WaPo article about waitlists today. I didn’t see anything shocking to me, but maybe interesting to those on the waitlist who don’t know much about how they work.
Interesting. Thanks for posting.
Seems like some schools plan to go to the wl from the get go to avoid over enrolling and manage the final admit number more closely
I think most schools we talk about out here would like to undershoot slightly in their initial yield, then pull a small number from the waitlist. Yield management is tough, though. It would be interesting to do a study of colleges that had particularly good or particularly bad news come out between their initial acceptances and May 1, and see how the yield compares between years for them.
Selective schools always try to undershoot as they can always go to the waitlist but overenrolling causes problems.
But as using the WL can also help with admit and yield numbers, don’t be surprised if more schools (especially outside the very tippy-top) start using the WL more aggressively and fill a greater and greater percentage of their class from the WL.
Besides Case, look at the WL numbers for Macalester, UCI, UConn, and UIUC.
The WL will soon be the 3rd round of admissions (4th if you count ED2).
Outside the top schools. I think they get nervous they will not fill their class – look at St. Mary’s College of Maryland a couple years ago – they darned near went under after a serious yield miscalculation resulted in not enough students.
@intparent, LACs and others that are far below the top tier, sure.
I’m quite certain that CWRU, Macalester, UConn, UCI, and UIUC are not worried about not filling their class. In that tier just below the tippytop, I think you’ll see more and more aggressive WL usage.
And that practice could spread upwards as well.
I don’t really see that as a trend. Most colleges use software (or external 3rd parties who use the software) to calculate their expected yield based in past response. They usually don’t do too badly, unless there is a blip in school news or if they made a big change in their recruiting & admissions strategy that year (what happened to St. Mary’s).
Agree to disagree.
I see an increase in number of schools engaging in a certain strategy as a trend.
How many schools were filling 10-40% of their class through the WL a decade or 2 ago?
They get a lot more applications now – yield projection is more difficult. But I don’t belive know most schools are shooting for 10-40% of their class from their waitlist, nor go I believe they will start doing so. This list shows one year’s data – you can’t identify a trend without a lot more analysis.
@intparent, true.
CWRU has been using the WL heavily for a few years now, though.
Yes, but one school doesn’t make a trend.
The aggressive use of WL is to improve the fake yield rate so that the school can rank higher on the US News.
As the article says, Case targetted to enroll 1250 and admitted 518 off WL. Obviously the yield rate for applicants off the WL (assuming they confirm to stay which means they don’t have better choices) is much higher. Typical Tufts syndrome. It does offer acceptances to lesser candidates and put better ones on WL since those are more likely to be accepted at better schools. So I believe when it says people off WL can be stronger than the regular admissions.
Same with Vanderbilt. Ask people to double confirm their intent. Why is that? To make sure the yield rate for those can approach 100%.
In theory, schools can put all applicants they want to accept on WL and ask people to confirm again before giving official acceptances. That will yield almost 100%. But that would be too obvious.
So it’s very easy to solve this problem. Just get US News to take off the yield rate as one of the components for ranking the school’s “competitiveness”.
I think yield included WL applicants who end up attending in the end. So that doesn’t make sense.
@intparent, you may be right and I am be wrong, but as the incentives are there to game the numbers (you just need to look on some selection threads to see just how much crazy importance many still attach to the USNews rankings), I’m confident in my prediction that more schools will aggressively use the WL and the WL round will become round 3 of admissions. As well as other USNews gaming measures such as guaranteed transfers, delayed admission, and sending kids abroad first term (Cornell, USC, NYU, and NEU among others already engage in one or more of these practices).
As I mentioned elsewhere, the only schools in the top 40 who don’t engage in these practices or have a restrictive early round are UChicago, MIT, and CalTech.
Already, some elites fill less than half their student body through RD. In a decade, I believe that will be true for most of the top 50.
Obviously, this is bad for poor kids.
@intparent, if yield numbers for WL admits are much higher than for RD admits (which is almost certainly the case), then admitting more of the class from the WL would improve yield numbers.
ED is not waitlist – that is a different discussion. And ultimately, a WL admission is an RD admission, just with later timing.
@intparent, I’m surprised that you don’t seem to get the math.
Hypothetically, let’s say a school like Case Western may only have a yield of 20% on their RD acceptances. That is, 4 of 5 likely have better places to go.
However, on the WL people, for those who sign up to stay on the waitlist, they likely don’t have better choices than Case. Otherwise they won’t bother to sign up.
So if they were offered acceptances, the yield on that group may be 80%.
So now let’s say the school plans to have 1000 enrollments from RD. And it offers 3000 RD acceptances which yields 600 coming. It then offers 500 WL acceptances (of course only to those who sign up) which yields 400 coming.
That’s a total of 1000 out of 3500 total acceptances. Its yield rate just jumps to 30%.
It’s not because the school is more preferred as the yield rate will be intepreted by the US News. Rather it waits so that it can choose from the people who it knows now will more likely to come.
Guessing that the WL students often have lower stats on average, thus pushing down the test score averages. Which also play into rankings.
Who says that WL students will have lower stats? They will always have plenty of high stats applicants left.
I know Case offered admissions to lower stats students and purposely put the high stats ones to WL because they are likely to have better chocies. Most of those do, so probability wise, Case is doing the right thing in term of yield management.
But I would imagine with a large pool, there will be plenty of those missing top schools for one reason or no reason. Case can then pick from those. That’s why the article says the quality of the students accepted out of WL is stronger than the regular applicants and I believe that. These days, stats are the easiest part to manage for school regarding admissions.
BTW, I’m just using Case as an example. There are plenty of schools playing this game to boost their “prestige”.