Honestly I have no insider knowledge, except that I know some wait listed day students who did not get in various places. When you think about it, if there were no space constraints of some sort, why would any day student applicant ever be waitlisted? They’d either be admitted or not, based on qualification.
My school, like most others, I suspect, has a target student body size. Obviously, the boarding school population is fairly fixed due to beds, although the increase in yield has forced them to squeeze in a few extra. I would assume that they would not open the floodgates to day students as they want to maintain average class size, student:teacher ratio, etc., and not have to increase staff to maintain those metrics. But 1-2 extra day students is easier to add than 1-2 extra boarders.
Not enough classrooms, maybe?
If day student floodgate is open, Building/dinning room fire code capacity violations, maybe? 
It’s also true that day student population has less qualified applicants in their pool than the entire boarding applicant pool, simply because there aren’t as many applicants.
Anyways, the entire guesswork is too much to know for certain, but if Hogwarts wants and admits 10 day students, and lots of day students have a good public school, or can’t afford it, or don’t want to go, (so only about 5 accept), then their yield rate is 50%. Next year, they will predict this and admit 20, and they will reach their target of 10. Knowing that Hogwarts has existed for many years, won’t they be able to predict this, and basically come pretty close to their target? So getting off the waitlist will be hard as always, but if one or two day students throw off the scale, doesn’t it make it easier to unbalance the proportion of day students now, since there are only 8 and that’s a yield of 40%. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it seems like schools would predict much of this ahead of time and day vs boarding waitlists are pretty much the same, both based on yield from previous years. This is all going back to @mrnephew 's comment.
Basically, I think that it’s unlikely either way. This is all very depressing and disheartening.
Hogwarts has day students?
Hogsmeade is the only ALL-Wizarding Village. It has to support at least 2 taverns, a candy shop, a cafe, a clothing store, a joke shop, and it takes a few minutes for the Golden trio to walk down the street. If 1 village supports all those shops, then the population has to be around 3-5k at a minimum and the minimum #of students at Hogwarts 280 and a maximum of 1000 (JK isn’t good with #'s) it stands to reason that there must be day students. Why would someone pay the tuition to board if they can be a day student? The village was built around Hogwarts, so I bet less-affluent families moved there so that they wouldn’t have to pay as much for their children to get a good education. I assume you have to pay to go to Hogwarts (it stands to reason that in a world where so many people work for the government that the school can’t also be funded by the government and that there just couldn’t possibly be enough $ to go around). Dumbledore also gives Tom money, so I bet the school pays for Tom’s education so I’m guessing there is a financial aid program(think, Hogwarts has had a long time to grow their endowment.) Also, why would the students that live in Hogsmeade go to London to ride the train just to come back?
My numbers are iffy, but I think I make some good points. @GMTplus7
Articles that May Interest You
Population and Pupils
http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/numbers.htm
Hogwarts
http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/Britrefs.htm#Hogwarts
Location, Location
http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/Location_Location.htm
PS. I would love responses. I put time into my post above.
"One thing we do not know is whether the students who come in by train are all the students there are. The whole matter of the Hogwarts Express and Platform 9¾ is problematic: are we to understand that students who live in Glasgow or Durham have to travel all the way to London before they can get on the train, or does the train make stops to pick them up, which we haven’t been told about? My theory is that major stations throughout Britain have their own version of the walk-through barrier, and they all lead to King’s Cross on the magic side even if the mundane side is in Birmingham or Aberdeen.
However, given that Hogsmeade is a purely wizarding village, and large enough to maintain a substantial shopping centre, there must be a fair number of children at Hogwarts whose families live in Hogsmeade. It seems unlikely that children who live almost on the castle’s doorstep would be expected to go all the way to London and then take a ten-hour train-ride back, so there may well be a significant number of Hogsmeade-born students who do not come in by train and by those hundred not-really-horseless-at-all carriages. [I would expect, however, that first-years who live in Hogsmeade do come down to the station to meet the train, so they can be carried across to the castle by boat.]
