<p>check today's NYtimes.</p>
<p>I was shocked to see Duke waitlisted 3382 students!!</p>
<p>University of San Francisco has a lot of waitlisted. I was rejected. They are accepting few freshmen</p>
<p>[Top</a> Colleges Have Bigger Waiting Lists - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/education/14waitlist.html?hp]Top”>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/education/14waitlist.html?hp)</p>
<p>" Ashley Koski, ranked third in the senior class at Thomas Dale High School in Chester, Va., has wanted to attend Duke University since she was 12.</p>
<p>Late last month, she learned that Duke had neither accepted nor rejected her. It had offered her a spot on the waiting list — along with 3,382 other applicants. That is almost twice the size of the incoming freshman class…</p>
<p>Duke, which had a record 27,000 freshman applicants, has placed 856 more on its waiting list than a year ago. The reasons include the uncertain economy, which makes it hard for Duke to estimate how many of the 4,000 it has accepted will say yes.</p>
<p>If Duke’s best guess holds, no more than 60 will be admitted through the narrow gate of what is essentially a giant holding pen…</p>
<p>M.I.T., which had a 6 percent increase in applicants, increased its waiting list by more than half, to 722. Last year, it accepted fewer than 80 from that list. Yale, which had a slight dip in applications this year yet still admitted fewer than 8 percent of applicants, placed nearly 1,000 others on its waiting list, an increase of more than 150. Dartmouth increased its list by about 80, to 1,740."</p>
<p>If you thought being on a waiting list was a “good thing” think again.</p>
<p>That create a lot of jobs.
From college search, campus visit, consultant, standard tests, application, collegeboard, re-visit …
Lots of money spent, lots of job involved.</p>
<p>I think the only way to stop this crazy arm race is to limit the number of colleges on the application for each applicant. The waiting lists are longer when students have more choices.</p>
<p>The Common App has made it easier to apply and students hegde bets by applying to 10-15 schools or more.So many top students are sending out 15 applications to Ivy League and Duke / Stanford types.But at the end of the process , they can only enroll in one school.
Add in the uncertain financial aid situation and we will continue to Applications and Wait lists increase and yield levels drop.Wait list also protects yield levels.</p>
<p>Would limiting application numbers be legal?</p>
<p>This year 25+ schools (including UMich and Columbia) will add on Common App which means students have more choices.</p>
<p>I do agree there should be a limit or at least suggest them not to apply so many schools. I heard someone applied 30+ schools, this is crazy! </p>
<p>Well, tough days for those admission officers to guess their yield rate. They must feel awful to see so many students decline their offers.</p>
<p>well, after all, those universities need to protect their yield rate.</p>
<p>But it is a true disaster for waitlistees. Stuck in the middle.</p>
<p>I was having a conversation with my neighbor about this, and he seems to think that the colleges know how many and which other schools an applicant has applied to. He then suggested that the schools try to determine which of the schools on this list the app will get into and may wait list a student that they think will go elsewhere in the end. Is that clear or too confusing the way I wrote it? All to up their applicant numbers and protect the yield. It is a terrible situation and so frustrating.</p>
<p>Can they really see which other schools an applicant has applied to? They have to break into our Common App account (or maybe Common App provides the information?) to know those stuff.</p>
<p>This is ridiculous. No school needs more students on their waitlist than the size of their incoming class. And no school needs that many wait-listees to maintain flexibilty either. First of all, these schools already accept more students than they can enroll. Beyond that, they have a waiting list. That’s fine. But do they really expect us to believe they NEED a pool of 3,382 or even 1740 students to fill out their class and fill in their spots if more students decline than anticipated? For us to believe that, we’d have to also believe that they have the time and resources to have set up in advance a complicated filing and sorting system whereby if an oboe-playing Hispanic girl from Texas declines, they can quickly find on their wait list another oboe-playing minority from the same geographic region. Really??? I’m not buying it.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that not all of the students offered the waitlist accept the waitlist. This particularly may be true of Duke where students accepted by Ivies may turn down Duke’s waitlist for even a lower ranked Ivy since some students’ goal is to say that they attended an Ivy.</p>
<p>I think that if you file FAFSA all the schools you submit it to can see the other schools you submit it to. If you don’t file FAFSA, I don’t think there’s a way schools know where else you’ve applied unless you tell. Anyone know if that’s right?</p>
<p>The scandal here is not how many students were watlisted, the scandal is that they didn’t even have the decency to READ all the applications so they just put them in the waitlist! I can’t believe this! I understand they need a watlist but not reading applications is a slap in the face to the students.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why the excessively high wait list helps much with yield. All they need is enough students to weed through to find the ones who indicate they will accept the school’s offer of admission. </p>
<p>If a school is going to take about 50-60 students from the waitlist, they only need a few hundred students in the wait list pool to determine which ones have the school as their first choice. </p>
<p>I think the huge waitlist is to insure diversity in the student population after seeing who accepts RD.</p>
<p>A few posters above are misreading the NYT article. It is not a fair interpretation to
claim that Duke did not read all the applications. Duke’s Dean of Admissions stated that the waitlist size could have been reduced if they had more time to look at everyone on the waitlist. I think it is fair to assume a first read placed the students in the waitlist pool, and Duke lacked the time to reread, in order to eliminate some that had little chance.</p>
<p>My 2 cents. My D applied to 13 schools AT MY URGING. Why? Two reasons. 1. Financial aid offers are all over the place. The variance in aid for my oldest D was $20,000 two years ago. This year, with my youngest D, the gap between high and low is over $30,000. If money is an issue, apply to one or two colleges at your peril. 2. As getting admitted to the nation’s most prestigious schools becomes more difficult, there are no guarantees of acceptance. Visiting schools and deciding on the best match before applying might work for a few who only target local colleges and have perfect SATs, but for the great unwashed visiting colleges is expensive and time consuming, and narrowing choices to a college or two can lead to heartbreak. </p>
<p>My advice to both my Ds was simple: don’t apply to any school that you wouldn’t be willing to attend. And for my youngest D, I asked that she not apply to any school that accepted her sister but offered little financial aid. And after acceptances and financial aid offers arrived, I asked that both contact schools that they knew they weren’t going to choose as soon as possible.</p>
<p>You are right, 2g1bmom. The actual quote from the article:</p>
<p>Another reason the list is so long this year, he said, is that he and his colleagues were so overwhelmed by the volume of applicants that they ran out of time.</p>
<p>“What we could have done, had we had another week,” he said, “was to look at everybody on the waiting list and say, ‘Do they all need to be on?’ ”</p>
<p>“Of all the priorities,” he added, “that was not in the top two or three.”</p>