Most people I interact with define this time of year by March Madness. People hear about upsets, Cinderellas, chokes, bad calls, flagrant fouls, and, more often than not, top seeds coming out on top. No, I am not talking about Basketball.
I am talking about the decisions that are sent out from the most selective colleges and universities to students around the world. Those who want to feel good can watch the video of the student who got into 20 top ranked universities in the US with full aid. Those who want to feel the pain of dreams crushed can go on to sites like Quora.com to read about students with remarkable credentials who were turned down. (I posted about this last week.)
But rather than March Madness, I want to focus those students who are currently in the uncertain place--the waiting list. There have been numerous stories in the media about the waitlist. Some of them fall under the subcategory of shock and awe: How could students with such outstanding credentials not earn a spot? The second group of stories calls into question the rationale and the ethics behind putting thousands of students on a wait list when the typical number of get off in a given your is well under 100. And the third set of stories or college confidential queries focus on what students can do to improve their chances of getting off the wait list.
I will address all of these issues below using some questions I have been asked on the website Quora.com, through email, and in person.
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Colleges and Universities: Are college waiting lists really not ranked? How do admissions officers choose from the list?
What follows is my answer to this question that was first posted on the website quora.com
This is a great question. As with many questions having to do with colleges and universities there is no simple answer. As a result, I will first try to describe the landscape of wait lists at highly selective schools After that I will try to explain why most schools do not place students in a formal rank order.
Why are wait lists so big and what are my chances?
Schools are required to post how big their waiting lists were from previous years, but this information is hard to find. In addition, they are required to post how many students were offered admission from the waiting list. You won’t find this information posted prominently, however, because most of the information about wait lists numbers are bleak. If you are searching for the waitlist numbers from a particular school try doing a Google search with the name of the school the phrase "wait list" and the year 2017. You might find the information faster.
I will give just one example from 2016. University of Michigan offered a spot on their wait list to 11,197 students. They ended up offering admission to 55 of them. Generally speaking, the larger the school, the larger the waitlist, so this huge number at Michigan is not representative of the size of wait lists at small liberal arts schools that have only several hundred entering students rather than several thousand. But the data is clear that many of the most selective schools put more students on the wait list than there are places in the first year class. In other words, the entire group of students who are originally offered admission, (including those offered early decision in schools which offer this option) would have to say no in order for them to get close to offering to most of the students from a wait lit.
The NY Times provides a chart that lists many of the top ranked schools and shows the size of the wait list and how many were eventually offered admission. Once glance demonstrates two things-- schools put huge numbers of students on the wait list but mostly only a handful get in. A number of highly ranked schools did not provide data to The Times, as they do not want to perceived as either putting far too many people on the list, or, in perhaps a few cases, for having to take a large number off the list. (The last observation is purely speculation on my part, but some schools would not want the public or their governing boards to know that the admission office fell well short of their enrollment goals.) . James Murphy from The Princeton Review has posted a much larger list of schools that wait list students and what the numbers look like.
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College Admission Yields & Wait List Data
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As the chart shows, it rarely happens these days that any school comes in far under their enrollment goals at highly selective schools. (It is another matter altogether at schools far down in the rankings. They are scrambling to fill the class and there are still many schools accepting applications for the fall semester throughout the summer.) Now that big data has become an essential part of the admission office set of tools, colleges and universities have access to lots of information that has significantly improved the prediction on yield—the number of students who accept offers of admission.
Yield has become a big focus for schools as the higher the yield the higher the selectivity of the school often is (as the NY Times chart shows). If almost all students accept the offer (Harvard is at the top at 82%) then they will not offer admission to many more students than they have actually enrolling and this increases selectivity significantly. Schools that have only a 50% yield need to offer to twice the number of students in order to enroll a full class. The chart shows that aside from a few schools, the yield rate is actually not all that high, even at some of the most prestigious schools in the US. For example, Johns Hopkins yield rate comes in at about 40% --less than half of Harvard’s. Students applying to Hopkins have to be great to get in and many of them get accepted to other highly selective schools and end up not enrolling at Hopkins. This low rate of return is something that has become a big issue in admission as it is used as a factor in US News rankings. (Editorial opinion: Rankings drive many administrative decisions that may not always be in the best interest of families and students.)
To put it simply-- because of the race to the top of the rankings selective and otherwise, schools have been investing a lot of money, time into increasing yield percentages. Some schools hire outside marketing firms to create a whole soup to nuts approach to admission. Gone are the days when students were accepted and then had a relatively quiet month to decide which is the best option. During the month of April, after decisions have gone out, parents and students can expect, from some schools, a blitz of emails, tweets, phone calls and other forms of outreach to encourage students to enroll. I have seen samples from schools this year and there are some schools sending stuff, if not every day, then at least every few days. In addition, many schools have special days in which to visit. On theses days invest lots of money and staff into rolling out the red carpet. Why? Students come, as those who visit are far more likely to enroll than those who don’t.
The discussion about yield is really a long way of showing why the chances of any individual student getting off the wait list are anything but good. Schools have lots of data to help them predict accurately how many students they should offer to get the number of students they want. At virtually every college or university the percentage of students being offered a place off the wait list is far lower than the acceptance rate for students who have applied for regular or early admission. For example, two years ago Emory University put over 4100 students on the wait list but ended up offering to 25.
