I can and may pose this more broadly in one of the collage applications focused areas, but, I’m especially interested in a take from BS parents because ‘buckets’ are “a thing” that get much airtime in discussions of BS admissions. We especially focus on buckets when talking about being admitted off of a BS WL.
Like, we often say that if the BS needs a full pay male, boarder, lax goalie, they’re not taking a female, FA, day student, tuba player.
Is the understanding that movement from college WLs follows a similar sort of pattern/approach? Or is it more broad e.g. hey we under-yielded by 5 kids, who do we like from the WL?
Some colleges do not meet full need for waitlisted student when they do in regular admissions. So…some might be looking for students they feel will really take the waitlist offer financially.
Actually, if you are talking waitlist buckets…I think aLl colleges offer spots to students who they think will take the offers!
Yup one college we are looking at states openly that they become need-aware when considering people on the WL.
Re: “students who they think will take the offers!” haha yes for sure, they are super yield focused at that point obviously and at least one school I know of asks you outright if you’ll accept if granted an acceptance before actually accepting you.
But even then, let’s say that full-pay is 1/2 the WL. Do they look beyond yield to other aspects?
Not a BS family, but the impression I got from the colleges where this has been discussed is they typically will do whatever they feel like on an ad hoc basis.
Obviously if there are certain restricted majors, programs, schools, etc., then waitlist admission will depend on there being a slot available. But otherwise, they don’t tend to commit to some sort of strict ranking, and may, or may not, admit people based on whether their institutional goals have or have not yet been met with the enrolled class.
Kinda random, but Carnegie Mellon lets you choose between a “priority waitlist” and a “regular waitlist” and you are supposed to choose priority if CMU is your top college choice. It isn’t binding, but you are supposed to pay your deposit within 72 hours. In return for this, the idea is you will get a decision from CMU in the first few days after the enrollment deadline, before they go to the regular waitlist.
But they don’t guarantee everyone on the priority waitlist is ranked ahead of the regular waitlist, nor do they rank either waitlist internally. They just do what they want to do to fill out their programs as they see fit.
I think all that information is reflected in some form here:
That’s just CMU, of course, but so far at least my impression is a lot of other colleges similarly do not rank the waitlist. Here, for example, is Williams:
Relevant quote:
Are waiting list applicants ranked in any way?
No, there is no particular ordering of the waiting list. Instead, the Admission Committee periodically reconvenes to assess the composition of the enrolled class to see what additions might be made to round out the group.
“Buckets” for admission are common. Here is an example of explicit bucketing by major, based on departmental capacity for each major:
The basic formula is HS GPA (recalculated with limited weighting) times 800. Add math GPA times 400 for engineering majors. For non-engineering majors, you can divide the index score by 800 to see what HS GPA the threshold corresponds to. You can see that, while some majors like biology, linguistics, and physics only needed a 2.5 to get admitted, other majors were much more selective, like computer science (4.3), animation (4.0), and pre-nursing (3.95).
Yup majors make sense (whether intended or impacted/apply-into), likelihood to yield, but also agreed and understood that they’re not ranked (and in fact “not ranking” in essence means buckets).
Haha yes I had started this post from inside the Prep-School sub area where BS is commonly known to mean Boarding School (among other things!) but it got posted to a broader area than intended.
I think the question “What buckets do colleges use when pulling from the waitlist” is one that is not limited to responses from parents of boarding school students, so I’m leaving where it is
Every school is different, and how they handle it may vary by admissions cycle and timeframe within the admissions cycle. I worked at a college that could not state how waitlists worked. Not because we didn’t know, but because it was a process that depended on so many factors. In a studio art program with a small cohort, balancing the type of work (size, focus) comes into play. In a larger college, the engineering school may have an opening for a chemical engineering student. As the summer progresses, it becomes increasingly important that a student admitted from the waitlist will actually attend. They may have to make a decision more quickly than they would have had to earlier in the cycle. Some students who stated that they would attend if asked actually just wanted to know if they would get in, which extends the timeline for admissions for the next candidate. That can lead to another round of “who to take next” if there isn’t a similar candidate available. So it’s an art rather than a science.
and at least one school I know of asks you outright if you’ll accept if granted an acceptance before actually accepting you.