Although we haven’t been told about it, it’s also possible that students from Hogsmeade do not board but go home every night. This might explain why JKR says there are five Gryffindor girls in Harry’s year and yet we only ever see three; if the other two live out they would not be in Hermione’s dormitory and would not be as much part of the social life of Gryffindor as the boarders are.
What is the population of Hogsmeade? Well, as a rough rule of thumb, where I live in south-central Scotland there are two villages very close together, which between them have ten thousand residents and at least seven pubs, or about one pub per fourteen hundred inhabitants. One pub per fourteen-hundred-head of population seems reasonable. Hogsmeade has two pubs, and that might suggest about two thousand eight hundred residents. However, those two pubs serve a substantial tourist trade, as well as the locals, so the resident population of Hogsmeade is probably only around two thousand.
How many Hogswarts students should there be among two thousand wizards and witches? Examination of all witches and wizards for whom an age at death is given on the Harry Potter Lexicon (discounting the Flamels, who are anomalous) suggests that the average lifespan of a witch or wizard is seventy-seven years. The efficiency of wizarding medicine means there probably aren’t a lot of childhood deaths, and their efficient medicine and their apparently greatly increased lifespan (as far as ageing goes) means that if they are tending to die at seventy-seven a high proportion of them are dying of things like potions accidents, not age or heart disease, so there shouldn’t be much tailing off of population as they get older, so the distribution of individuals across aged zero to seventy-seven should be fairly even.
If their population is stable, that should mean that children in the seven years of Hogwarts-age make up one eleventh of the wizarding population. If that’s wrong it will tend towards a higher proportion of children, as is the case with Muggle population demographics, so we can say that Hogwarts’-age children make up at least one eleventh of the population of the village. If Hogsmeade has about two thousand residents that means around one hundred and eighty children of Hogwarts age.
Some of those will be Squibs (and in Hogsmeade there are no compensatory Muggle-borns to make up the numbers), and some will simply choose not to go to Hogwarts, although given how handy it is there probably won’t be many of those. So at any given time there should be at least about a hundred and forty students (i.e. about twenty per year) at Hogwarts who come from Hogsmeade and who probably don’t come in on the Hogwarts Express."
I did not write this, I give credit to White-Hound Fanfiction from Masdafish.
@GryffinHunter We have a fireplace and owls fly by all the time, but no letter! There were a lot of disappointments on the 11th birthdays.
Son was accepted to BS but placed on FA wait list. Anybody have experience with this? I assume this is a better position to be in than not being accepted and being placed on the general wait list or declined. I guess we’re just waiting to see if trickle down occurs when accepted students with FA move on to other schools.
Trying to wrap my head around the school accepting him but WLing him for FA. They have basically counted him as a bed space
Hi Everyone
I read the whole chain agree a bit depressing but my DS only applied to day schools 3 of them and got WL for all of them. What are the chances with day school only?
@myrealname23 Hogwarts: the one school that didn’t WL stargirl
@Cambridge68 Chances for Day are pretty much the same as a boarding student, in that A) it is extremely small and B) there really isn’t any way to tell. If you know that pretty much all of the other accepted day students are going to decline, then sure, chances are higher, but you most likely don’t know for sure. Also, day students may have a higher yield, since there are less reasons to decline, making it harder. It’s basically very vague and the only way you will know is if something happens before April 10th
@stargirl3 I’m guessing that you declined because “fighting gigantic spiders” was not on your goals list?
@myrealname23 It was just that I preferred the Salem School of Witchcraft. It’s closer to home.
*Salem Witches’ Institute @stargirl3
@GryffinHunter They rejected me; I have the right to call them by the wrong name.
Now I’m gonna go around saying “Phillips Academy Exeter.” 
I was wondering, is it ever possible to actually get an offer from a school if you are on the waitlist. Many people have told me it is impossible especially for schools such as Choate, Milton, Nobles, Exeter, RL, Lawrenceville, or even BUA
Basically impossible. Considering most of the established schools have a pretty good idea about their yield percentages, and that the yield usually goes upward, the chances are that all spots are filled or over enrolled.