These daunting statistics lead me to give this piece of advice before I begin to explore more about who are the students who do come off the wait list and why they are not placed in rank order. First and foremost put a deposit down at another school prior to May 1. May 1 is the national candidates reply date that all selective schools have agreed to honor. Because schools are so much better at predicting how many students will accept offers it has become increasingly rare for students to hear anything from a wait list school until after this deadline passes. It makes economic sense for a student hoping to get off a wait list to hold off making a deposit until late in the month, as on the off chance they do happen to get off a wait list prior to May 1 they can get a refund on their deposit to the initial school. On the other hand, if a school, for any reason, comes in far in excess of its targeted numbers at May 1, then they very rarely accept a late deposit and the student would be out of anyplace to go in the fall. (I have seen this happen. It isn’t pretty.)
I also mention putting down a deposit for another reason. Since the odds are so steep for getting off the waitlist for any particular school, it is important for students to begin to think of the school where the deposit has been put in as “their” school. In other words, a lot of students who are wait listed spend a great deal of time and mental effort (and in some case physical effort) designing ways to get in off the wait list. While I have written about a couple very special cases where this kind of strategizing worked, the stats show that these are very rare cases.
To me, most students would be much better off taking the time to embrace the school they have paid a deposit to attend—
Start wearing the school sweatshirt, start filling out all the stuff that the schools send, gets on the entering class Facebook page etc.
Start imaging a great life ahead instead of focusing on what will likely not happen.
This will make the end of senior year less stressful and will prepare the student for where, in all probability, they will go. (I hope what I have just written will not be interpreted by anyone as inviting a student to slack off academically. Any low grade will not only doom a student’s chance of getting off the wait list but low grades that show up at the end of the year could also be a reason to lose the place a student already has—this does happen, not very often, but it is not worth the risk).
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Why do almost no colleges and universities have a ranked wait list?
Now that the preliminaries are over I can go on to explain why it is not in the school’s best interest to attempt to rank students on a wait list.
For the purposes of creating a thought experiment let’s say the May 1 deadline has just passed and the school is now looking over their numbers. Let’s suppose that the school has 40 spaces to fill. They have over 2000 students on the waiting list. If they do not rank students how will they go about doing this?
At first this seems like a huge task and that having a ranked waiting list would make it far easier to select students. While this initially might seem like a good idea there are many reasons almost no school follows this approach.
Each school has its own mission and institutional priorities that they hope to fulfill. For example, universities, by their very nature, have separate undergraduate schools within the whole university. In this thought experiment let’s say the university has a school of arts and sciences, a school of business, and a school of engineering. It may well be that the students who have made a deposit have filled the spaces for engineering and only have a couple for business, but they have 50 spaces in arts and sciences to fill. Virtually every one accepted off the wait list will be in the arts and sciences pool. No one will get in to engineering and perhaps two or three to business.
Institutional priorities also come into play in many other ways too. If, for example, the school in question is State Affiliated, then it may be that the number of in state students is low and the number of out of state students is just about right. In this scenario, all the offers from the wait list would go to in state students.
Or let’s say a private school, hoping to increase their geographical diversity, notices that there are very few students who have accepted offers live in States west of the Mississippi. They may decide to pull all those students on the waiting list who are residents of those states and offer almost all the spaces to them. Some schools wish to demonstrate on their profile that they enroll students from many places. They want the perspective these students may bring but they also want more applications to come in too. Students who notice that n there is no one in the region enrolled from where they live might not choose to apply.
Or it may be that a given school the percentage of women the school would like to enroll is several percentage points higher that would they would like. They may then decide to give almost all the spaces to males. (This is something that schools will not often admit in public for reasons that are pretty clear.)
Or it may be that the number of under-represented students is not what they had hoped it would be, so they may try to enroll as many of these students as they can from off the waiting list. For those who think this sounds like schools have quotas, they don’t. There is no fixed number of students that schools establish as that would violate the law, but there are intuitional goals.
Trying to increase diversity by gender or race this way may be a bit tricky if the courts looked at the figure closely (most schools do not publish much specific data about the characteristics of wait list acceptances), but this kind of selection of students does go on at some schools hoping to enroll a diverse student body as they have chosen to define it).
Given what I have just described about schools, I hope it is now clear why schools rarely rank students on the wait list. The wait list is one way a school gets to shape the class in terms of institutional priorities. If the school tried to rank students it would not be useful as the school does not yet know what groups of students they may be looking for. In other words, the wait list is not so much about individual students, although this is true to some degree, it is more about which groups the school wants to fill in based on what they already know about the incoming class.
