<p>When did I become the expert on this? I’ve never worked in an admissions office. :)</p>
<p>With the understanding that I actually know nothing and am mostly making educated guesses here, I posted earlier in this thread about two different wait list structures: the ranked wait list (possibly broken out into more than one list - such as by gender) and the unranked wait list. </p>
<p>Some of this is repeat from that earlier post.</p>
<p>Ranked wait list: The students on the wait list are simply ranked from 1 to N. Maybe there are separate boys and girls lists. There should be separate lists for incoming students in different grades: a 9th grade list, a 10th grade list, etc… The school would have admitted more students than it needs to fill its class based on its expected yield percentage. Let’s say a school expects a yield percentage of 75% and wants to fill an incoming 9th grade class of 150. They certainly aren’t going to admit just 150 because they probably wouldn’t be able to fill the class. But look what happens if they admit 200. If the actual yield percentage matches the expected yield percentage of 75%, they have 150 students and everything is fine. But, approximately half the time, their yield percentage should be above 75% and approximately half the time, it should be below 75% (the “above” and “below” chances might not be identical, but that’s much too fancy statistics for this example). If the yield percentage is below 75%, the school goes to the wait list. If the yield percentage is above 75%, say 80%, which could easily happen, the school has 160 students showing up in the fall and they don’t have anywhere for them to sleep at night! Big problems! To help avoid this problem, the school should (this is what I would do, but I don’t know if schools actually behave this way) admit a bit less than 200 students. Let’s say a school admits 190 students, now they expect to yield 142 or 143 students. If they hit that expectation, they’ll go to the wait list and should expect to go the wait list in a normal year. It’s not until the yield percentage climbs to 79% that they don’t need the wait list anymore. Beyond 79% they end up overcrowded, but at least they’ve reduced the chance of that.</p>
<p>Then there’s the unranked wait list. In this case, the overall numbers game works the same way as described above, but who is taken from the wait list works differently. Instead of going down the ranked order of the appropriate sub-wait list (for the right grade or gender for example), the school wants to balance the demographic make-up of their class. So, after all the responses are in, they look at who they’ve got. That star football quarterback from Iowa went to our archrival? Drats! We better pull the one from Pennsylvania off our wait list. Those 2 math geniuses from NYC decided to stay home and go to Stuyvesant because they didn’t like their FA awards? We’ve got one from Ohio and one from Palo Alto dying to come. Get them on the phone! And so the school can keep their desired class balance.</p>
<p>For both of these types of wait lists, there can be different levels of wait lists. Above I’ve described the part of the wait list called the “real” wait list. That’s the part of the wait list from which the school may actually admit students if the numbers and/or demographics work out in the appropriate way. After that, schools have at least one other wait list. The traditional “other” wait list is known as the “courtesy” wait list (or sometimes by other names). Let’s say the golfing buddy of one of the school’s trustees asks the trustee about his daughter who’s applying to the school. Can the trustee “order” the Dean of Admissions to accept the daughter. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. But he probably doesn’t want to because he cares a lot about the quality of the school, too. What he probably does if he wants to do his buddy a favor is write a letter and/or make a phone call to the dean of admissions and point out that this young lady is applying. If the young lady is talented and appropriate for the school but she might have been overlooked because the admissions process is often artwork, she’ll almost certainly get in now. But let’s say the young lady is a C- student with 25% on her SSATs and we’re talking about a very competitive school. She’s not getting in (well maybe under extreme circumstances, but let’s not worry about that here). She’s also not going to see an outright rejection letter in her mailbox. It costs the school nothing to send her a wait list letter as a gesture to the trustee (which makes his life easier with his buddy also).</p>
<p>I know for a fact that some schools have a 3rd level of wait list, though I’m not sure of the exact nature. I’m guessing it’s somewhere in between the two I’ve described. Reasonable kids who may be encouraged to apply next year or kids who are qualified for the school but have too many other kids ahead of them to have a chance to get in this year.</p>
<p>That’s an awful lot of explanation and although some of it is based on real knowledge, some of it is based on how I suspect it would make sense for these lists to logically operate. I am actually focused on these details very intently (mostly because of my nature) and have spoken to several directors of admissions about the processes involved here, but my thoughts here should definitely NOT be taken as absolute in any way. Moreover, much (though not all) of my information is based on NYC schools operations. I believe that it should be applicable to boarding schools as well, but there may be subtle differences that I don’t understand.</p>
<p>I’m fully prepared for GemmaV to jump on here now (though she’s probably back into busy mode) and tell me that I’m full of it, but more likely (I hope!) she’ll just tell me that I’ve missed some nuances.</p>
<p>I hope that helps rather than confuses anyone for whom it’s relevant.</p>