Waitlists...basically a dishonest policy?

<p>I thought ED and EAs were deferred to regular RD pool then dealt with...by the way, my head is all a jumble now</p>

<p>Well, my recommendation to kids - unless they have NO other choice - would be to do just what my son did. Throw it away and move on. I think schools are ignoring the fact that behind these applications are real kids. </p>

<p>And the original point of my post has been somewhat lost by hazmat - that the sheer number of kids waitlisted is the problem. I understand they need a waitlist of some sort. For instance, according to the Bucknell forum, admissions told one kid that last year over 1900 kids were waitlisted and zero were taken off! I figure the freshman class of Bucknell isn't even 1000 kids. What is the point other than to torture some poor kid who thinks s/he still has a shot?</p>

<p>Yes, ED's and EA's get deferred, rejected or accepted.</p>

<p>Weenie -
"that the sheer number of kids waitlisted is the problem."</p>

<p>Agreed!</p>

<p>I am confused about your original post? Have I missed something here?</p>

<p><<i can="" see="" if,="" let's="" say,="" last="" year="" they="" took="" 20="" kids="" off="" the="" waitlist,="" so="" maybe="" waitlist="" should="" be="" around="" 50.="" but="" these="" (relatively="" small)="" schools="" are="" waitlisting="" thousands="" of="" kids.="">></i></p><i can="" see="" if,="" let's="" say,="" last="" year="" they="" took="" 20="" kids="" off="" the="" waitlist,="" so="" maybe="" waitlist="" should="" be="" around="" 50.="" but="" these="" (relatively="" small)="" schools="" are="" waitlisting="" thousands="" of="" kids.="">
</i>

<p>I have no personal experience with waitlists, but a friend's son got into CMU off the wait list several years ago in mid-June, and the child of someone on this board got off the waitlist for Stanford next year after he was all set to attend another college. So it can work for some people (but maybe a very small percentage???)</p>

<p>In the end, doesn't a place on a waitlist make most kids feel better than a rejection?</p>

<p>It is possible that the "sheer number of kids waitlisted" is directly related to the number of applications the kids are submitting. Back in our day kids would apply to 2-3 schools. Now many kids are applying to 12-15 schools. If those kids are accepted at all their schools they are saying, "no thanks" to many, many schools. A school that used to have a yield of 30% may find it now has a yield of 20%. I think in many cases the schools use the waitlist to protect themselves against being underenrolled if too many accepted kids decide not to come.</p>

<p>I don't know what the answer is, but it seems to be a no-win situation for everyone. Kids find the admissions process to be a crap shoot so they send more applications, and the schools have a harder time predicting their yield so they institute a very long wait list. Who knows where it will all end...</p>

<p>My son was WL at 2 schools, and will probably stay on 1 of them. This school took a lower # and % of students this year because of a large class last year. They have a small WL relative to the admitted class size and they have statistics showing years when almost half the kids on a WL this size were admitted ultimately. They are upfront about the WL situation, though of course they cannot say if/how many kids they will take in. At this particular school my son was pleased to be WL. He beat the odds at another school he applied to (deferred ED when they took 40%, accepted RD when they took 13% of those they deferred)...so he might be inclined to try to beat these- I am not sure how long he would wait, but time will tell!</p>

<p>I think sitting on a WL looks very different once you have another admission or several that are pleasing to you...being on the WL without any admissions, or if the other admissions are clearly to non-preferred situations is a different story...much tougher.</p>

<p>I agree that waitlists can be cruel and their message hard to decipher. But lightning does strike--that is, kids do get in off the waitlist, and often it seems an arbitrary thing, like most else relating to college admissions. Last year my D received WL letters from 5 schools and chose to remain on three WLs; in early May she received a call from one of the scohols (paradoxically not the one for which her high school was making an all-out effort) offering a spot in the class. As it turns out she did not accept it because by then she had come to feel very possitive about a school that had accepted her in the first place, so someone else got in off the waitlist in her place. </p>

<p>It is hard to say no to a spot on the WL if the school in question is your dream school, but it is also hard to be in limbo thorugh spring and early summer of your senior year; I don't know what the right answer is.</p>

<p>My S is now at a school that he was waitlisted at last year, UChicago. They were very upfront about how many were on the waitlist and what percentage had been admitted in prior years. The average % accepted was 9%, if I'm remembering right. A classmate of his was accepted off the UChicago waitlist as well, and is in the same math section as my S.</p>

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<p>Lightening strike - an apt metaphor.</p>