To give just one more fictional example, let’s say the school does not have any students who have paid a deposit from Montana (for some reason in the world of admission this State is the one that gets picked when talking about geographical diversity). In an effort to try to change this, the school may decide to pull up all the students from the Montana who are on the wait list. Since the State is so small there may only be 2 or 3 of these students. If that is the case, then the chances for them getting in are between 33%-50%. On the other hand, if the school looks to see that they have actually had too many students enroll in their school of architecture, there will be a 0% chance of any students getting in to that part of the school as schools need to meet enrolment goals. Bringing in too many students creates all sorts of problems for housing, class size and advising etc. It used to be a nearly impossible job for schools to come in at the exact number they are tasked to enroll. Now, with all the good data these days, most come close to doing so.
In addition to the groups I have just mentioned, there are some others kinds of students that may benefit in the selection process due to “institutional priorities”. The number who falls into the following categories on the wait list is often small, but they are often given high priority to come off the wait list. If a coach comes to the admission office and makes a case that an athlete who was recruited and is now on the waiting list has recently improved his or her skills dramatically, then this student may well be given a spot. Most coaches already have their rosters set, so this is not that common but an athlete who suddenly jumps up in talent will be given an edge. Or if it turns out that the coach has come up short of athlete needed for a team then any athlete on the wait list might get an edge as well.
The other group of wait list students who often get priority for acceptance from the wait list are those who have ties to the school either because they are a legacy or are development case. Many people do not like the fact that students whose parents went to the school already have an edge and it certainly won’t make them any happier to know that there are some on the waiting list that get special treatment. In addition, an edge will be given at some schools for those students whose parents may have the capacity to give huge sums to the school. There are stories that circulate around the admission world about how parents have bought a place at a school and perhaps some may be true, but I do not think this goes on in quite so direct a way as the consequences are to great for those involved.
A number of stories have come out this year about how Board Members and development officers do talk with admission about candidates. In addition, Dan Golden won a Pulitzer prize for documenting how the rich and famous sometimes get their children into certain schools more for who they are rather than what they might have done academically. In some cases these students are offered spots off the wait list. In others they are offered entry into the second semester so they don’t show up on the US News data.
Recently, at a number of schools, one particular group of students has increasingly been given priority to get in off the wait list—those who have the means to pay the total cost of attendance. While there are a handful of schools that might look at the accepted student data and then try to take a few more low-income students in order to diversify the class socio-economically, this applies to very few schools as most simply do not have the money to do this. Instead more schools now look at the ability to pay full fees as one of the factors when choosing students.1 Therefore, in the aggregate, low-income students’ chances of coming off the wait list are much slimmer, in most cases, than full payers. In some cases they will have virtually no chance at all. (Schools will not say this in public.)
The last topic I that will address about the way schools now evaluate students to accept from the wait list falls under this rubric:
Demonstrated Interest
I should start by saying that demonstrated interest is now a much larger part of how schools accept students overall. The stats are clear that students who choose to apply early decision, and to a lesser degree, early action increases their chances for admission. In some cases the differences are dramatic.
Demonstrated interest, however, is also an increasingly important part of how many schools decide to accept student in regular decision. I mentioned above that deep data is now a vital part of what admission offices use to help them enroll the students that will help them meet their enrollment goals and institutional priorities. I also mentioned that improving yield was an important part of helping schools rise in the rankings. Therefore, schools are now tracking things like whether applicants have visited the school, whether they have opened emails that the school has sent, whether they have contacted the admission etc. Not all schools do this but more and more schools are. Those students who show up in the data at the high end of demonstrated interest pool are more likely to enroll than those who may have great academic numbers but have done nothing to show interest. Some very strong students have been surprised not to receive an offer from some schools where they would seem to have had a great chance to get in. So far as I know, there have been no publicly released studies on how much demonstrated interest gets factored in to admission decisions. Students, families and counselors need to be aware that the difference between getting in and not getting in now includes demonstrating interest at many places.
In terms of how demonstrated interest and the wait list works there are two things that students can do. One is what all students should do and the other is for those who are sure that the wait list school is their clear first choice.
In the information schools send to students on the wait list they typically include a list of things that students should do. The most important of these is for the students to tell the school they wish to remain of the wait list. Almost all schools ask this question, as some students have not yet heard from other schools when they are placed on the wait list. These students subsequently get into their first choice school and have no intention of enrolling at the school which placed them on the wait list. Schools do not wish to consider students who have little or no interest in being considered for a spot. Once again this would hurt their yield percentages.
Colleges and universities also ask students on the wait list to provide them with any significant updates. By this they usually mean academic updates like term grades or in some cases, if the secondary school year ends in May or early June, the final transcript. (Most wait list selections are finished by June; almost none are still active after July).
Most schools are not interested in seeing students take more standardized tests like the SAT or ACT. Most schools are also not interested in getting a flood of new recommendations either. On the other hand, a student who has been recognized for winning a significant award, academic or extracurricular or in some other endeavor, then he or she should send that to the school. A student should not feel at a disadvantage if there are no great new things that have happened.
Nevertheless there is one particular thing that can be useful to the student trying to get off a wait list that helps the school to determine demonstrated interest of the part of the student. If it is true that a student can put into writing that the school is the his or her first choice and that he or she will enroll if offered, then that should be put in writing and sent off well before May 1. As I have already written, schools don’t like it when people don’t accept an offer made to someone on the wait list. It hurts yield. Having something in writing from a student saying he or she will come is demonstrating interest in ways that the school wants to know. 2
In fact, in some cases, schools call the student and ask if a student will accept an offer prior to sending the offer. In other words they want to be sure that if an offer is made it will be accepted. If a student is not sure, then they likely will not receive an offer. Some schools only give the student a day or two to decide (which I think is ethically questionable).
