<p>oldoldadd,</p>
<p>Regarding Stanford admission, I have heard some people said Stanford's is a bit more quirky than others. But I have never seen anyone saying Stanford is practicing yield protection. Stanford doesn't need to.</p>
<p>I will say that until I know more about the actual data that I am not sure what the approach really is. Also I would like to wait until April 30 to see what happens at the other top schools. Application numbers are getting unbelievable and each year I think colleges are having a tougher time trying to figure out the best way to handle them. I think now it goes way beyond rankings. I really do think EA etc has really created a mess and I mean it when I say I would hate to have to try to make the call on all of these top kids. Having said that I do not believe there is on adcom member who doesn't have heart ache at the thought of waitlisting or rejecting these top kids. They are human and many are parents too. It can't be a fun task.</p>
<p>There's nothing wrong with washu's adcom committee making a conscious decision to choose candidates who seem most likely to accept the offer of admission. Happy students who want to be there make for a happy campus. This is a common philosophy in other top schools as well. If that means they waitlist rather than reject stellar candidates who might seem likely to choose to attend elsewhere, so what? It's a private college and administrators can choose the freshman class as they see fit. </p>
<pre><code>BTW, I believe that USNWR stopped using yield statistics in its ranking methodology about two years ago. Why not think of this another way: rather than protecting yield, what the washu adcoms are doing by refusing admission to top candidates likely to go elsewhere is protecting spots in the freshman class so they can offer them to top candidates who are likely to accept.
</code></pre>
<p>Jazzymom: Good points</p>
<p>jazzymom,</p>
<p>Actually, yield is implicitly tied to acceptance rate, which USNews does look at. If a school has high yield, then it can accept less to fill its class.</p>
<p>Sam I think you may be trying to suggest a more sinister motive for something than exists and it may be just as jazzymom states... or we are only seeing a small piece of the total picture. Let's see how this all plays out.</p>
<p>Oldolddad -</p>
<p>I think that most agree that WashU has been playing the rankings game for awhile - no harm in that. However, it is going to be difficult for you or anyone else to argue that WashU isn't manipulating its acceptance rate to some extent, particularly with its very large waitlist this year. Of course, CC is merely a sample of students that applied, but a quick glance at the WashU decisions thread compared to others shows that WashU probably waitlists a much larger percentage of applicants than other top schools. Whatever the motive may be, it will ultimately help keep the acceptance rate low.</p>
<p>How many other schools RD do we have so far?</p>
<p>oldoddadd,</p>
<p>It's true that most other schools haven't released their RD yet. But this is not the first year WashU has a huge waitlist; it's been several years they've been doing it already. Maybe we will see copycat though.</p>
<p>I think you are confusing me with others. jazzymom was responding to those who claimed WashU is practicing yield protection by not accepting those who likely go to HYPS. I wasn't talking about yield protection. I've been giving the reason why the waitlist is unusually long, without commenting the quality of the waitlists/admits.</p>
<p>Sam, if the acceptance rate is around 18%, the available spots are 1350, how many kids they should accept to have an acceptance shield of 38-40%? Once you get the number, do you think the waitlist would change them?
What I see is that WUSTL doesn’t want to hurt the kids’ feelings, they know those kids had amazing stats but they can’t offer admission to every single amazing kid, so they have to reject them making them feel inferior or just saying to them “you’re very good, but I already filled the spots, so if you really want to be here, you have a last chance by accepting the place in the waitlist and wait if there are more available spots in the future”. It’s much better than a plain rejection as I see with many amazing kids that applied to other colleges.
Cornell University has another approach, they have the “guarantee transfer after freshman year” that it works the same, if there are spots; they fill them with these kids.
And it isn’t true that WUSTL waitlist the kids that could be accepted by the Ivies, my S got into the Ivies even with a Dean Merit Scholarship at Cornell Engineering, and he was accepted by WUSTL, and there are many kids with him with no merit scholarships that were accepted by the Ivies. One thing is for sure, if WUSTL wasn’t in St. Louis but close to Boston or NYC, no one would complain.</p>
<p>Two points; 22,000 applications and here on CC we have heard from 100 or maybe 200 people. Who, with any credibility, can make ANY conclusions about how big the wait list is? If 10% of very high SAT"s (etc.) are rejected and that's all we hear about, that means that 90% are accepted and only the 10% are making noise.</p>
<p>Second point: It's OK (and in fact expected) for students to manipulate their stats to make themselves look better to the colleges. Such as not reporting the lower of the 2 tests (SAT v ACT). only non-required SAT II's if the scores are good, SAT prep courses, easier classes to boost GPA, and on and on. Why is it bad if colleges do the same to boost their stats.</p>
<p>Look up hypocrisy in the dictionary</p>
<p>cressmom: I think you finally nailed it in your last line. You posted what I think a lot of folks are thinking.</p>
<p>I think trying to decide how many to accept has become problematic the last few years especially for WashU. The differene of only 3 % or so on yield gives them 100 more students and real housing headaches. If there are 23000 applicants 400 waitlisted seems big (to throw throw out a number) but is only 2% of the pool.</p>
<p>Cressmom, Skidmore (in NY) handles admissions and waitlists as WUSTL does, only on a smaller scale, and people do indeed complain. It has gotten so bad at both schools that many guidance counselors are recommending against applying to these schools at all unless a student falls in the middle range of the published stats. That's not to say that those with top stats don't get in--they do--, just that it's actually MORE difficult to get in with stellar stats than it is with merely good stats. At the Ivies, for example, you want to be at the upper range of their stats, not in the middle, to improve your odds. This is a critical difference. Yes, all top schools are somewhat unpredictable with their admissions, but WUSTL and Skidmore overuse the waitlist, in part to see which students at the top of their pool will most likely attend.</p>
