<p>You can either mail or email a response to take a place on the waiting list.</p>
<p>Some thoughts on the waitlist - and why you shouldn’t give up hope.
At Carleton, and likely most schools, every effort is made to stay safely within the aid budget when admissions decisions are made because overspending will have an effect for four years. If the guesstimates are right and it is possible to make additional offers of admission, financial need will not be taken into account when considering students on the waiting list.<br>
The science part is well understood (how many will accept can usually be predicted within a standard deviation or two), but it is not only how many will accept but who. If there are deposits from many more women than men then they’ll look to men on the waitlist. Same with geographic distribution, diversity, etc.
So “luck” for lack of a better term, plays in heavily at this point. Needing lots of aid may have less effect on the wl, than in the original decision, if you fell in the 15% or so that were considered under the “need-aware” category.</p>
<p>bvttam1012</p>
<p>Your post, #59, is absolutely wonderful. Refreshing. Humbling. Lacking an attitude of entitlement. Best of luck to you.</p>
<p>Waitlisted. upset. Carleton was my TOP choice. Does anyone know who to email about staying on the waitlist?</p>
<p>I’ve read some articles about sending additional academic information…or even something cute and creative, like writing a song, to show schools they are your number one. Anyone know what Carleton thinks of this?</p>
<p>waitlisted.
carleton was definately a school I wanted to get into. arrgghhh! I’ve been accepted to all the schools I’ve heard from so far, excluding Carleton, and I really wanna know why I wasn’t good enough! ugggghhhhh!!</p>
<p>…and yeah i’ve heard of people sending in short statements about why they should be admitted or whatever, but i’m not sure if those work or not. It can’t hurt, though. I mean, we’re waitlisted so we might as well try whatever we can to get in, it’s not like we have anything to lose. =)</p>
<p>but hey there are always other schools, right?</p>
<p>oh, and here are my stats (the very short version)
GPA: 3.97 w
SAT: 2010
main ECs: 4 years of 2 varsity sports (numerous awards, placed high in both of them), yearbook, camp counselor</p>
<p>Got my waitlist letter today. I’m more than a little heartbroken, but I suppose we’ll all end up where we’re supposed to be… right?</p>
<p>I’m waitlisted too 
Looking at the number of waitlistees that get in finally, on average, this seems to be as bad as getting rejected outright.</p>
<p>What’s eating me up right now is this: they say in the email that I had all the admission requirements and everything they needed, the only problem was space. Does this, by any chance, mean that had I applied earlier, I might just’ve been accepted??</p>
<p>imgonnaKILLmyselfifanyonesaysyes</p>
<p>Samdish, CC is not representative of the whole applicant pool by any stretch, much more people get rejected than waitlisted. Unless you applied after the deadline, applying earlier wouldn’t have helped, as the college does not differentiate between on-time applicants the date of their application.</p>
<p>This is a few of years old, but is only more pertinent today. It’s an excellent article–sad but true. </p>
<p>OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
To All the Girls I’ve Rejected</p>
<p>By JENNIFER DELAHUNTY BRITZ
Published: March 23, 2006
Gambier, Ohio</p>
<p>A FEW days ago I watched my daughter Madalyn open a thin envelope from one of the five colleges to which she had applied. “Why?” was what she was obviously asking herself as she handed me the letter saying she was waitlisted.</p>
<p>Why, indeed? She had taken the toughest courses in her high school and had done well, sat through several Saturday mornings taking SAT’s and the like, participated in the requisite number of extracurricular activities, written a heartfelt and well-phrased essay and even taken the extra step of touring the campus.</p>
<p>She had not, however, been named a National Merit finalist, dug a well for a village in Africa, or climbed to the top of Mount Rainier. She is a smart, well-meaning, hard-working teenage girl, but in this day and age of swollen applicant pools that are decidedly female, that wasn’t enough. The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today’s accomplished young women.</p>
<p>I know this well. At my own college these days, we have three applicants for every one we can admit. Just three years ago, it was two to one. Though Kenyon was a men’s college until 1969, more than 55 percent of our applicants are female, a proportion that is steadily increasing. My staff and I carefully read these young women’s essays about their passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place.</p>
<p>I was once one of those girls applying to college, but that was 30 years ago, when applying to college was only a tad more difficult than signing up for a membership at the Y. Today, it’s a complicated and prolonged dance that begins early, and for young women, there is little margin for error: A grade of C in Algebra II/Trig? Off to the waitlist you go.</p>
<p>Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions. Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women. While gulping down coffee and poring over statistics, we heard about a young woman from Kentucky we were not yet ready to admit outright. She was the leader/president/editor/captain/lead actress in every activity in her school. She had taken six advanced placement courses and had been selected for a prestigious state leadership program. In her free time, this whirlwind of achievement had accumulated more than 300 hours of community service in four different organizations.</p>
