husband and I liked very much!-- but I mailed the cards, and let the game play out. And now he is at UChicago.</p>
<p>lderochi - this is not just a phenomenon of the most elite schools, unfortunately. The schools I spoke of in post #97 had acceptance rates ranging from 45% to 75% - not exactly lottery schools. Still, an example of waitlist stats from one of these schools: #WL=1715; # accepting place on WL=667; # admitted from WL=88.</p>
<p>As an example of a school that seems to use a very liberal WL policy, let's look at Dartmouth in 2004-2005:</p>
<p>For an enrollment of 1077 (11734 applications), they issued 2173 admissions and 1275 wait list offers. In the end, Dartmouth accepted 24 students from the WL.</p>
<p>PS The years before, D issued 1296 and 1200 WL offers for 54 and 15 WLA.</p>
<p>At my alma mater, I have heard that virtually all legacies who are rejected are automatically placed on the waiting list. It's a way of letting them down "softly".</p>
<p>But a large waiting list helps a school build a class. Supposing, as an example, P. desperately needs a quarterback. Through a series of unexpected circumstances, their #1 choice turned them down, and their number 2 choice just got a full ride at Penn State, and is mulling the options (as Princeton finds his family "more needy", and ups its offer.) Anyhow, they lose both. They go to quarterback #3 on the waiting list. He says, "no thanks", going to Yale. Quarterback #4 on waiting list can't decide quickly enough. Quarterback #5 is the one they will get. So they had to offer admission to 5 quarterbacks to get one, three of them having been on the waiting list.</p>
<p>So now add in oboe players, tubas, college actors, potential archaeology majors (or others hoping to major in small departments), metallurgical engineers, etc., and you can see why a long waiting list might be useful.</p>
<p>(Back in the dark ages, I got into my alma mater off the waiting list, and I was the 7th most qualified, out of 9 applicants, from my high school.)</p>
<p>My son had a waiting list success story from his summer program last summer. The program had a rolling admissions process based on an admissions quiz. My son sent in his quiz early, and was told he was on the waiting list. He immediately emailed back expressing continued interest in the program (waiting list tip #1) and the program said he still had time to improve his quiz answers (waiting list tip #2: add new information to the file). He did that, and he eventually got in. We later learned from a newspaper article about the program that hundreds of kids applied, but only seventy-some got in. (They had a theoretical capacity of 100 for the program, but admitted the students they deemed qualified.) So that waiting list was genuine, and treating it as genuine was helpful to my son. Most colleges are badly oversubscribed, beyond the limit of dorm space, but if there is any movement off the waiting lists you might as well be the one to move.</p>
<p>Finding this thread so late it's a wonder I'm bothering to chime in...</p>
<p>I heartily endorse changing the AdCom term. I never considered myself a member of the "Admissions Committee." That was a separate body of faculty to whom I and my collagues took my recommendations of a candidate for approval and, if needed, discussion. I was an Admissions Rep or an Admissions Counselor or (the largely ceremonial title) Assistant Director of Admissions.</p>
<p>Based on Fall 2004, this is some waitlist info for certain universities. The % number is the percentage of the enrolling freshman class made up of people admitted off the waitlist.</p>
<p>U of Chicago 18.3%
Miami of Ohio 10.5%
Washington U 9.2%
Carnegie Mellon 8.8%
Northwestern 8.1%
UNC-Chapel Hill 6.9%
Princeton 6.7%
Notre Dame 6.5%
Brown 6.1%
Cornell 5.6%
Duke 5.2%
Columbia 4.1%
NYU 3.5%
Penn 3.5%
Stanford 3.4%
Illinois 2.2%
UVa 1.2%
U of Washington 0.6%
Yale 0.6%</p>
<p>Some of these institutions had waitlists longer than 1000 students (I can also post the percentage of waitlisted students who were eventually accepted, if people have a hankering to see it) but I'd done the math this way to show that some institutions do rely on the waitlist (some fairly heavily) to make up their final class.</p>
<p>Re #106, the same thing occurred to me that Mini described - not only are waitlists for letting down alums softly, and maintaining good relations with feeder high schools - big waitlists also keep a pool of "specialists" to draw from. But that raises another question - how in the world do they keep up with who was waitlisted why - "This is the football team pile, here are the oboists... now what in the world happened with that goat farmer from Texas?" ;) Curmudgeon.</p>
<p>I think Xiggi has the waitlist concept right. The waitlist is a way maintain bridges with schools they want to keep getting top applicants from, and a way to extend a softer rejection to students. The odds of getting in are slight at most schools, but that's not how many people interpret it since the letter doesn't say "rejected". They reason "Joey got in to X, and they'll enroll him just as soon as a seat opens up". The emphasis seems to be on the "in" part even though the kid won't actually be attending the school.</p>
<p>It is cruel to the kids since a lot of them maintain false hopes over the summer, and they don't fully embrace the school that DID accept them since they are hoping to come off the waitlist and don't want to get too tied to a school they're going to inform they're not coming after all. The only justification I can think of is that many of the top schools are so flooded with good applicants these days that its common to hear that they could build a 2nd class equally as good as the ones they did admit out of their rejected students, and the "you're admitted but we're not taking you" reflects this. But I don't think this is a big enough reason to balance the harm they do to kids with the phony waitlist status.</p>
<p>*He believes way too many people are overly preoccupied with GPA's and standardized test scores. He believes these are almost always bright line tests, rarely anything more. Exceed the threshhold and the REAL review begins."</p>
<p>Some people, with everything else in place, need to cross that line; for them scores definitely matter. Scores matter.</p>
<p>Hoedown, I invite you to read an article from June 2005, which is documenting that the numbers vary from year to year --depending on various factors such as changes in yield or ED/EA policies.</p>
