<p>Quoting myself (…) from another thread about a good applicant who wondered why she got waitilsted in so many schools:</p>
<p>The general answer is that the more schools a single applicant applies to, the more waitlists will come into play. Universities have an increasing challenge of gaging the yield, and this has gotten worse and will continue to, in proportion to how-many-schools-to-apply-to become the ‘new average’ for HS seniors. We are making our own bed…
Another casualty of applying to so many schools is that no one can give the sort of attention that clearly says there’s no place they’d rather be to all of them. Back in pre-historic times, when I went through this, applying to FOUR schools was a lot, and you could do a lot to show how much you know and want to go there. You could mention specific faculty members and their research, and show that you’ve read their academic papers. How do you do anything like that with sixteen universities?</p>