<p>I can’t tell you why they should, except that people who are willing to take the plunge and commit to a school using Early Decision are more likely to go. At least, that’s what most colleges that care about “demonstrated interest” seem to believe.</p>
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<p>In a capitalist system students would bid, cash, for a seat at each university. The system we have now is far more agenda driven, with hand waving by admissions stating they are “building a community” and late night incense burning while writing “the perfect essay” for the student.</p>
<p>Capitalism would be more honest.</p>
<p>I think the whole American college admissions thing is going to implode. </p>
<p>It’s not sustainable on so many levels, from tuition, to the marketing/rankings insanity, to the application requirements, to the obsession with a few schools and ridiculous number and scope of applications, to now ridiculous waitlists, to the nonsensical "sculpting a class’ BS that they’ve convinced people is real. </p>
<p>It’s just another bubble because all this trending is not supported by a more straighforward leap up in applications (which would be a logical explanation with a real foundation rather than a psychological and social one). Instead it looks more and more similar to the economic concept of ‘irrational exuberance’.</p>
<p>as suspected, princeton waitlisted 1526 students in 2008 with 1061 accepting a spot. 148 were ultimately offered admission (and enrolled). the commenter misunderstood what it meant to accept a spot on a waitlist.</p>
<p>that having been put to rest, there is no doubt in my mind that exploding waitlists are pure marketing moves. </p>
<p>on the waitlist yield question, keep in mind how different the accepted and waitlisted pools look at most schools. to illustrate this, the rd acceptance pool at my lac alma mater had an average sat score around 1385. this group had a yield of around 28%, with the average rd enrollee having an sat score 60 points lower, 1325. the bottom of the accepted students pool (based only on sat scores, which understates the effect) had a significantly higher yield than the top. now, the top of the waitlist pool, particularly those who accepted a spot, would have yielded at a higher rate than the bottom of the admit pool.</p>
<p>so, in short, the ‘original’ yield on waitlisted students who chose to stay on a schools waitlist would have been much, much higher than the overall rd yield of 28%. how much anticipated ‘yield’ declines when attempting to pull from the waitlist is a good question, though.</p>
<p>regardless, small annual changes in application trends with their resultant small impacts on yield do not justify the magnitude of the waitlist boom. mits waitlist grew by 50% during a period of five years when yield INCREASED from 59% to 66%. the waitlist at my alma mater grew similarly despite rd yield increasing from 22% to 28%. princeton has more than tripled its waitlist as a result of dropping ed, a move that doubled its number of rd acceptances. and im sure the list could go on all day.</p>
<p>^^I agree, Starbright. I would buy stock in the University of Phoenix right now if it were offered.</p>
<p>I can now see how Duke has uncovered a new marketing trend. It reminds me of new restaurants and night clubs that create the illusion of a line outside for marketing hype.</p>
<p>You make a ridiculously long waitlist…it gives you free but highly valuable media coverage. It creates yet an even stronger and more impressionable and memorable sense that “Duke is selective”. Far more powerful than the most current admit rate. </p>
<p>This industry is all about playing the numbers and creating the right impression with them. The more people believe you are selective, the more selective you become, the more you move up in the rankings, and reap all the benefits of that. </p>
<p>Watch next year: dozens more schools will be in the news with gigantic never-before-seen waitlists. They are watching and learning from Duke’s strategy here.</p>
<p>Ah, cross posted with Erica- yes entirely a marketing move</p>
<p>Excellent post, bchan1. At this time of year, I think it’s very hard for ambitious students and their eager parents to keep in mind the wisdom in the last paragraph of your post. </p>
<p>But here’s the rub: even if they agree with you in theory, the world around them teaches them otherwise in practice. For example, students get a very different reaction from their teachers and peers if they say they got into HYPSCM than if they say they got into Local State U. We have already seen the “star” effect for our own D, and it’s uncomfortabe and embarrassing. After all, she was the same child before she received the acceptance letter as after! Her inner worth did not suddenly change from one day to the next because of a letter. I think it’s akin to the feeling I had when I was a college student and lost some weight. I wasn’t obese or anything, just 15 or 20 pounds over optimal weight. Suddenly boys I barely knew said hello to the slimmer me, struck up conversations with me, and invited me to parties. People in general treated me with greater respect. Of course I was happy and flattered, but deep down it hurt because it felt as though they valued me only if I was skinny enough.</p>
