<p>^ rubbish.</p>
<p>I was also accepted to USC, and got a likely letter from Columbia, and I'm in the same boat as you for WUSTL. Have some patience :)</p>
<p>My family's EFC is 0. WashU didn't seem to care, since I was accepted. People were waitlisted with much better credentials than mine. Therefore, I don't think need could have played THAT big of a role in this game. I think it's a way to pin the blame on something that is outside the applicant's power. If it was the essays, then it was THEIR fault. But finances isn't, so it MUST be that.
I mean, yes, college admissions is quite subjective and there will always be some randomness. However, there is definitely a method to their madness, and that method isn't purely need based.</p>
<p>rodney - Sorry for the delayed answer, but I was in meetings for most of the morning. You are right regarding thr timing for the WL going active. Once the initial responses have been received, the intent is to establish a trend for acceptances. Once a meaningful trend (statistically suficient to allow for potential projections) has been established, the WL will become active. It is very possible that may take place before May 1 this year. But only time will tell if that will be the case or not.</p>
<p>For all of you who have been waitlisted at WUSTL, don't feel bad. As a resident of St Louis, it is well known here that Wash U plays admission "games." They purposely do not take the best applicants because they know they will go elsewhere anyway. They DO want a high yield to try to increase their prestige, and I suspect ultimately this will be self-defeating, because sooner or later everyone will catch on and stop applying. I had one child who went to Wash U, and one who got in and elected not to (went to USC). I can tell you from first hand experience the one who went to USC was FAR happier and got (in my opinion) a much better all around education. Don't be fooled by a school's games--do you really want to go to a school that has their self interest above the students'? Those of you who got in other prestigious schools (I suspect the majority of you will), consider yourself lucky you weren't fooled into thinking Wash U was the equivalent of the ones you will end up in.</p>
<p>I was waitlisted by Wash. U. and now I have lost all hope for getting into my top schools.
I figured that with almost perfect grades and a hook like Art would help me to get it.</p>
<p>GPA: 4.0 QPA: 5.5
SAT: 2100 (720 Writing, 720 Math, 660 Reading)
AP: 5 English Lang. and Comp, 3 US History, 3 Calc AB, 5 Drawing, 5 2-D Design
(AP Scholar with Distinction)
Officer for school's NAHS, member of NHS, Key Club, Model UN
Travelled abroad with MICA to a 3 week painting trip to Italy
Travelled to Colorado for MWSAF Summer Seminar for 2 weeks
Have an incredibly extensive portfolio of art
NFAA youngARTS Honorable Mention
7 Scholastics Gold Keys
1 Scholastics National Silver Medal</p>
<p>Guess I should've applied to the College of Art, in hopes of getting into Wash.U...maybe it's as not as a big of a hook as I thought.</p>
<p>well i don't know about overly qualifying students being wait-listed</p>
<p>at my school me and the other one(washu was not among his top choice) got wait-listed
but this extremely smart guy(altho deffered at yale...hmm..but surprisingly washu is one of his top choices) got accepted </p>
<p>i don't know maybe WahsU is playing the "game"</p>
<p>but i don't consider myself as "qulified" student, actually I expected to get denied lol
so this result doesn't really depress me lol also b/c Washu wasn't my top choice</p>
<p>anyway
this result however does worry me about the brown/Cornell- which is my top choice-</p>
<p>i'm scared :(</p>
<p>i was waitlisted
wash u was a reach for me, and was the most selective school on my list- so i see it as a good chance for the rest of my list
hey at least it wasnt a rejection- but i wish it was an acceptance</p>
<p>WashU would be extremely stupid to play these games, as they would be chasing away their best applicants. WashU was among my top 3 schools, and all of my stats are higher than their averages. My EFC is sort of low though, and being asian never helps. I'm just hoping for acceptances elsewhere that would give me a good deal financially</p>
<p>The letter said that WL-ers are accepted according to "fit" but do they have a general list for each major based on the quality of the application? Do we just send supplementary stuff in to admissions if we want another shot?</p>
<p>I got waitlisted but it doesn't really matter. Received my Dartmouth likely letter a week ago, so I could care less about WashU. I don't blame them for trying to play a high-yield game, so this was expected.</p>
<p>I got a Duke likely the day after being waitlisted by WUSTL. </p>
<p>Add this to my Columbia likely and you can see that WUSTL DEFINITELY is no indication of future decisions :P</p>
<p>yeah, i know many people in the past from my school who have absolutely dominated in school and got wait listed by WUSTL... and they got into HYPSM, Penn, and Columbia</p>
<p>plus, i'm in the WUSTL wait list group this year, and I hope I follow that past trend and get into H, Y, P, and/or M</p>
<p>Or maybe WUSTL admissions are as seemingly subjective and complex as HYPSM admissions?</p>
<p>^ that's the point we were making lol</p>
<p>grrrr. does anybody know the percentage stats? like, how many of the applicants were waitlisted?</p>
<p>Or maybe WUSTL admissions are as seemingly subjective and complex as HYPSM admissions?
