As the parent of a student who never got off the Grinnell wait-list a few years ago, I’m kind of shocked to read this:
And an op-ed from Grinnell’s president in today’s Post: “College president: Schools can’t be blue islands in red states”
Sometimes schools over-yield and sometimes they under-yield. Grinnell (and perhaps other schools) will need to make sure they have a bigger wait list going forward. Plenty of qualified, interested applicants out there, so it’s a shame those applicants were prematurely denied admission instead of waitlisted. But this outcome may leave room for a lot of transfer students this cycle. It will be interesting to see whether last year’s result was the beginning of a trend, whether just there or everywhere. Applicants may be getting savvier at demonstrating “interest.”
Oddly not mentioned in the article was that they also accepted a much smaller percentage of applicants initially in 2016 for 2020. Their admit rate - by their report - went from the mid 20s in the prior year to 18%
http://www.thesandb.com/news/college-receives-record-applications-for-2020.html
Sounds as if that may have been a miscalculation.
It seems a lot of other small LACs had similar issues last year, since I know a bunch of kids called of wait lists after already committing elsewhere. Once they’ve committed, it’s sometimes hard to lure them back. I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the sheer number of applications coming in these days, and thus difficulty with predicting yield.