<p>Few of us sitting around the table were as talented and as directed at age 17 as this young woman. Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write “admit” next to her name.</p>
<p>Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.</p>
<p>We have told today’s young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How’s that for an unintended consequence of the women’s liberation movement?</p>
<p>The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a “tipping point,” where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you’ll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.</p>
<p>Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.</p>
<p>What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I’m sending out waitlist and rejection letters for nearly 3,000 students. Unfortunately, a majority of them will be female, young women just like my daughter. I will linger over letters, remembering individual students I’ve met, essays I loved, accomplishments I’ve admired. I know all too well that parents will ache when their talented daughters read the letters and will feel a bolt of anger at the college admissions officers who didn’t recognize how special their daughters are.</p>
<p>Yes, of course, these talented young women will all find fine places to attend college — Maddie has four acceptance letters in hand — but it doesn’t dilute the disappointment they will feel when they receive a rejection or waitlist offer.</p>
<p>I admire the brilliant successes of our daughters. To parents and the students getting thin envelopes, I apologize for the demographic realities.</p>
<p>Jennifer Delahunty Britz is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College.</p>
<p>i was waitlisted as well…but not that depressed hehe</p>
<p>Any news about the waiting list? Has anyone been accepted off the list? I’m a waitlisted international. So far I haven’t heard from them.</p>
<p>Yes, Carleton has accepted people off the waitlist this year. Don’t know about internationals.</p>
<p>Interesting side note about the above article by the Kenyon admissions VP Jennifer Delahunty Britz – she’s a Carleton grad.</p>
<p>After a wrenching decision, ds turned down an offer off the waitlist. Maybe they’ll be making more offers.</p>
<p>Good luck to your son, doughmom!</p>
<p>"Waitlisted. upset. Carleton was my TOP choice. Does anyone know who to email about staying on the waitlist?</p>
<p>I’ve read some articles about sending additional academic information…or even something cute and creative, like writing a song, to show schools they are your number one. Anyone know what Carleton thinks of this?"</p>
<p>You have a kid going to St Louis University and you are applying to Carleton? Strange…</p>
<p>I was reading this and wondering why the test score averages at Carleton seem to be low compared to all of the superbly qualified students they waitlisted? I recently visited Carleton and really loved it, but now I am worried I don’t even have a chance. My scores fall into their mid-range, but most of the people who posted here and were waitlisted had higher scores. I do plan on retaking but it kind of shocked me how many seemingly great applicants they waitlisted. And yes, I know scores are not everything but the waitlistee’s all seemed well rounded and deserving outside of their stellar SAT’s so I am kind of intimidated :)</p>
<p>
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<p>How does a college justify placing more students on the waitlist than are initially admitted? Knowing you will only admit 8 - 30, perhaps, off the waitlist, how do adcoms sleep at night falsely raising the hopes of approximately 1500 kids who have zero chance of getting in? Can someone respond to my questions?</p>
<p>thestrokes - I think it’s a complete crapshoot, to be honest. I was admitted with a lot of the same scores that others were waitlisted with. That being said, I also think that CC has a very self-selecting group of people who generally seem to be extremely competitive. All of the students ON COLLEGE CONFIDENTIAL that were waitlisted had great scores, great ECs, etc., but i don’t think they are always representative of the general applicant pool.</p>
<p>That being said, I have the utmost sympathy for those who were waitlisted (I know how much it stings - I was WLed at two other schools that I really liked as well, so I’m counting my blessings with Carleton). I remember when I started going on this site last year, I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn’t get in because of all of the fantastic people who were waitlisted on the website. But you never know until you try! I truly believe that they probably just had too many competitive applicants with high test scores and grades.</p>
<p>Plainsman - I agree, it seems terribly unfair. To be honest, though, this seems to be a general college practice, though - I know <em>lots</em> of other schools that do the same things. One of the WL letters I received told me that there were 1700 people on the waitlist - even though there areonly 2000 people at the school as a whole. No one was admitted off the waitlist (if you’re curious, PM me and I’ll tel you which one). Comparable schools like Williams, Amherst and Wesleyan, as well as much larger universities such as Penn, Duke, and Cornell do the same thing. It’s really stupid and I wish they would change their policy.</p>
<p>Like reesezpiecez said, I think that by waitlisting students colleges want to send the message that the waitlisted students were generally very qualified, but the school simply did not have room to admit all of them. It’s viewed as being kinder than straight-up rejection, which would put them in the same boat as the students who were not qualified. The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg sheds some light on the situation. That being said, I absolutely understand how awful it can be to be kept “in limbo” about your college situation for an extended period of time.</p>