This article from Bloomberg shows just how unrealistic it is to expect getting off the WL really is!
Its better to take a WL notification as a “soft denial” for top U’s such as Stanford, Harvard., etc.
No use getting your hopes up.
Is this news?
Well, here’s the thing…take Stanford (the most dramatic school listed here)…7 kids attended Stanford last year who thought they weren’t going to get in. For those 7 kids, a pretty big deal. 
I truly think the vast majority of kids here know that they aren’t going to get off the lists…but two things 1) for most of the schools, being wait-listed genuinely means that the kid had the chops and 2) its always nice to have something to look forward to.
And sometimes it works out…a classmate of D’s was waitlisted to uchicago last year…and she just happily finished her first year there.
it may be news to newbies. that’s why I posted it.
you and I know its not news.
Others new to CC and the college application process may not know and still have naive hopes of getting off WL’s.
One of my daughter’s older siblings was kept on the wait list at his top choice until July, at which point he was rejected. It was just awful, because he was in a holding pattern until then, and didn’t focus on the school where he deposited. Given that experience, I was so happy when she didn’t accept a place on any of the waitlists she received, focusing instead on the schools that did accept her.
I’ve a lot less concern about wait lists than I do about the number of students deferred from EA/ED to the regular pool – some schools, like MIT, defer a huge percentage of applicants even though the admission rate for those applicants in RD is not good. Better to make a decision and communicate it rather than holding out unlikely hope right at the time students ought to be getting serious about other colleges that actually would be likely to admit them.
There are far more extreme examples of deferrals than MIT. For example, the early action results for Princeton’s class of 2018 are below. Only 1% of applicants were rejected.
3042 deferred (79%)
714 accepted (19%)
49 rejected (1%)
12 withdrawn (0.3%)
35 no information
At the time my older son applied to MIT the deferrals had a bout a 25% chance of getting in regular round. It was better odds than the EA round which at that time (and maybe still) had capped to only accepting a certain percentage of the class. I think the real problem is that so many more student are applying that it’s hard to do the real cutthroat denials in the length of time they have. They can just admit the superstars EA and then do a much more detailed look at the rest later. I know Tufts has said that if you are deferred it means that at least one person on the committee was rooting for you.
Even 40 years ago I had a friend who didn’t get off the Yale waitlist until August.