Has anybody done that and have you seen any merit aid from those schools?
I’m sure every experience is different but my son’s experience was good. He got accepted to his first choice school off the waitlist last year and was offered what we considered to be a decent amount of merit aid. His second choice school, to which he had already accepted a spot but let the studio teacher know he was remaining on the waitlist at the other school, then counteroffered and more than doubled his original merit aid offer. It was late April so by that point I think they’d had some declines which ‘opened up’ more merit aid than they originally had to work with. He was able to use that to appeal the aid from the waitlisted school and they were able to come up with just a little more. I don’t know if his experience was at all typical.
One thing he did while he was waitlisted was he kept in regular contact with the admissions office and made sure they (as well as the studio teacher) knew he was genuinely interested. He said his goal was to contact them often enough so that they knew who he was, but not so often as to annoy them. 