How hard is it to get off the CMU priority waitlist?

atxfather
Sat, 30 Mar 2019 15:26:52 +0000

waitlists vary from year to year. you can look at the CDS dataset on the website for some insight. Looks like last year they took 109 from a waiting list of over 3.6K. The year before they took 4. I think last year may have been an anomaly as most years the # taken from the wait list is very small.

It will depend upon how many acceptances they get by May 1st. Admissions is a balancing act. They have to over accept to get a target # of acceptances. If they get what they consider to be a full (or over full) number of acceptances the waitlist acceptance will be basically 0. If they are below expectation on one or more of the schools they end up taking a few. They end up adjusting the number of acceptances each year based upon the % they think will actually enroll and usually they are pretty close so the waitlist doesn’t get used heavily.