Top Colleges Dig Deeper in Wait Lists for Students

[csleslie51]

In what may be a happy surprise for thousands of high school seniors, Harvard plans to offer admission to 150 to 175 students on its waiting list, and Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania each expect to take 90, creating ripples that will send other highly selective colleges deeper into their waiting lists as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/ed...hp&oref=slogin

[tokenadult]

Thanks for sharing the link.

[frazzled1]

This is good news - I'll have my fingers crossed for several of my daughter's friends, and a number of CC posters, as well.

[fireflyscout]

Amazing that Harvard will be taking so many off the waitlist. It will be very interesting to see how this dominos.

[JHS]

If you do the math, all it means is that Harvard's yield, taking into account the lack of EA and the liberalization of financial aid, didn't go up significantly compared to previous years, and actually may have gone down a tad. If it has 125 slots open, that equates to a 78% yield on the students it accepted in April, compared to 79% last year. It accepted a meaningfully smaller number of students this year because no one knew how yields would play out, and it didn't want its third overstuffed class in a row. It's possible that Harvard's yield didn't go down at all -- the 125-150 range may reflect fewer than 125 spaces, but an assumption that yield from the waitlist won't be 100%.

There will be some domino effect, I'm sure, but it's likely to be pretty diffused. Those 125 students could be coming from 40-50 other colleges. If a few other colleges at the top of the food chain do something similar, the effect could be much bigger. But the article indicates that Stanford doesn't plan to use its waitlist at all except for any effect from other colleges' waitlists (i.e., Harvard), and that Yale is more in the 40 student range. (Which, of course, is completely consistent with Harvard's yield not going up as much as people feared it would.)

[VeryHappy]

Those 125 students could be coming from 40-50 other colleges.

I suspect they'll come from a smaller number of schools than that -- perhaps only 10 or 12 schools.

[JHS]

There's no way to tell, is there? For what it's worth, I was thinking 15-20 private universities, 10-15 LACs, and 10-15 state flagships. I don't think that's unreasonable. I know people on CC think everyone applies to all of the Ivies, plus Stanford and MIT, but that's just not true in my world. I see lots of kids who only apply to one or two of those schools (and more often to Harvard than to any other). And it's not that they're slouches -- sometimes they get in to Harvard. The only person I know taken from the waitlist at Harvard in recent years had put down a deposit at a well-outside-the-top-20 LAC, by the way.

[stacy]

i hope harvard will consider taking some of the transfer applicants (who were encouraged to apply--and pay the application fee--before being told no transfers would be accepted this year) as well as looking to their first-year wait list. I realize those people would be in a different graduating class, but presumably they could fill the same dorm rooms and would require similar levels of attention from profs.

[wjb]

At many schools, financial aid is severely limited (even non-existent) for students admitted from the waitlist. Does anyone have ideas about whether Harvard will be as generous with students admitted from the waitlist as it was with students admitted in the regular round?

[tokenadult]

Harvard treats all admitted students the same with regard to financial aid.

Harvard houses freshmen in one set of dorms, upperclassmen in another.

[coronax2]

UVA - According to Dean J from UVA, the College of A&S is over enrolled and most likely won't go to the wait list. The specialty schools might have a little wait list movement, but the numbers will be very small.

There's a link to this article, posted by Slickster, in the UVA forum.

[Professor101]

Anyone wants to speculate on why HYPC UPENN all have to use the waitlist while Brown and Dartmouth are over-enrolled.

[EMM1]

has to be differences in estimates about yield.

[fireandrain]

Brown accepted a couple hundred more students this year than last year. Perhaps it thought the yield would be lower because of new strategies by Harvard et al.

I can't speculate on Dartmouth -- how does its number of accepted students this year compare to prior years?

[mrego]

It's no news. Princeton knew last fall they would take up to 100 off the waitlist.