<p>I don't think that waitlists are dishonest. I just think they are very unlikely to result in an acceptance. My D got two waitlist letters, including one from my (if not quite her) top choice, but I told her to focus on the acceptances she had in hand.</p>

<p>If you thought EA or RD was a longshot at selective schools, getting in off the waitlist is the longest shot of them all. If she had had no good acceptances, it might have been a different story, but I encouraged her to forget the waitlist game and move on.</p>

<p>If the schools told kids stats on the waitlist (from last year ... how many were on the wait list, how many were offered a spot, and how many accepted a spot) would you still say that?
<<</p>

<p>They do 3togo. It's all in the common data set and easily available. BUT things change from year to year.</p>

<p>I have mixed feelings about waitlists. I see them as part of the larger problem of kids applying to 10,15, even 20 schools which boosts the overall total number of applications which boosts the number of qualified kids moved to waitlist which, in the end, reduces the chances of getting off the waitlist. It's also a domino effect: kid gets put on waitlist on school he'd rather go to but he needs to protect his ability to go somewhere so he sends in a deposit to another school he has no intention of going to if he gets into the first school. He gets off the waitlist at school one, drops off going to school number two which has to scramble to fill his spot. It's a vicious cycle.</p>

<p>I am seriously starting to think that there is a need for a nationwide cap on the number of applications each student can send out. Maybe 10 schools max. - I think kids would be a bit more pro-active about which schools they really would attend in the first place. Of course, the colleges themselves would never support that because they couldn't brag about how many applications they've received this year.</p>

<p>Carolyn,
I was thinking about the Cap issue yesterday. Kids from our school can only submit 8 US applications (the UC application counts as one no matter how many are sent). The school sends a letter to the colleges informing them of this fact- and that since the student is applying to fewer schools, there is a greater likelihood of attendance. Our school, perhaps in part because of this, seems to do particularly well with admissions to the top LAC's, though I am not so sure that the HYPMS schools care in the slightest. Elsewhere the kids are posting their admissions results...I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the number of kids who apply to every single Ivy as a subset of 15-20 applications. </p>

<p>Looking at my sons' results over the last 2 years I will say that I think application limits make you a bit more cautious and very thoughtful about each application. Had each son had no limit, we probably would have added another couple of high reach schools for each.</p>

<p>The peroblem with the cap at schools that have them is limiting reach schools, which we all know are becoming more of a crap shoot each year. We are debating at my kid's school wheher we want to keep a cap. It seemd like a great idea in years past.</p>

<p>I've always wondered why kids are not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge. I guess they knew they would have almost total overlap.</p>

<p>Power to the people! We, collectively, can end the tyranny of wait lists immediately by a simple action - everyone offered a position on any wait list can tell the college "No Thanks!" </p>

<p>I would not feel 'welcomed' or 'wanted' if I were wait listed. Didn't happen at our house this year - 10 admits, 2 denys.</p>

<p>No one can really predict what is going to happen from one year to the next because schools send out admissions with the hope that an overwhelming majority of students are going to take them up on the offer and the wait list won't have to be used. However many students apply to a wise array of schools, some which overlap one another. For the class of 2008, Williams admitted 1093 students to fill a freshman class of 517. While they did not state how many people took a spot on the waitlist, in the end they accepted 51 students (almost 10% of the class ) from their waitlist.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.williams.edu/admin/provost/ir/2004-05cds.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.williams.edu/admin/provost/ir/2004-05cds.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>All I can talk to from my limited experience was that when we went to Williams my daughter met friends at Williams who she later met up with at Dartmouth, Amherst. Some friends also got accepted to Harvard and yale. Case in point : Nonposionivy, who was over the moon with S's acceptance to Williams, then the Princeton admission came in. You just never know the process from one class to another.</p>

<p>I got off a wiatilist back inthe day. I know two kids who got off last year, both from the same high school, one to Tufts and one to Cornell.</p>

<p>My son was waitlisted at Stanford, and I thought their letter was quite honest. "Historically, the number of students we have admitted from the waiting list has ranged from none to nearly 100. In only our second year of Single-Choice Early Action, we do not know precisely the number of students admitted early who will choose to enroll at Stanford, making it difficult for us to predict how many of our waitlisted students will ultimately be offered admission. Typically, though, we do fill the final spots in our class through the waiting liste, and anticipate doing the same this year."</p>

<p>That explains what the odds might be, as well as why they can't say anything more definite.</p>

<p>Yes, waitlists are a frustration to the students who end up on them, but I'm not sure there's any better way to do it.</p>