<p>Anyone know how many WashU waitlists, how many accept, and then how many actaully get off on average each year?</p>
<p>No one seems to know how many students they actually offer a spot on their Wait List to. I’m sure if you call the admissions office, they might tell you, but they don’t publicize that information anywhere.
The size of any school’s wait list, though, isn’t known until after May 1 (the national deposit deadline). Wash U will offer you a spot on the wait list… you can choose to respond and accept a spot there, or not. I imagine that their response rate varies considerably from year to year.</p>
<p>I was wait listed last year, and I called the admissions office to see how many people were actually accepted from it. The girl said that about 100 people were accepted from the wait list in the year before, but a couple years ago (I guess 3 or 4 years ago at this point), they didn’t accept anyone from the wait list, because more people who were accepted said Yes than they predicted.</p>
<p>Last year Harvard accepted 200 people from the Wait List, and some of the other Ivies accepted that many as well. At Penn, there were about 700 people wait listed, and the newspaper said that 25% of the kids were accepted. I doubt the acceptance rate will be anywhere near that high for Wash U, but its useful to do some benchmarking.</p>
<p>It’s hard to predict how many people they will actually accept from the wait list in any given year, but I guess they always plan to use it if they have room. It varies from year to year… the wait list at any school is the “buffer” to round out the freshman class size so they can reach the precise enrollment that they want.</p>
<p>With the economy nowadays, it’s going to be even more complicated and hard to predict what colleges will do.</p>
<p>I am going to guess that they will take a good amount of applicants from the waitlist this year. While guestimating the number, I reminded myself of what a waitlist really is: a tool/ saftey net for colleges to handle uncertainty in yield (the percentage of accepted students who enroll). So the more uncertainty there is for a college, the more likely a college will utilize their waitlist. In other words, the more uncertainty, the less people they will accept and the more they will place on the waitlist. This year is certainly a year of uncertainty because most colleges are not sure how the poor economy/large applicant pool will affect their yield. So to be on the safe side, Wash U probably accepted less and wailisted more in case their yield ends up growing. They do not want to be caught in the situation where more applicants enroll than there is room for. So if the yield drops or remains the same, they will go on to accept many students off the waitlist. </p>
<p>From what I have heard, Wash U has not been giving great aid/ scholarships. Considering most of their accepted students get into similarly prestigious colleges which offer similar/better aid, I feel the yield cannot increase. Please note, I may be completely wrong.</p>
<p>I am on the waitlist, and I really do not know what I will do if I am called off of it. Once again, the age old question of a 4.0 at a less prestigious school or a lower GPA at a place like Wash U, which is highly regarded among top med schools, presents itself. Yikes! I think I would gravitate to the former, as I don’t want to risk failing intro chem or ochem! And there is always transferring to Wash U and bypassing those classes there…why does this have to be so complicated?! </p>
<p>Back to the topic though…I agree with you waitn184, as that seems to be the general consensus based on hearsay.</p>
<p>Does anyone know the size of the waitlist for NYU? How many got accepted from the waitlist last year?</p>
<p>@keepitcoolidge, the Ivies never accept that many people off of a waitlist… Harvard’s waitlist acceptance rate is generally ~2% and for other Ivies it’s around the same. Each year, about 25-30 people are taken off the waitlist for the Ivives. Also, WashU generally has an extraordinarily high amount of people taken off the waitlist because only about30% of accepted people actually choose to go to WashU.</p>
<p>@creamandcheese64:</p>
<p>I just wrote what I found out last year from Wash U’s admissions office. It would surprise me if this was incorrect. For example, this year Wash U had 23,000 applications. Their acceptance rate hovers between 17-20%. If you assume that they had a 18.5% acceptance rate (just for sake of argument), then they will have accepted a total of 4,250 people. With their overall yield of 33%, that gives them a freshman class size of 1,400 people, which is about the size of their freshman class. Given the fact that some people ultimately cancel coming to Wash U after already saying “yes”, and that my numbers are rough estimates, there is no way Wash U accepts more than 100 from the wait list, which is in line with what I was told last year anyway.</p>
<p>Although you need to keep in mind that my numbers are rough estimates, colleges’ acceptance rates and yields don’t change more than a couple of percentage points AT THE MOST in any given year. Even if they accepted 16% or 21% of people, or their yield changes to 32% or 34%, the estimates still do not provide leaway for more than 100 people to come from the Wait List given the fact that their freshman class size will always be around 1,400 people (plus or minus a few dozen due to whatever reason… you cannot plan it exactly)</p>
<p>The data from Penn is from Penn’s newspaper. </p>
<p>Harvard did indeed take 200 people off their wait list last year (I don’t remember how many were on it).</p>
<p>Yale accepted 60 from 1,052 students on their wait list last year.</p>
<p>Princeton took nearly 100 from a 1,000 person wait list.</p>
<p>You can find all of this information by googling, looking at the CC boards from last year, or looking at their student newspapers which have direct quotes from the schools’ admissions directors.</p>
<p>Pleased don’t hypothesize/overgeneralize about waitlist numbers creamandcheese64. Keepitcoolidge is correct about some of the Ivies dipping quite a bit into their waitlists last year.</p>
<p>I would guess that Wash U is well aware of their average yield rate (as are other schools - Ivy or not) and manages their number of acceptances to take this into account. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t (for WashU and for even the Ivies)…WashU’s class of 2010 did not take any from the waitlist as more students accepted WashU than expected. In contrast, last year (class of '12), they did go to their waitlist. I cannot speak to other years, as I do not have any personal experience with them.</p>
<p>Who knows what this year will bring…</p>
