Q for college counselors on CC: Which highly selective schools are known to underenroll to yield protect with the waitlist

Applying to College
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I’ve heard two different podcasters say that certain schools are known to: (1) intentionally take less students regular round then they predict will yield and fill the class, and then take the higher yield firm WL people after screening them with calls first; and/or (2) do more than the usual amount soft nos with the WL.

Curious how one would find out which ones or what type of highly selective schools would engage in these practices.

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See how many kids schools take off their waitlist.

CWRU does/did this (I haven’t checked in recent years).

COVID will probably mess everybody up this year, though.

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If you look at colleges’ common data sets, section C2 describes wait list use, and section C7 shows how important “level of applicant’s interest” is.

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Schools that have a low yield (e.g. CWRU) have more yield risk and more danger of over enrolling. Therefore, the reason to use a waitlist may not just to keep the acceptance rate down.

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That’s fair.

All incentives point to one direction, though: For colleges to utilize both the WL (and ED) more.

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What’s the point of a soft no? Why not just give the no?

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They give a soft no to legacy kids, donor relations, kids from feeder schools where they want to keep a good relationship with the guidance counselor. Sounds better than a no when third parties are told.

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So schools with a healthy yield would be less likely to use that strategy. That makes sense. One of my S’ sounded pretty confident in their letter that it would be a small number of WL and will be wrapped up in May. They still have thousands invited to WL though.

Flagship publics would probably not engage in that process I would think? We have 2 of those WL.

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A college that does not practice yield protection (trying to get yield as high as possible) may still have a waitlist for the purpose of hedging against errors in yield prediction.

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Right. One of the podcasters said certain schools might do both. Holding out 100 spots for the first strategy to bump the yield plus a long WL in case they made errors in predictions. It seems like only a certain level of school should be able to do and benefit from that heavy WL use.

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In this COVID year (2), I’d expect pretty much all colleges to defer and WL a lot, including flagships.

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