<p>I'm trying to assess what a waitlist decision will entail for my prospects of getting into Harvard. </p>
<p>Assuming I get placed on the waitlist, how much hope should I have of being admitted?
What percentage of waitlisted students are eventually accepted? </p>
<p>Feel free to give insight into waitlist practices for other selective schools as well, especially Princeton, Yale, and Dartmouth (the three other Ivies to which I applied ;)) </p>
<p>Thanks guys.</p>
<p>It varies year to year. Some no movement whatsoever from the WL. Others, lots of movement. Just depends on what the accepted kids do – and how likely they’ll be wooed away from Harvard or take a gap year.</p>
<p>Thousands of kids go on the waitlist, and less than 100 get off of it. It’s another way of saying “we didn’t dislike you enough to reject you, but we didn’t want to accept you.” They don’t rank the waitlist, so waitlisters get accepted at random. If you get waitlisted, move on and invest your college decision making in other schools.</p>
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<p>Can someone else confirm this. I certainly do not believe this to be true.</p>
<p>My friend and I kind of concluded this from past decision threads.
If you are a viable candidate for HYPSM, you are more likely to be REJECTED than waitlisted, since H can recognize from your app that you are at that level. They know that if they waitlist you, you’re just going to YPSM and you’re not going to bother.
Waitlisted applicants are more likely to be the people who were accepted at other Ivies, WUSTL, Northwestern, Berkley, Duke, etc. Who still might hold out.
Agree? Disagree?</p>
<p>Disagree.</p>
<p>I know quite a few people who were accepted at YPSM, but still held their spot on the waitlist and eventually got accepted.</p>
<p>How long can students remain on the waitlist? Don’t students have to commit to a college before May 1st?</p>
<p>Also, I’m planning on visiting Harvard if I am waitlisted so that I may express a more genuine interest in attending after having seen the campus, which at this point, I have not. Of course, if the waitlist is random…any pleading to adcoms would be futile.</p>
<p>^You can often commit to a college with the condition that you may remain on a waitlist. I have a friend who said that she would attend MIT, but come the middle of May, she was taken off the Harvard waitlist and decided to go there instead.</p>
<p>Is not random, though dependent on who withdraws. They try to keep their class balanced so if a physics interested man withdraws, they will try get another physics interested man off the Wlist.</p>
<p>Honestly your chances? Very slim.</p>
<p>Except the number of accepted students that deign not to matriculate is skyrocketing. Don’t be so sure.</p>
<p>Remember though that this will be taken into account - they accept more than they have place for. So not every person who goes elsewhere opens a place.</p>
<p>“If you are a viable candidate for HYPSM, you are more likely to be REJECTED than waitlisted, since H can recognize from your app that you are at that level. They know that if they waitlist you, you’re just going to YPSM and you’re not going to bother.”</p>
<p>What? Harvard doesn’t care what other schools accept you. They have the biggest yield rate and certainly won’t casually reject people rather than putting them on the WL – if they truly want them and want them on the WL, they’ll do it. Viable H candidates are extremely attractive to other schools. H knows this so it doesn’t factor into their decisions. They aren’t insecure, you know.</p>
<p>London: showing up on campus to plead your case is a waste of money – they won’t be moved one way or another. This applies to Y & P as well. You can remain on wait lists up to the start of school (late August).</p>
<p>Is there any kind of ranking order used in the waitlisting process? Will they let us know?</p>
<p>^^ If there is an internal ranking order, they do not make that information public.</p>
<p>There is no internal ranking. As another poster explained, they will use the waitlist to re-balance the class if the matriculant group has lost some role players. Remember that people who decide to take gap years, as well as those who go elsewhere, will affect the wait list.</p>
<p>Interesting.</p>
<p>
So basically I can commit to a school that accepts me, but remain on the waitlist at other schools so that I may change my mind if I’m accepted?</p>
<p>Yale seems to waitlist people and accept some of them later if they are still interested based on how many turn down Yale. I know one person two years ago who was admitted HPS but waitlisted at Yale and he said he did nt to be on the list. Last year another person was in at Princeton, waitlisted Yale but requested to stay on waitlist. Yale admitted him at the end of April. MIT admitted a girl almost end of May last year from waitlist. I suspect YS go deeper on waitlist than HP because of the better financial packages available at HP for higher income families if a person gets admitted to all 4.</p>
<p>Yeah, but you’ll have to forfeit your enrollment deposit at the school you commit to.</p>
<p>To summarize:</p>
<p>If you are waitlisted at Harvard (or anywhere comparable), you have a very small chance of being admitted – generally much worse than the 5-6% admission rate in the RD pool. Some people DO get admitted off the waitlist, but it’s rarely more than a few dozen and often only a few, period. The size of the waitlist varies from college to college and year to year, but the range seems to be from about 50% of the actual class size to 200% – lots of people, by any count.</p>
<p>If you are waitlisted, you should accept admission at some college that has actually admitted you, and pay the deposit there (which is usually not cripplingly large, more on the order of $200-300). If you are accepted later from the waitlist at a school you like better, you will forfeit that deposit, but that will be the only negative consequence to breaking your commitment to attend the first college. All the colleges expect some series of adjustments through mid-summer and beyond as various waitlists play themselves out. But the adjustments are less than you might think because the colleges manage their admissions and enrollment with “summer melt” in mind. A few years ago, Harvard took an unusually large number of people off its waitlist (about 100) – it was the first year Harvard went without EA, and out of caution it had been very conservative in the number of students it admitted on decision day. Everyone thought that was going to cause a chain reaction elsewhere, but it didn’t at all.</p>
<p>Visiting and showing interest is not likely to affect whether you get accepted from the waitlist. You should definitely send an e-mail to your regional rep updating him or her on your great performance this semester and your promising cancer-cure field trials, and saying you still want to go to college there, but more than that won’t help. The waitlist isn’t ranked or anything. What you are hoping is that, if your claim to fame is that you are a harpist, the harpist they accepted instead of you decides to go to Stanford.</p>
<p>@Lutherjw - 200-300 is a small price to pay as opposed to lifetime of regret. It is a choice a student makes that is no different from giving up a full ride at some other school to go to their first choice school that gave them no money at all.</p>