<p>This is what our kids might be feeling with regard to college admissions, and so we need to be on guard to validate the positive inner qualities that make our kids who they are. Those of us whose kids have elite admissions in hand need to remind our kids that it’s who they are inside that counts–not the name on their sweatshirt or even on their diploma.</p>
<p>But prestige has power, and until the day it doesn’t, the system will march on using these marketing ploys.</p>
<p>Thanks for clarifying, EricaTBucknell.</p>
<p>The comment didn’t seem to ring true.</p>
<p>eric, you’re assuming that there is a smooth curve between the bottom of the admit list and the top of the waitlist. That’s certainly not the case at Princeton, Cornell, Duke, or any of the other colleges we have been discussing. The bottom of the admit list, in terms of test scores, almost certainly consists of recruited athletes or recruited students with other special characteristics, where both the acceptance rate and the yield are effectively 100%. At most selective schools, I think the “stats” footprint of the waitlist looks much more like the top half of the admit list than the bottom.</p>
<p>I can’t remember where I have seen it, but I think I remember reading last year that when Harvard or Stanford or one of those, with well over 1,000 students initially accepting a place on the waitlist, did a check in late May to see how many wanted to remain on the list, it was down to 600 or so. And that was for the absolute top of the heap. I bet dropping down even to the Duke level makes that erosion much larger.</p>
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<p>This seems to be a very common-sense approach. We made sure with my son that he picked safety schools that he would be perfectly willing to attend. He was accepted to all six schools he applied to, and ended up choosing the one with the best scholarship and FA package and is happily looking forward right now.</p>
<p>I feel for the kids who are caught up in this. If they are smart enough to be waitlisted and not rejected outright, I hope most of them have at least one really attractive alternative they can say yes to before too much longer. Maybe this years situation will turn off many students in the future and bite these ultra-selective institutions in the butt.</p>
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<p>My thoughts too. </p>
<p>I actually find this waitlist fiasco to be unkind to students at its best, cruel at its worst. Any school with this kind of waitlist could not care less about students: not when they can milk it for marketing gain.</p>
<p>You could argue that they do care about their students. That is, the ones that they accepted and the ones that they rejected. The one that they left trapped in limbo, however, aren’t really any of their concern.</p>
<p>You people are talking crazy. In what world is giving students the option to remain on a waitlist both “cruel” and “marketing”? In fact, it’s neither. It bears emphasizing again: staying on a waitlist, caring about it at all, is entirely up to the student. He is free to walk away and not to look back, and that’s what many do. He’s also free to stay on, but not to invest in his slim chance of admission, and to spend his psychic energy on the college he will actually attend. In that case, two months from now, three months maybe, there will be no trace left of the emotional torture the waitlist supposedly represents.</p>
<p>Sure, waitlists serve the colleges’ needs, by helping them fill all of their available slots with the class they want. But it’s not cruelty, or torture, and if a student (or parent) feels like it is for more than a few days of disappointment, that indicates some fundamental problems with the way they have approached college admissions. In any event, I’m certain colleges are aware that people don’t necessarily like to be waitlisted – and that many waitlistees will continue to call and send material for months, making everyone’s life a little worse. They don’t do it just for fun.</p>
<p>As for waitlist yields: My favorite college applicant this year got 5 waitlists between March 27 and April 1, including what would have been his top three (or four) choices at the beginning of that period. However, when the dust cleared he only accepted a place on two of them. And that’s before he attends Suck Up To Accepted Students Weekend at the college that wants him. Only one of the waitlist colleges has clear advantages over the college he now tentatively plans to attend. My experience-based guess is that by the time May rolls around, he will not stay on the peer college’s waitlist any longer. If he gets off the “better” college’s waitlist, great – his parents will be able to drive him there for move-in; he will get to see his sibling, whose college is nearby, more – but he won’t be holding his breath.</p>
<p>These are all highly selective colleges, by the way, top 20 universities or top 10 LACs. And out of five waitlists, only one of the colleges will have a viable candidate in May.</p>