<p>
[quote]
At Princeton and Johns Hopkins, the lack of wait-list admissions is a sharp contrast to last year, when Princeton admitted 99 wait-listed applicants and Hopkins took about 150. Yale took eight last year.</p>
<p>Duke University admitted just 22 students from its list, compared with 86 last year. The University of Chicago says it admitted only 34 students from the wait list, compared with 150 last year. The University of Pennsylvania took 10 students this year, compared with about 30 last year.</p>
<p>Yale University typically welcomes 1,310 first-year students every year. As of now, says Admissions Dean Richard Shaw, 27 more than that are slated to enroll -- which is why he isn't taking any from the waiting list. Yale's yield went up four percentage points this year, to 72%, which is "extraordinarily high" says Mr. Shaw, adding that a one percentage point increase is usually viewed as a big improvement in the admissions world.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If the numbers quoted in the article are true, Chicago's 150 WLA out of an enrollment of 1,220 in 2004 dwindled to 34 WLA out of 1,231. The percentages would have changed from 12.29% to 2.76%. What a difference a year makes.</p>
<p>That's true, Zuma. Unfortunately, the people obviously most affected by that threshhold are those most challenged by the standardized testing format but are technically not "diagnosable" as justifying extended time. These students sometimes radically underperform in the SAT or ACT environment, vs. classroom testing. I won't hijack the thread by discussing all the bureaucratic hurdles one must clear before gaining Accommodation, I promise. Your comment just reminded me, though, of that difficulty. We CC'ers tend to focus on the perils of high stat students "assuming" qualification for high-end U's -- & thus the need for creative angles & creative college lists. Think about how creative the lower-stat but brilliant students need to become (A+, A or A- GPA but D or F equivalent in standardized testing); admissions can be even more of a high-wire act for them, in an attempt to find an intellectually challenging environment where the admissions counselors will even allow them to get to the 'REAL review' level. The fairtest site does not provide enough options for many categories of programs & level of challenge. That would be esp. if those students are financially challenged. Most of their options right now are (1) less challenging academics (often with high, unaided tuitions in 4-yr colleges) or (2) applying to a fairtest college that is not appropriate for them (doesn't have the academic programs they need), (3) surrender to the system & attend a community college where they will be even less challenged.</p>
<p>Epiphany - thanks for your post. I wonder where the dinner companion admissions rep. meant that the "bright line" is -- at the median or average test score level? Or at the 25% mark? Statistically speaking, it can't be much lower -- I assume the tail end of the distribution is filled with hooked applicants, such as recruited athletes. </p>
<p>The problem isn't simply with the kids who have the A grades but the "D" level test scores-- its also kids like mine with the A+ grades but B+ test scores. My kid's class rank is within the top 2% of her school, standardized test scores equate to about 92% percentile. Well above average for most state U's, but probably below that bright-line threshold the ad rep spoke of. </p>
<p>But this clearly is a a situation is not one in which a student could possibly get testing accommodations. At least one private college consultant suggested to me that we should seek such accommodations - which left me shaking my head. What kind of learning disability could you claim when for a kid who performs well academically and consistently tests within the top 10%? Or even top 20%? </p>
<p>Maybe we will get lucky and it will turn out that the "bright line" threshold is lower than I think. I understand what is driving the admissions process - the test scores don't mean all that much, but it makes the ad com's task easier if they can add more files to the reject pile without close scrutiny. Its just that they may end up missing a lot of strong students that way. </p>
<p>I really think there should be a much greater focus on grades than test scores, with test scores being used primarily as a check against grades: that is, if the grades are very high but test scores significantly lower, it could indicate that the school grading standards might be lax; if the scores were high but the grades were not, it could indicate that the school's grading policies were particularly stringent. </p>
<p>The UC system does this to a small extent: they use a formula that combines a the numerical value for grades and test scores, so the "bright line" gives the benefit of the doubt to kids who perform well but test low, as well as kids who test better than they perform.</p>
<p>Yes, calmom, & a lot of students do qualify for the UC's because of the formula & because of comp review. Unfortunately for the student I described (not necessarily yours), a very large U would tend to be one of the worst places many of them should go -- so again one has the limitation of options one is faced with, in this category.</p>
<p>So many varieties of student are compromised & challenged by the current college "craze": the BWRK's who have nothing wrong with them, the very but not stratospherically accomplished, auditioning performing artists who will find few available spots in excellent programs which will also match their needs for training, those challenged by testing hurdles, etc. We parents should keep that all in perspective, I guess.</p>
<p>Yes, xiggi, that article was read here; one of the reasons I've paid more interest in this is because of the unpredictable yield on our campus. I have more than one year of data: I just published the 2004 because it was the most complete and I thought people would be interested.</p>
<p>18 percent is pretty unusual, but it's instructive to us that some colleges end up building a not-small proportion of their class off wait list admits.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But that raises another question - how in the world do they keep up with who was waitlisted why <<</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>I think the person most likely to come off the waitlist is one who is championed by an adrep, but who did not garner the support of the whole committee.</p>