<p>To make things even worse for students, WUSTL sends out mass mailings throughout the year to entice as many students as possible to apply. This automatically increases their selectivity because of the volume of applications. Nothing wrong with that. However, many students end up applying who don't have a chance of getting in because their stats don't measure up; they apply anyway because they get the (false) sense that they are being recruited.</p>
<p>Oldolddad, I appreciate your loyalty to WUSTL and your years as an educator, but WUSTL's practices are well-known among guidance counselors and those in higher education. Of course, if these practices improve the quality of the student body, then admissions has chosen the correct course. I question, however, how much they've limited themselves by this practice. What if the student body would be a notch better because they accepted those only at the top of their applicant pool? They seem to be assuming that the best won't attend their school. That kind of inferiority complex might hurt them in the long run, especially when this current population bubble bursts.</p>
<p>Since WUSTL overenrolled last year, it only would make sense that they would waitlist more students this year.</p>
<p>I do not have a particular loyalty as I like many(personlly I think there are at least 100 top schools or more) and all the one's that my own kids and students have appplied to(some are way down the list with zero postings on CC). I think if you just look at absolute numbers of NMF who attend and the selectivity rating on the same lists that everbody uses to say how good a place is compared to WashU, you will see they have lots of good students. There was an interesting thread, I believe it was on the MIT site, where kids were claiming that MIT was rejecting high SAT kids, many with perfect scores. So I do not see where things are that different here. Interestingly enough my kids were interested in Wash U before they saw any of the brochures etc. We knew about a long time ago. But if everybody "knows what they do " why do so many apply still apply? And then turn around and blast them. If theey are as smart as they think why do they play the game? I can list perfect score candidates who did not get into HYPS and could have made the statement that it would have been better to not score so high. Imagine telling a kid not to do well. Interestingly enough all the top scoring kids I have known have gotten accepted to Wash U. What is nice for any of these schools is that they have the luxury to pick and choose what they want for a class. There is quite a variety. When a school does that there are going to be a ton of really really good kids that are going to feel shafted--and rightly so. But I think that it is not a good idea to pick any school that you would not really want to go to or just to "throw in an app" or to consider any of many schools a safety.Fortunately, there are a ton of good places and all these kids will get into one or more of them.</p>
<p>Momwaitingfornew, Are you saying that kids apply to Wash U just because the received mail from it? Do you apply to all the credit cards you got mail from? That makes no sense at all. I would not accept that a guidance counselor give my kids such advice, every kid should decided if he wants to apply to X college. It is not all about stats, my S had one of the highest SAT scores at his high school since freshman year, 12 APs with 5 and he was accepted at Wash U, and he is very happy there. Are you saying that he shouldn’t apply to Wash U because he was at the highest level possible? That makes no sense either. Kids are more than stats, they have very interesting lives and their essays should reflect that.
My kids received tons of mail from every college even the Ivies (Harvard and Cornell were at the top of the senders), but they were wise enough to do their homework and my S applied to only 4 schools and my D just one; maybe we are creating too much anxiety in our children making them to apply even where they don’t want to go.</p>
<p>Momwaiting:</p>
<p>I can't believe that guidance counselors, seeing the spread of scores of admitted washu students, would be foolish enough to advise students to only apply if their scores fall in the middle. Washu accepts many top scoring students; it simply can't accept all who apply. It can't accept every high scorer from certain high schools and it can't accept every high scorer from certain parts of the country --- just as other top schools are limited as to how many top scorers they can accept. They can't accept every qualified, stellar-on-paper student who applies with an eye toward its medical school and pre-med preparation. Sheer numbers prevent that. Out of the freshman class it selects, it wants future engineers, doctors, research scientists, architects, visual artists etc. It also wants to accept students who don't know their majors yet, who want to try out the integrated humanities program or the other unique integrated programs washu offers. My S was an NMF from CA with an SAT score of 2310 and an ACT of 35 and yes, he was accepted along with acceptances from other much touted colleges on these boards. It would have been sheer folly for a guidance counselor to tell him not to apply to washu.</p>
<p>Sam where are you?
Oh no! MIT just posted their admit stats for this year. 12443 app, 1533 accepted, 500 waitlisted. Hmm, about same or greater waitlist ratio for accepted to applied then Wustl. They join Caltech who has proportionately even more. I thought Wustl was the only school waitlisting large numbers? MIT usually has a 67% yield or so too. I'll bet the stats on the waitlists are pretty good too.</p>
<p>yeah we get it. the use of a waitlist is not uncommon.</p>
<p>oldoldadd,</p>
<p>I am here. MIT's number is nothing out of ordinary. The 1000 I vaguely remember I saw, if it's even what I really saw or not something someone just made up, is likely the number of students decided to stay on the waitlist, not the number of students receiving waitlist decision. I have no idea why you said that's about same or greater waitlist ratio for accepted to applied then Wustl. Are you saying this out of bias?</p>
<p>Last year or the year before, I would see kids on CC saying they knew 5 waitlisted and 1 rejected or things ridiculous like that. Pretty much all of them that came to CC to comment said they knew more waitlists then rejects, as far as I can remember. MIT wasn't like that at all and I am not surprised at all for MIT number. 500 out of 12443 is a tiny fraction, nothing like what I saw or what we have now for WashU.</p>