Anecdotal but last year a family member ended up on more than what I would have considered a normal number of waitlists. Two things worry me: (1) I’ve heard on CC that waitlist is a soft rejection (backed up by the statistics) but I don’t feel like the general applicant pool (and families) are aware of this. (2) as colleges try to respond to the unhappiness of ever-more-active parents (we are definitely more “involved” as a group than the prior generations, for good and bad reasons), they might lean further into using the waitlist as a soft rejection, thereby having WL lose all meaning. And the process of getting into a school from a waitlist is the one most open to shenanigans…
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