<p>How is a gigantic waitlist that makes the national news not marketing? I can believe that it wasn’t intentional, but you can’t say that this doesn’t make Duke look like an incredibly selective and highly prestigious school. This might not have been the goal, but that’s what seems to be happening and that’s what happens to schools in the past that don’t admit most of their applicants.</p>
<p>Gardna, I don’t see how Duke comes out looking good. I think it makes the school look ridiculous and makes me disinclined to let the next kid apply there even if he wanted to (first didn’t).</p>
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That could be an unintended consequence. Nothing ever affects every single person in the world the same way. The fact is, Duke couldn’t admit all these people. The reason why they waitlisted all of them is unclear. The effects include both making the school ridiculous to some people and making the school look exclusive (especially to impressionable teenagers who might know someone who was waitlisted).</p>
<p>These lines from the original article</p>
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<p>don’t make me think that Duke is incredibly selective and highly prestigious. They make me think that Duke admissions is and was totally unprepared, and not clever enough to come up with a better way to spin this. There were so many other things they could have told the students, and the NYT. They could have said that they were especially worried about filling enough seats, given the ever-increasing number of colleges students apply to. They could have said that this was a way to recognize or honor students who they’d love to have at Duke, even though there just wasn’t enough room. The takeaway message is that Duke didn’t bother reading anyone’s application very closely at all. That might not be true, but it’s definitely the impression I’m left with.</p>
<p>thrill - I feel downright unimaginative, your description of the ultimate capitalistic education system is frightening beyond words; but before I continue let me say I am not anti-capitalist, my point is that these are our children, not pork belly futures.</p>
<p>GFG - I completely understand the emotional reactions involved here but prestige=power does not = happiness. I know kids who stuck it out at an Ivy school hating every minute of it because they couldn’t walk away from the prestige (or at least their parents perception of it). This is not a bad reflection on the school, other kids I know loved the same school, but the unhappy student went there for the wrong reasons. I know kids who went to state U. and walked out happy with prestigious scholarships (fulbright, Marshall). I have the luxury of having watched many more kids go through the process than my kids will know at the same point in time only because I work at a high school, so I have a long term perspective they lack. My own child made good choices for good reasons - state u. without debt vs. oos with financial stretch - but then began to second guess her “value” when others began receiving admissions/scholarships from schools she didn’t apply to (and their scholarships/aid packages wouldn’t have covered her need even though she would have gotten the same merit aid had she applied). I think you are very wise to keep your daughter grounded regarding her own intrinsic worth - kids are still so vulnerable at this age. The College Admission Mystique by Bill Mayher (published over 10 years ago and more relevant than ever) puts the admissions process into perspective. Some of the most powerful people in their respective fields have become so because of who they are, not where they went to school or who they went to school with - I’m thinking of Spielberg being rejected by top film schools and Ronald Reagan attending Eureka college as two notable examples.</p>
<p>Youdon’tsay, you might be right that it will make Duke look bad, and the response will be a collective avoidance. I think Duke is potentially taking a risk with this strategy (but I do believe they are hoping it works to their benefit for marketing reasons, and it’s why they are doing it). </p>
<p>My bet is it will work to their advantage, not disadvantage. Colleges can charge crazy-insane prices, require crazy-high application requirements, offer extremely low odds, send abysmal rejection letters…and it only increases, not decreases, their appeal. We know tuition works that way. Acceptance rate works that way. This probably will as well.</p>
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<p>Said like a true rationalist. Sure all factually true, doesn’t make it psychologically kind. And research bears this out- it is not. </p>
<p>Anyone who does research and publishes for a living, has experienced the editor’s risky resubmit request. It goes like this, “well you can revise this manuscript for reconsideration, but it is extremely risky revise and resubmit…”. And all recipients know perfectly well that is a far worse outcome than “revise and resubmit” and “rejected”. Come on, help put people out of their misery. </p>
<p>Okay cruel is a dramatic overstatement. But let’s just say it’s not a respectful way to treat your customer. And I do hope future families and students remember this and think again if this is really the kind of institution they want to belong to.</p>