I want to add however, that students should think very carefully before submitting such a letter. I always try to give this advice to students: Even if you come off the wait list that is no reason to drop the other school. Look carefully at the options. Being at a school that is a great fit is much more important than the ranking of the school in terms of future success. A student who is swayed by the ranking rather than the atmosphere of the school may end up at a place that does not feel right. A student that thinks that rankings are the be all and end all of what makes a school great does not understand that performance and immersion in the whole experience of a college or university is what will open doors after graduation. Since I have written about this many times I won’t give a long sermon about this here.
Finally, There are, many stories of students who have done innovative things to get off the wait list. I have described a few of them here. These approaches are essentially one-offs. They worked once for that particular student but they are not likely to work again. It is the innovative approach that was unique and subsequent students repeating what others have done does not demonstrate much except the ability to copy well and that is not what schools typically look for in high achieving students.
One thing, however, there seems to be disagreement about when it comes to demonstrating interest centers around whether a student should make personal contact with someone in the admission office and if they do so how this should happen.
I can’t speak for others, but those students who show up on campus and reach out and talk have often helped themselves. Schools don’t encourage this as many schools wait list thousands of students so they say they can’t talk with them in any formal way during April and usually overall too. But students show up anyway and ask to speak to a dean or admission officer. In some cases, the conversations I have had with students like this have been so compelling that I advocated strongly to take them off the wait list. I don’t know how common this might be at most schools, but demonstrating continued interest and strong academic performance are the two big-ticket items for reconsideration of students who are on the wait list.
I should also add that I am not the only one who has noticed that personal contact with the admission office can help. A student who was accepted to MIT but wanted Harvard shared his experience in Forbes:
But his advice does not always apply. When Shah found out he was wait-listed at Harvard his guidance counselor suggested he contact the admissions officer responsible for his area of the country. He was already heading to Cambridge for MIT’s pre-frosh weekend, so stopping off at Harvard was reasonable. He made an appointment to tell his advisor why he was a good fit for the school. In his case, the quick visit worked. “The important thing was just telling him that I was interested,” Shah says. “Beyond that there’s not much an applicant can do.”
While I have tried to be detailed about the many things that go on with the wait list I still need to make one last comment. Each school has its own approach to admission. There is no way to cover all the factors that individual schools use to determine who gets off the wait list. Like everything else in admission, the process of selecting students is a bit too opaque and far more complicated than even a long answer like this could hope to address in a way that covers all the different factors that come into play. Given what I have just said, I would advise students and families to be wary of believing some of the things posted about how to get in off the wait list. Often they are short and have some bullet points that are worth thinking about, but they do not take many of the variables into account. I have not been able to address many of the other variables here, but I have tried to give enough detail to let people know the process is detailed and anything but random. Schools know what they are looking for and try to make sure that the students who start classes in the fall meet all the most important institutional priorities set forth by the President and the Board.
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1. Most schools are becoming more need aware in regular admission and some are definitely need aware during the wait list season. There are simply not enough families who can afford to pa full fees these days so there are tuition discounts and lots of other things that never existed a generation ago. For the wait list specifically, schools have already awarded financial packages to all the students they could. These packages often include significant loans. As many people have written about, student loan debt is one of the largest economic problems in the US today. Since schools have already awarded the limited grants they have, low income student would have loans or nothing to choose from should they picked from the waiting list (or at least this is the case at some schools; others will create a package for low income students).
One of the big problems in admission today is how transparent schools are when it comes to aid. More and more counselors who work with low-income student are struck by how some of these students are not getting into some schools in which others with credentials that are lower are getting in. At schools that say at the outset they are need aware in admission, then it is not an ethical issue that anyone can do anything about. On the other hand, there are some schools that post they are need blind (they do not look at income as a part of the evaluations of students for admission) who are taking weaker students who can pay and these students are not hooked to the schools in some way (athlete, legacy, under-represented minority for example). I have pointed out how we are all biased due to the way our brains are wired. One way this happens in admission is how the income information is actually foregrounded on the first "page" of data that comes in from the Common Application. Even if an admission reader thinks this data does not affect they are reading neuroscience demonstrates they are wrong. We are primed by the information we see.
2. It is important for those students who are on a wait list to remember than with a few exceptions all of them are more than qualified to attend the schools and do exceptionally well. Some wait-listed students at highly selective schools often ask themselves all too often “What did I do wrong?” The answer in most cases is “Nothing”. Highly selective schools get exceptional students from all over the world to apply. They have limited spaces and they pick students for a lot of reasons, some of which I have already highlighted. If there were any significant problems the admission office noticed in evaluating the application, the student would have simply been denied. I can say that some of the students who have been accepted off of wait lists and the attended that school have done far better than almost all the students on campus at the end of four years. I have described one of those students here. These students often come in with something to prove. They are motivated to show the school that they belong and so they work exceptionally hard and end up doing well. To put it simply, wait listed students should consider themselves ready to do well the second they step on campus. They should not in any way feel they are not as prepared to contribute in and out of the classroom. They should begin their academic career fully confident they have what it takes to be a star.
