<p>I watched this PBS thing where they described the admissions process for Amherst College. They accept basically twice as many students as they have room for, knowing a lot of them will go to other schools, and then take people off the waitlist.</p>
<p>My question is, theoretically, what would happen if more students accepted the admissions offer than there's room for in the freshman class? Would some poor kid at the bottom of the freshman class have his acceptance revoked and have to scramble for another school?</p>
<p>At the University of Missouri - Columbia, they always accept more kids than they have dorm space for and have to rent rooms from nearby Stephens College to house everyone until the dropouts provide enough dorm space.</p>
<p>I read that at some school (don't remember which one, because it was from another one of those countless college guides) one year more accepted people decided to go than predicted. What they did was since there were too many students they offered a year of free tuition to the first few students who were willing to just live off campus and have a whole year of no classes so that the dorms wouldn't be overflowing and the classes wouldn't be oversized. However, most colleges are already "comfortable" with how many people decide to attend and how many do not so they know how many to accept, so it should be pretty rare.</p>
<p>Cornell is over-enrolled for its freshman class. We'll see how that goes over...</p>
<p>I've heard of colleges converting dorms (doubles to triples, quads to bigger suites, etc) to accomodate the extra students.
There's no real alternative though--there's no school that has 100% yield rate, so they have to accept extra to make up for that.</p>
<p>Generally, colleges find additional living space by buying local apartment buildings, scouring existing dorms for space, and the like. It is a zero probability that all the students accepted will actually matriculate, but class size does fluctuate based on sheer statistical fluctuation.</p>