Universities Weblog

Here's some bad news for students still lingering on a college's wait-list. Most elite schools are reporting that they'll be admitting fewer students from the list; in many cases, that means none at all.

Consider this from a Wall Street Journal article:

The months of May and June are the time when colleges nail down their incoming freshman classes by filling any empty seats with students they neither admitted nor rejected, but put on hold. This year, amid a record flood of applications at some schools, admissions officers added slots in their freshman classes and extended more acceptances and wait-list offers than the year before, offering hope to an unusually large number of students.

But in the end, some of those schools wound up being unexpectedly stingy in admitting wait-listed students. The reason: Many admissions officers were caught off-guard by the large number of students who accepted offers of admission made earlier in the spring. Every year it's a gamble as to how many students will accept, and this year, slots at highly competitive schools filled quickly, leaving little or no opportunity for wait-listed applicants. In fact, some schools are finding their incoming freshmen classes a little crowded. [....]

The calculus for predicting how many students will enroll has been particularly slippery for the past two years. Last year, uncertainty surrounding changes in early-admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and Stanford caused many top schools to be more cautious with the number of students they accepted, allowing them to admit more students from wait lists later in the spring. This year, a number of admissions officers extended many more acceptances for a variety of reasons, from expanding class size to continuing uncertainty over how the early-application changes would affect enrollment. At many top schools, those additional offers were snapped up.More specifically, check out these sobering figures:

(Source: Wall Street Journal)So if you're still holding out hope while wait-listed at your dream school, you'd better start thinking seriously about Plan B.

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