On the other hand, I would not want to leave out something that is also a part of the wait list that not many know much about. There are some students who are placed on the wait list as a “courtesy” (a term used by some in the world of admission). A courtesy wait list can be defined as a student who is placed on the waiting list for reasons that are strategic or political but that the student has virtually no chance of being offered admission. Who are these students? These students tend to be legacies or others tied to the university in some way (perhaps a faculty child for example). The thinking behind placing a student like this on the wait list is that it is not quite as hard a blow as getting a straight out deny. There are some in education that hate this kind of thing and it is pretty easy to understand why. The student has no chance of getting in yet continues to hope that good things might happen. On the other hand, when I worked for a university, I would occasionally receive calls from college counselors who were hoping to find out something about their students. In some cases, the counselors would ask that a student, who might be in the deny group, still be put on the wait list as a courtesy. It isn’t just the colleges and universities that are trying to placate the parents and students and sometimes having students on the wait list makes the student feel better or at least this is the thinking some educators have. For reasons that are obvious no school would ever reveal that a particular student was on the wait list as a courtesy. So while schools do not rank wait list students, there are some on the list that are on there for reasons other than making sure the school enrolls the class it wants. (This should also tell you that there are counselors that reach out to schools to talk about candidates prior to decisions going out. In some cases ,if there is a strong relationship with the counselor and the school, these decisions will be discussed. This kind of special access is described well in Jacques Steinberg’s excellent book The Gatekeepers.)
Yield has become a big focus for schools as the higher the yield the higher the selectivity of the school often is (as the NY Times chart shows). If almost all students accept the offer (Harvard is at the top at 82%) then they will not offer admission to many more students than they have actually enrolling and this increases selectivity significantly. Schools that have only a 50% yield need to offer to twice the number of students in order to enroll a full class. The chart shows that aside from a few schools, the yield rate is actually not all that high, even at some of the most prestigious schools in the US. For example, Johns Hopkins yield rate comes in at about 40% --less than half of Harvard’s. Students applying to Hopkins have to be great to get in and many of them get accepted to other highly selective schools and end up not enrolling at Hopkins. This low rate of return is something that has become a big issue in admission as it is used as a factor in US News rankings. (Editorial opinion: Rankings drive many administrative decisions that may not always be in the best interest of families and students.)
To put it simply-- because of the race to the top of the rankings selective and otherwise, schools have been investing a lot of money, time into increasing yield percentages. Some schools hire outside marketing firms to create a whole soup to nuts approach to admission. Gone are the days when students were accepted and then had a relatively quiet month to decide which is the best option. During the month of April, after decisions have gone out, parents and students can expect, from some schools, a blitz of emails, tweets, phone calls and other forms of outreach to encourage students to enroll. I have seen samples from schools this year and there are some schools sending stuff, if not every day, then at least every few days. In addition, many schools have special days in which to visit. On theses days invest lots of money and staff into rolling out the red carpet. Why? Students come, as those who visit are far more likely to enroll than those who don’t.
The discussion about yield is really a long way of showing why the chances of any individual student getting off the wait list are anything but good. Schools have lots of data to help them predict accurately how many students they should offer to get the number of students they want. At virtually every college or university the percentage of students being offered a place off the wait list is far lower than the acceptance rate for students who have applied for regular or early admission. For example, two years ago Emory University put over 4100 students on the wait list but ended up offering to 25.
These daunting statistics lead me to give this piece of advice before I begin to explore more about who are the students who do come off the wait list and why they are not placed in rank order. First and foremost put a deposit down at another school prior to May 1. May 1 is the national candidates reply date that all selective schools have agreed to honor. Because schools are so much better at predicting how many students will accept offers it has become increasingly rare for students to hear anything from a wait list school until after this deadline passes. It makes economic sense for a student hoping to get off a wait list to hold off making a deposit until late in the month, as on the off chance they do happen to get off a wait list prior to May 1 they can get a refund on their deposit to the initial school. On the other hand, if a school, for any reason, comes in far in excess of its targeted numbers at May 1, then they very rarely accept a late deposit and the student would be out of anyplace to go in the fall. (I have seen this happen. It isn’t pretty.)
I also mention putting down a deposit for another reason. Since the odds are so steep for getting off the waitlist for any particular school, it is important for students to begin to think of the school where the deposit has been put in as “their” school. In other words, a lot of students who are wait listed spend a great deal of time and mental effort (and in some case physical effort) designing ways to get in off the wait list. While I have written about a couple very special cases where this kind of strategizing worked, the stats show that these are very rare cases.
To me, most students would be much better off taking the time to embrace the school they have paid a deposit to attend—
Start wearing the school sweatshirt, start filling out all the stuff that the schools send, gets on the entering class Facebook page etc.
Start imaging a great life ahead instead of focusing on what will likely not happen.