<p>I have the feeling that this year, past percentages of waitlisted–>accepted will be irrelevant, especially for an expensive school such as WashU. Lots of people I have talked to, even those who received half-scholarships at the Scholarship weekend, are going where they received full-rides, be that a state school or a lower-ranked private. And those are the kids with half-rides… imagine how many that aren’t getting the big money are going to struggle to come up with the money and end up going somewhere else. This is also especially true for WashU since many students at WashU have plans for grad school and need to save the money until then w/o going into debt. I would imagine the waitlist to be used fairly extensively this year in comparison to past years.</p>
<p>Agreed. I think scholarships/FA for Wash U were mediocre/inadequate in comparison to those offered by similarly ranked schools; so even those who can afford half rides have a good chance of attending a different school.</p>
<p>Colleges realize this is a crazy year for college admissions due to the economy and the class size. When in doubt, they under-accept and utilize their waitlists because then they can easily manage the class size to fit the college’s housing/classroom capacity. They never want to over-accept students because more students might accept admission than the college has room for. I think they will somewhat disregard avergae yield statistics they have gathered due to the perplexity of admissions this specific year.</p>
<p>I recently read an article about the waitlist in that last year, a lot of colleges found that they had too many spaces left over after may 1 and thus may have accepted a lot more from the waitlist than in previous years. So hence, the huge number of people accepted from the waitlist last year compared to before = more hope for people :D</p>
<p>I am not sure if I will attend Wash U if taken off the waitlist. Its either full tuition at Wash U or half tuition at Case (ranked 44 or something close to that in USNEWS). My family can afford either.</p>
<p>newprov - we are one case that was exactly what you outline. My D was accepted Wash U with no money, and got full tuition (merit) to Tulane. She liked both schools but would have preferred Wash U. When Wash U turned her down for any merit money her reaction was “Maybe I preferred Wash U, but not $150,000 worth!” and of course it will actually be a bit more than that. I am hearing from lots of people that they are weighing financial considerations against prestige/quality of peer students more than ever, and that is hurting some of the elite privates that are skimpier with merit aid (or give none). I am sure the Harvards, Princetons, etc. will survive just fine, but that next tier is probably seeing a hit. I guess we will see how true that turns out to be. Wash U, at least, never was need blind, so that might be an interesting factor as well.</p>
<p>waitin184 - I have no idea why or where you came up with the following statement “From what I have heard, Wash U has not been giving great aid/ scholarships.” WashU increased the amount of both financial and merit aid this year. In the future you might want to check your facts before posting hearsay. The financial numbers are all about how much a school wanrs a particular applicant. You may be assured, schools like WashU will have no problem filling next year’s freshman class with very high quality applicants.</p>
<p>As pointed out previously by other posters - this indeed will be an interesting year for WL. Past indicators or statistics may or may not have any bearing on what takes place this year. More admissions people are having sleepless nights leading up to may 1. Finaly - the revenge of the applicant takes place. Don’t be surprised if you begin seeing WL movement at many schools within the next week or two. Early numbers are starting to show conversion trends.</p>
<p>congrats fallenchemist (and to your daughter)-- I have a friend at Tulane. She says she is having an amazing time, as will your daughter I’m sure. Another great school that is fun to be at, especially if you have a full ride :)</p>
<p>D’s prep school has 4 year aggregated data for waitlist on Naviance. Of all schools, Washington U stands out as the school that extends Lots and Lots of wait list spots, but never accepts anybody. Example: Out of 83 applications, 11 were admitted, 31 were extended wait list spots. ZERO were admitted from the wait list. </p>
<p>Dartmouth and Bucknell had similar number although in magnitude WUSTL was in a class of its own.</p>
<p>Frankly, I am at a loss to understand what toadstool’s data means. First, from a scientific point of view, it is meaningless because it has a small sample size that is self reported, from what I can see. This is unsound methodology for reaching true conclusions. But let’s just, for the sake of argument, assume this would hold true if all data points could be analyzed for all universities. What conclusion are we supposed to reach regarding this? Is it really surprising that a school like Wash U that has risen rapidly over the past 20 years or so and is getting more and more well known nationally and internationally would have a large waitlist of highly qualified candidates? And that based on the fact that apparently a lot of kids, after visiting, think Wash U is exactly what they want that there are few taken off the wait list? Sure, maybe to some degree they waitlist extremely qualified people they think are far more likely to choose other schools, based on not showing much real interest in Wash U or by their historical profiles or whatever. Given the (completely ridiculous) obsession with the USNWR rankings parents and prospective students have, who can blame them for wanting to tweak the stats? I suspect this is actually a very small factor though.</p>
<p>The only reason Harvard, et. al. do not waitlist as many as Wash U (if that is even true) is because they know from long experience that they will get a very high acceptance rate on their offer, and therefore they don’t have to. The head of Harvard admissions once said they could take the top 2,000 students they rejected for an offer of admission and not lose an ounce of quality. Sure they could waitlist all those kids, but they don’t have to and therefore don’t keep them hanging.</p>
<p>All these schools do what they do for good reasons, both their own self-interest and in the interest of the students. All this paranoia is silly, as is any animosity towards Wash U for their just doing what they need to in order to make sure they get the highest quality class they can without overextending themselves. I cannot see what is wrong with that.</p>
<p>FWIW, my public HS shows similar stats to toadstool’s prep school:</p>
<p>This year, we had 15ish applicants, 2 acceptances, 9 WLs, and 4 rejections to WashU.</p>
<p>I looked into the school’s prior data with a counselor; in the last decade, close to sixty applicants were placed on the waitlist, while only four were removed.</p>
<p>Any one can have my seat. I can not pay 225 K for my UNDER grad .I am not eligible for FA.
I will go to SLU for 93 K as a med scholar.</p>
<p>I will work hard & Try to get in to med school.</p>
<p>They want our house as a lien …with 6.25 % interest.
Good luck to those who can afford !!!</p>