^^^^^^^^^
makes more sense!</p>
<p>Or maybe they don't want to admit overqualified kids who will likely go elsewhere? Anyone heard of 'Tufts Syndrome'? WashU has it, and it has it bad.</p>
<p>i was using that as an excuse to make myself feel better (in response to slipper's comment)</p>
<p>but i just found out my friend got in. he is more qualified than me and this was like a safety school. he showed no interest in it. i feel worse now. FML</p>
<p>Maybe it is a combination of the two.
It's okay guys, I will be rejected from Stanford!</p>
<p>LazyAznBoy: Well not HYPS but I did apply to Penn and Cornell and now I don't see a lot of</p>
<p>I got waitlisted by WUSTL...</p>
<p>but I got a likely letter for Cornell that says "You will be offered admission"</p>
<p>So all hope is not lost...</p>
<p>I don't see myself as "Overqualified" by a long shot but IDK, I did get a likely letter from an Ivy so maybe I don't think as highly of myself as I should.</p>
<p>it seems that some people want to try to figure out why WUSTL makes certain decisions. bottom line is: you can't figure it out. you're never going to see the HYPSM boards filled with dozens of threads furious at those schools for not accepting kids. truth is -- for the past 10+ years, WUSTL has had acceptance rates on par with many of the ivies and schools ranked above WUSTL. you guys really need to realize that if you're applying to a Top 20 school, the odds are AGAINST you that you'll get in. </p>
<p>WUSTL has gained more of an national/international reputation over the past couple decades. So have other schools. If you're thinking just in terms of a silly USNews ranking anyway, UPenn is actually probably the most improved school over the years. But, no one is flaming on my school's boards because "oh, they have the Ivy League brand attached so its ok." Should we fault those Universities who try to better themselves, attracted the best and brightest students, and enhance their reputation? Or should schools just stay constant and predictable and have no aspirations? I applaud schools who are ambitious, and I really don't see any statistically significant correlation between an increase in rankings and a Wait List policy. It's on the burden of the accuser to calculate a correlation between these two things -- and no one has yet to show quantitatively how they're related. </p>
<p>WUSTL has amongst the highest SAT/GPA/Class rank averages of any school in the country. Their averages are basically identical to HYPSM and greater than many schools ranked above it. These are numbers that you can't "fudge" -- every school reports SAT scores and percentage of kids in the top 10 % of their class in the same way. If WUSTL waistlists "overqualified" applicants, then so does HYPSM. But, of course, no one is daring enough to say that "I was over-qualified for insert-ivy-name-here." </p>
<p>Someone really needs to define what "over qualified" even means. No one on this board is over-qualified. You are just qualified - plain and simple. You're qualified for WUSTL, qualified for Yale, qualified for UChicago. Qualification NEVER means Acceptance. Sure, someone can be over-qualified for some schools in America, but if you are looking at basically any school in the Top 20 -- you are not too good for any of them. If you think you are over-qualified for them, then why on earth did you waste your time applying to a school full of kids who are not as good as you? This air of superiority is really off-putting -- no wonder why WUSTL didn't take some of these people. </p>
<p>You cannot rely on anecdotes and hearsay on an internet forum to determine your impression of a school. People post things like "i had a friend last year who was Waitlisted at WUSTL and accepted by Columbia, Brown, etc". That's ONE case. There's also people who were Accepted by WUSTL and denied by Columbia and Brown. These are one-time stories and you cannot make any stretch of a quantitative impression of a school based off of a handful of anecdotes. </p>
<p>Sure, WUSTL seems to Wait list lots of people. We're not debating the merits of doing so. You just need to have an argument to back up things that you are claiming and not make a blanket statement. You simply cannot claim these people are "over qualified" or try to figure out the workings of a highly selective school's admissions committee's deliberations. There's 23,000 people applying, and the differences between most of them are likely very minor. There's an infinite number of reasons why you were or were not accepted, and trying to pin point it to ONE thing (oh - its because i needed too much money, or because i didn't do this, or did that) is a fool's errand. </p>
<p>Its best to just move on, and think about the rationale and implication of things you are trying to claim.</p>