This will make the end of senior year less stressful and will prepare the student for where, in all probability, they will go. (I hope what I have just written will not be interpreted by anyone as inviting a student to slack off academically. Any low grade will not only doom a student’s chance of getting off the wait list but low grades that show up at the end of the year could also be a reason to lose the place a student already has—this does happen, not very often, but it is not worth the risk).
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Why do almost no colleges and universities have a ranked wait list?
Now that the preliminaries are over I can go on to explain why it is not in the school’s best interest to attempt to rank students on a wait list.
For the purposes of creating a thought experiment let’s say the May 1 deadline has just passed and the school is now looking over their numbers. Let’s suppose that the school has 40 spaces to fill. They have over 2000 students on the waiting list. If they do not rank students how will they go about doing this?
At first this seems like a huge task and that having a ranked waiting list would make it far easier to select students. While this initially might seem like a good idea there are many reasons almost no school follows this approach.
Each school has its own mission and institutional priorities that they hope to fulfill. For example, universities, by their very nature, have separate undergraduate schools within the whole university. In this thought experiment let’s say the university has a school of arts and sciences, a school of business, and a school of engineering. It may well be that the students who have made a deposit have filled the spaces for engineering and only have a couple for business, but they have 50 spaces in arts and sciences to fill. Virtually every one accepted off the wait list will be in the arts and sciences pool. No one will get in to engineering and perhaps two or three to business.
Institutional priorities also come into play in many other ways too. If, for example, the school in question is State Affiliated, then it may be that the number of in state students is low and the number of out of state students is just about right. In this scenario, all the offers from the wait list would go to in state students.
Or let’s say a private school, hoping to increase their geographical diversity, notices that there are very few students who have accepted offers live in States west of the Mississippi. They may decide to pull all those students on the waiting list who are residents of those states and offer almost all the spaces to them. Some schools wish to demonstrate on their profile that they enroll students from many places. They want the perspective these students may bring but they also want more applications to come in too. Students who notice that n there is no one in the region enrolled from where they live might not choose to apply.
Or it may be that a given school the percentage of women the school would like to enroll is several percentage points higher that would they would like. They may then decide to give almost all the spaces to males. (This is something that schools will not often admit in public for reasons that are pretty clear.)
Or it may be that the number of under-represented students is not what they had hoped it would be, so they may try to enroll as many of these students as they can from off the waiting list. For those who think this sounds like schools have quotas, they don’t. There is no fixed number of students that schools establish as that would violate the law, but there are intuitional goals.
Trying to increase diversity by gender or race this way may be a bit tricky if the courts looked at the figure closely (most schools do not publish much specific data about the characteristics of wait list acceptances), but this kind of selection of students does go on at some schools hoping to enroll a diverse student body as they have chosen to define it).
Given what I have just described about schools, I hope it is now clear why schools rarely rank students on the wait list. The wait list is one way a school gets to shape the class in terms of institutional priorities. If the school tried to rank students it would not be useful as the school does not yet know what groups of students they may be looking for. In other words, the wait list is not so much about individual students, although this is true to some degree, it is more about which groups the school wants to fill in based on what they already know about the incoming class.
To give just one more fictional example, let’s say the school does not have any students who have paid a deposit from Montana (for some reason in the world of admission this State is the one that gets picked when talking about geographical diversity). In an effort to try to change this, the school may decide to pull up all the students from the Montana who are on the wait list. Since the State is so small there may only be 2 or 3 of these students. If that is the case, then the chances for them getting in are between 33%-50%. On the other hand, if the school looks to see that they have actually had too many students enroll in their school of architecture, there will be a 0% chance of any students getting in to that part of the school as schools need to meet enrolment goals. Bringing in too many students creates all sorts of problems for housing, class size and advising etc. It used to be a nearly impossible job for schools to come in at the exact number they are tasked to enroll. Now, with all the good data these days, most come close to doing so.
In addition to the groups I have just mentioned, there are some others kinds of students that may benefit in the selection process due to “institutional priorities”. The number who falls into the following categories on the wait list is often small, but they are often given high priority to come off the wait list. If a coach comes to the admission office and makes a case that an athlete who was recruited and is now on the waiting list has recently improved his or her skills dramatically, then this student may well be given a spot. Most coaches already have their rosters set, so this is not that common but an athlete who suddenly jumps up in talent will be given an edge. Or if it turns out that the coach has come up short of athlete needed for a team then any athlete on the wait list might get an edge as well.
The other group of wait list students who often get priority for acceptance from the wait list are those who have ties to the school either because they are a legacy or are development case. Many people do not like the fact that students whose parents went to the school already have an edge and it certainly won’t make them any happier to know that there are some on the waiting list that get special treatment. In addition, an edge will be given at some schools for those students whose parents may have the capacity to give huge sums to the school. There are stories that circulate around the admission world about how parents have bought a place at a school and perhaps some may be true, but I do not think this goes on in quite so direct a way as the consequences are to great for those involved.
A number of stories have come out this year about how Board Members and development officers do talk with admission about candidates. In addition, Dan Golden won a Pulitzer prize for documenting how the rich and famous sometimes get their children into certain schools more for who they are rather than what they might have done academically. In some cases these students are offered spots off the wait list. In others they are offered entry into the second semester so they don’t show up on the US News data.
