That’s a positive way to look at it lol.
lol well, i just received this response to an emailed update:
Dear ____
Thank you for your message and continued interest in the University of Pennsylvania. Please note that there is no guarantee that we will be able to admit students from the waitlist. Therefore, we encourage you to make sure you have made your deposit at a school that has offered you admission to secure your place for fall 2021.
Sincerely,
Penn Admissions
brrrrr cold as ice
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Is this just their usual formal way of responding or is it indicating that their class is pretty full? I’m going to call tomorrow to ask whether or not deferrals were considered and if that’s why the predicted yield rate was so high. But again the year before the last their class was pretty full and they still accepted 9 waitlist so I think no matter what happens there will be waitlist acceptances, just a question of how many. It’s very unlikely that no additional admission offers will be made because there are going to be people who give up Penn to attend another school if they get off that waitlist (most likely another Ivy League).
Worst case scenario, they are way over their expected class size of 2400, they would accommodate to a new class size, but even in this case there’s still going to be at least one waitlist acceptances, there’s never a year that there’s no waitlist acceptances at all (since 2000, I couldn’t find exact data before that).
2nd call to admissions after Commitment Day:
The lady said that they can not provide any information on how the class is filling up right now since they are still reviewing and evaluating (they want a well rounded class so to an extent they don’t just accept the best waitlisted candidate but instead the one they need the most so for example they can be looking for a male that plays soccer in Wyoming). She also said the usual thing of decisions will be going out on a rolling basis from May to June. (I suspect that information will be available by next week or they would at least be able to provide information to how the class is filling up).
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where did you find their predicted yield?
doing god’s work
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by the way the admissions office still hasn’t reached back to me about my “missing items” idk what to do at the moment, I hope something isn’t off
The have always had a anticipated class of about 2400 people so I just divided the amount of people they accepted this year by the intended class size. In this cases it is 3202/2500=~75% which is a lot higher than their average yield rate of around 68% in the last few years, however I’m not sure if some of those 2400 spots were reserved for deferrals and the exact number of deferrals or if it’s just due to special circumstances and possibly a new admissions dean so they decided to predict a higher yield rate, I asked when I call previously but they weren’t giving a definite answer. I’ll ask if seats are reserved for deferrals when I call next time.
Did you try calling them directly?
no, I emailed and asked and all was said was that they could only send an email to the admissions team and that they would follow back to me about it
I’m kind of confused, you emailed the admissions team and they told you that they’ll email admissions? Or did you email someone else? Also I suggest you calling because it is the fastest way to get answers.
i emailed the west coast admissions team which basically referred me to this email, applicants@admissions.upenn.edu. Upon emailing said address, they told me they will send me an update soon regarding what is either wrong or missing in my application; furthermore, they said they couldn’t talk about my application over the phone because they needed to basically review and look over it again which is going to take time. Im gonna stick it out and wait for the email to come through, but I’m worried that I found this error too late; as mid may is approaching and the first wave of decisions should be expected to come out in the next week or two.
Oh okay, don’t worry though. I personally believe that it shouldn’t be a major problem affecting your admission decision, it’s most likely going to be a missing financial aid document because you would not have been waitlisted if something major was missing.
i did some skulking and found the email address for my admissions reader - ended up sending them the longest email. no response 
When did you send it? Did you write something like a LOCI?
Just a question out of curiosity, how long were your LOCIs? Mine was three pages double spaced.
800 words, three pages, double spaced aswell. I also included two more Letters of recommendations
yeah that makes sense. But there were about 200 deferrals so if you subtract them from target class size of 2400, the expected yield rate is 69% which is in line with previous years which would make a lot of sense.
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For Fall 2019, 2932 were offered a place on the waitlist and 2,051 accepted. Only 101 were admitted from the waitlist. The total admit number was 3,446. I read a reliable source that said for every 1 spot that needs to be filled from the waitlist, about 4 to 5 offers were made since only about 1 in 5 applicants will actually make the change once committed to a school–and the closer to the school year, the less likely an applicant will switch. Most waitlist candidates will stick with their first choice, but the best chance of getting WL people is earlier than later. This number isn’t reported on the Common Data Set, but based on what is available AND that 1:4 or 1:5 stat, it means in 2019:
3446 total applicants were offered admission
2992 of those offers were “original” (not waitlist) offers
454 are waitlist offers (estimate splitting difference between 1:4 or 1:5 waitlist enroll to admit)
692 original offers had to be refused to leave 101 spots available for the WL to fill
23% of original offers were refused
The big question (for us and for the schools) is whether the high number of applications will make that percent of original offers refused go below the normal 23% or higher than the normal 23%. Based on all the press about most schools going bonkers with setting high numbers on the waitlists, most think that percentage will go up, but schools like the Ivies are thinking it will go down. AND all are still worried about high Gap-year numbers again, but maybe not as worried as last year.
My math could be off and I was estimating too.
Do you guys think the refusal percentage is gonna go up or down for the Ivies?