| 1. The idea of a "courtesy" waitlist is courtesy not so much to the kid as to other people who may have supported the application (including involved alumni parents, grandparents, etc.).
2. So what if a college wants to use its waitlist in the way cptofthehouse describes? It's taking a pretty big risk, in that it may not get a crack at students it actually wants. But I can see using the waitlist as a legitimate strategy to find out which of a group of students really, really wanted to go to your college and which were using it as a safety, and baking that planning into your acceptance strategy. Also, leaving a little room to fix "mistakes" called to your attention by trustees, significant donors, feeder schools, etc. It may not be pretty or live up to the highest standards of transparency, but it may be an effective way to run an institution. (By and large, I'm thinking about LACs here, not HYP-type schools so much. The times when it has looked to me like something like this was going on, it was with LACs.)
3. Super-large waitlists at selective institutions:
The randomness of admissions at the top of the food chain means that the kid Chicago waitlisted may well have gotten into Princeton and has no intention of accepting a waitlist place. I suspect, even at Harvard, etc., that lots of students don't accept a place on the list, and that the percentage who stay on the list and would accept an offer drops precipitously once you go below the top 5-6 colleges. Furthermore, I think to some extent elite colleges may use the waitlist to fill unexpected highly-specific slots: if Harvard admitted two offensive tackles, and both wound up going elsewhere, and the football coach is sobbing on the admissions dean's doorstep, they want at least a couple of offensive tackles on the waitlist.
And, again, once you dip below the HYP level the math changes pretty quickly. There aren't many more (and may not be any more) than 8-9 colleges where more than 40% of the kids they accept RD enroll (ED programs often disguise an RD yield around 33%, even at very highly rated institutions). My guess is that you (if you're not Harvard) may need to offer waitlist places to 10 offensive tackles in order to make certain that you can get an offensive tackle from the waitlist if you really need to. Multiply that times the number of slots that someone may be tracking, and you get a pretty big waitlist, even before courtesy comes into play (or any other element discussed here). |