Recently, at a number of schools, one particular group of students has increasingly been given priority to get in off the wait list—those who have the means to pay the total cost of attendance. While there are a handful of schools that might look at the accepted student data and then try to take a few more low-income students in order to diversify the class socio-economically, this applies to very few schools as most simply do not have the money to do this. Instead more schools now look at the ability to pay full fees as one of the factors when choosing students.1 Therefore, in the aggregate, low-income students’ chances of coming off the wait list are much slimmer, in most cases, than full payers. In some cases they will have virtually no chance at all. (Schools will not say this in public.)
The last topic I that will address about the way schools now evaluate students to accept from the wait list falls under this rubric:
Demonstrated Interest
I should start by saying that demonstrated interest is now a much larger part of how schools accept students overall. The stats are clear that students who choose to apply early decision, and to a lesser degree, early action increases their chances for admission. In some cases the differences are dramatic.
Demonstrated interest, however, is also an increasingly important part of how many schools decide to accept student in regular decision. I mentioned above that deep data is now a vital part of what admission offices use to help them enroll the students that will help them meet their enrollment goals and institutional priorities. I also mentioned that improving yield was an important part of helping schools rise in the rankings. Therefore, schools are now tracking things like whether applicants have visited the school, whether they have opened emails that the school has sent, whether they have contacted the admission etc. Not all schools do this but more and more schools are. Those students who show up in the data at the high end of demonstrated interest pool are more likely to enroll than those who may have great academic numbers but have done nothing to show interest. Some very strong students have been surprised not to receive an offer from some schools where they would seem to have had a great chance to get in. So far as I know, there have been no publicly released studies on how much demonstrated interest gets factored in to admission decisions. Students, families and counselors need to be aware that the difference between getting in and not getting in now includes demonstrating interest at many places.
In terms of how demonstrated interest and the wait list works there are two things that students can do. One is what all students should do and the other is for those who are sure that the wait list school is their clear first choice.
In the information schools send to students on the wait list they typically include a list of things that students should do. The most important of these is for the students to tell the school they wish to remain of the wait list. Almost all schools ask this question, as some students have not yet heard from other schools when they are placed on the wait list. These students subsequently get into their first choice school and have no intention of enrolling at the school which placed them on the wait list. Schools do not wish to consider students who have little or no interest in being considered for a spot. Once again this would hurt their yield percentages.
Colleges and universities also ask students on the wait list to provide them with any significant updates. By this they usually mean academic updates like term grades or in some cases, if the secondary school year ends in May or early June, the final transcript. (Most wait list selections are finished by June; almost none are still active after July).
Most schools are not interested in seeing students take more standardized tests like the SAT or ACT. Most schools are also not interested in getting a flood of new recommendations either. On the other hand, a student who has been recognized for winning a significant award, academic or extracurricular or in some other endeavor, then he or she should send that to the school. A student should not feel at a disadvantage if there are no great new things that have happened.
Nevertheless there is one particular thing that can be useful to the student trying to get off a wait list that helps the school to determine demonstrated interest of the part of the student. If it is true that a student can put into writing that the school is the his or her first choice and that he or she will enroll if offered, then that should be put in writing and sent off well before May 1. As I have already written, schools don’t like it when people don’t accept an offer made to someone on the wait list. It hurts yield. Having something in writing from a student saying he or she will come is demonstrating interest in ways that the school wants to know. 2
In fact, in some cases, schools call the student and ask if a student will accept an offer prior to sending the offer. In other words they want to be sure that if an offer is made it will be accepted. If a student is not sure, then they likely will not receive an offer. Some schools only give the student a day or two to decide (which I think is ethically questionable).
I want to add however, that students should think very carefully before submitting such a letter. I always try to give this advice to students: Even if you come off the wait list that is no reason to drop the other school. Look carefully at the options. Being at a school that is a great fit is much more important than the ranking of the school in terms of future success. A student who is swayed by the ranking rather than the atmosphere of the school may end up at a place that does not feel right. A student that thinks that rankings are the be all and end all of what makes a school great does not understand that performance and immersion in the whole experience of a college or university is what will open doors after graduation. Since I have written about this many times I won’t give a long sermon about this here.
Finally, There are, many stories of students who have done innovative things to get off the wait list. I have described a few of them here. These approaches are essentially one-offs. They worked once for that particular student but they are not likely to work again. It is the innovative approach that was unique and subsequent students repeating what others have done does not demonstrate much except the ability to copy well and that is not what schools typically look for in high achieving students.
One thing, however, there seems to be disagreement about when it comes to demonstrating interest centers around whether a student should make personal contact with someone in the admission office and if they do so how this should happen.
I can’t speak for others, but those students who show up on campus and reach out and talk have often helped themselves. Schools don’t encourage this as many schools wait list thousands of students so they say they can’t talk with them in any formal way during April and usually overall too. But students show up anyway and ask to speak to a dean or admission officer. In some cases, the conversations I have had with students like this have been so compelling that I advocated strongly to take them off the wait list. I don’t know how common this might be at most schools, but demonstrating continued interest and strong academic performance are the two big-ticket items for reconsideration of students who are on the wait list.
