With so many college campuses inaccessible to visitors, it is imperative that you plan the next few months carefully.
Getting waitlist results from colleges while sifting through Coronavirus news and school closures can be heartbreaking. If your child is in the waitlist zone, she could mope or freak out. Or she could take a deep breath, read this article, and be okay. Because there’s a secret to waitlists.
And once you know the secret, you’ll know to take control of the situation and help her finalize her college decision.
Every year, college admissions offices play a game I call “Too Many/Too Few.” Colleges can’t accept too many students – housing constraints, course sizes, and budgetary decisions limit schools to a maximum number of first-year students. And no college wants to accept too few students – tuition dollars are too important to pass up. As a result, they almost always admit fewer students with their initial round of acceptances, undershooting their admit targets, knowing that they’re going to end up with Too Few students.
Here’s where the waitlist comes in. In order to ensure that enough students say yes to fill their freshmen classes, the chances of getting off a waitlist look like this:
- On average, US colleges admit about 11 percent of all students who accept placement on a waitlist.
- About 71 percent of colleges admit less than 10 percent of their waitlisted students.
- Approximately 57 percent of universities admit less than 5 percent of students on their waitlists.
But these general numbers obscure how unpredictable the dynamic can be. Here are some examples of how waitlists vary. This year may look very different given the circumstances.
- Boston College has about 7,500 students on its waitlist, while Northwestern has only 2,800.
- Skidmore admits 28 percent of its waitlist; Pomona only admits 13 percent.
- UC Riverside puts more than 11,000 students on its waitlist, but ultimately admits only 1,100 of them.
- UCSB puts over 7,500 applicants on its waitlist, but rarely admits any of them.
Simply put, when it comes to waitlists, colleges are all over the place.
So now we come to the secret: if you know how a school approaches its Too Many/Too Few problem, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen and what – if anything – your child should do about it.
Here are a few key steps she should take.
Respond to the Waitlist Offer – If it’s a school she’s interested in, she’ll want to let them know she “accepts” placement on the waitlist. That will keep her in the waitlist pool. If she doesn’t respond, chances are she’ll fall off the list entirely.
Write a Letter of Intent – Pay close attention to what schools say about additional information they will take from waitlisted students. Some schools tell you to send nothing. With those schools, there’s little more to do than wait. But most schools will accept additional information, which means students should write a letter of intent. College admissions offices want to know if you’re going to accept an offer of admission. If the school is your top choice and you’re confident you’ll go if accepted, then tell them.
At Colledge, we counsel our waitlisted students with next steps and they’ve had real successes. We helped one student – a budding community leader who was waitlisted at Georgetown – write a heartfelt letter of intent that leveraged her off the waitlist and into the school of her dreams. Why did this work? Because we knew her strengths and priorities, and we guided her with first-hand admissions knowledge about waitlist realities.
For more information on how to get beyond the waitlist zone or to set up a free phone consultation to discuss how we work with students on the college admissions process, click here.