I should also add that I am not the only one who has noticed that personal contact with the admission office can help. A student who was accepted to MIT but wanted Harvard shared his experience in Forbes:
But his advice does not always apply. When Shah found out he was wait-listed at Harvard his guidance counselor suggested he contact the admissions officer responsible for his area of the country. He was already heading to Cambridge for MIT’s pre-frosh weekend, so stopping off at Harvard was reasonable. He made an appointment to tell his advisor why he was a good fit for the school. In his case, the quick visit worked. “The important thing was just telling him that I was interested,” Shah says. “Beyond that there’s not much an applicant can do.”
While I have tried to be detailed about the many things that go on with the wait list I still need to make one last comment. Each school has its own approach to admission. There is no way to cover all the factors that individual schools use to determine who gets off the wait list. Like everything else in admission, the process of selecting students is a bit too opaque and far more complicated than even a long answer like this could hope to address in a way that covers all the different factors that come into play. Given what I have just said, I would advise students and families to be wary of believing some of the things posted about how to get in off the wait list. Often they are short and have some bullet points that are worth thinking about, but they do not take many of the variables into account. I have not been able to address many of the other variables here, but I have tried to give enough detail to let people know the process is detailed and anything but random. Schools know what they are looking for and try to make sure that the students who start classes in the fall meet all the most important institutional priorities set forth by the President and the Board.
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1. Most schools are becoming more need aware in regular admission and some are definitely need aware during the wait list season. There are simply not enough families who can afford to pa full fees these days so there are tuition discounts and lots of other things that never existed a generation ago. For the wait list specifically, schools have already awarded financial packages to all the students they could. These packages often include significant loans. As many people have written about, student loan debt is one of the largest economic problems in the US today. Since schools have already awarded the limited grants they have, low income student would have loans or nothing to choose from should they picked from the waiting list (or at least this is the case at some schools; others will create a package for low income students).
One of the big problems in admission today is how transparent schools are when it comes to aid. More and more counselors who work with low-income student are struck by how some of these students are not getting into some schools in which others with credentials that are lower are getting in. At schools that say at the outset they are need aware in admission, then it is not an ethical issue that anyone can do anything about. On the other hand, there are some schools that post they are need blind (they do not look at income as a part of the evaluations of students for admission) who are taking weaker students who can pay and these students are not hooked to the schools in some way (athlete, legacy, under-represented minority for example). I have pointed out how we are all biased due to the way our brains are wired. One way this happens in admission is how the income information is actually foregrounded on the first "page" of data that comes in from the Common Application. Even if an admission reader thinks this data does not affect they are reading neuroscience demonstrates they are wrong. We are primed by the information we see.
2. It is important for those students who are on a wait list to remember than with a few exceptions all of them are more than qualified to attend the schools and do exceptionally well. Some wait-listed students at highly selective schools often ask themselves all too often “What did I do wrong?” The answer in most cases is “Nothing”. Highly selective schools get exceptional students from all over the world to apply. They have limited spaces and they pick students for a lot of reasons, some of which I have already highlighted. If there were any significant problems the admission office noticed in evaluating the application, the student would have simply been denied. I can say that some of the students who have been accepted off of wait lists and the attended that school have done far better than almost all the students on campus at the end of four years. I have described one of those students here. These students often come in with something to prove. They are motivated to show the school that they belong and so they work exceptionally hard and end up doing well. To put it simply, wait listed students should consider themselves ready to do well the second they step on campus. They should not in any way feel they are not as prepared to contribute in and out of the classroom. They should begin their academic career fully confident they have what it takes to be a star.
On the other hand, I would not want to leave out something that is also a part of the wait list that not many know much about. There are some students who are placed on the wait list as a “courtesy” (a term used by some in the world of admission). A courtesy wait list can be defined as a student who is placed on the waiting list for reasons that are strategic or political but that the student has virtually no chance of being offered admission. Who are these students? These students tend to be legacies or others tied to the university in some way (perhaps a faculty child for example). The thinking behind placing a student like this on the wait list is that it is not quite as hard a blow as getting a straight out deny. There are some in education that hate this kind of thing and it is pretty easy to understand why. The student has no chance of getting in yet continues to hope that good things might happen. On the other hand, when I worked for a university, I would occasionally receive calls from college counselors who were hoping to find out something about their students. In some cases, the counselors would ask that a student, who might be in the deny group, still be put on the wait list as a courtesy. It isn’t just the colleges and universities that are trying to placate the parents and students and sometimes having students on the wait list makes the student feel better or at least this is the thinking some educators have. For reasons that are obvious no school would ever reveal that a particular student was on the wait list as a courtesy. So while schools do not rank wait list students, there are some on the list that are on there for reasons other than making sure the school enrolls the class it wants. (This should also tell you that there are counselors that reach out to schools to talk about candidates prior to decisions going out. In some cases ,if there is a strong relationship with the counselor and the school, these decisions will be discussed. This kind of special access is described well in Jacques Steinberg’s excellent book The Gatekeepers.)
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