<p>Just called. They said they started reviewing on Thurs, Fri and end Mon next week</p>
<p>Do you think that means they will call on Monday?</p>
<p>So obviously your friend was insincere then since they have not finished the review yet. Just relax and wait. Regardless, you have a good school either way.</p>
<p>they call as they make decisions. Btw are you in any way affliated with Harvard? you seem to speak on these matters with an air of authority.</p>
<p>I used to work there, but not in admissions. But this is simple statistics and anybody who has worked in a college and has seen budgets and participated in budget meetings knows at a minimum basics how the system works. </p>
<p>If you noticed in waitlist threads for other colleges, they called everybody within a brief time period like a wave, not drip drip. I am guessing here as you do. Should not they wait until they have reviewed everybody to decide whom they would admit instead of calling everyone the very first day of reviews? If they started reviewing on Thursday, as people was told here, I would expect first calls to go out at the earliest Friday. What if the 15 best fits in the holistic review are at the very end of the pile? Unless there are special cases like development, child of a big shot professor, etc. I assume they made a list with let’s say ~40 and will call until they hit 26 yes/maybe. Then first mass rejection wave goes out, with very few WLs being retained as hedge for summer melt down, since many other schools also had high yields and did not open the WL, or accepted very small numbers.</p>
<p>btw, last night we were discussing the yields and wl for different schools this year with someone who used to be an admissions officer in another ivy and told us that if the men’s rate was indeed 52.x, almost 53%, then they will move aggressively towards females, or at least that’s what she would have done as she said schools want to have as close a balance to 50/50 ratio as possible.</p>
<p>Ana1,
You may be right. But after all, you aren’t one of the officers. Even if you are, each officer has their own ways. Pulling people from the waitlist to next year doesn’t affect this year’s diversity or numbers.
Right. That is, I believe, the case of my friend. I won’t name the specifics here, but you get the point.
Still not Harvard. Each school has an agenda of it own.</p>
<p>Are they admitting people off the waitlist in waves again?</p>
<p>That’s what it sounds like</p>
<p>Weird…you’d think that with 25 people, they’d do it all at once, haha. So are the re-evaluating the remaining people as they go along? Or will they have a list of people that they go through to admit in waves?</p>
<p>The lady on the phone told me that the next wave is end of May. They will offer spots, but in case those 25 decline, they will still have people to choose from.
What I dont understand is whether those 25 people are reserved for this year waitlist only or does it include z list?</p>
<p>Will they let us know when all of the waitlist spots have been taken?</p>
<p>detoidi, each school has an agenda of its own but they do operate in similar ways. Complex organizations and bureaucracies operate utilizing similar principles, regardless of the specific field of the institution, that’s why they are studied in management courses. You just need to look at the stats for a specific school for the last five years for race/gender/field of study and you can see patterns emerging. Check the yielding stats announced every May for H and then the final class profile and you will know what they are striving for. Also, it is still a committee that decides who gets in, not the individual admissions officer. The officer will decide whether to call you at 8pm or 6 pm, but the office decides when the decisions will go out. Nothing happens without being well thought.</p>
<p>“Pulling people from the waitlist to next year doesn’t affect this year’s diversity or numbers.”
Yes it does, because if they currently have 22% Asians and all previous years had 18% to 19% it means that they have to bring the percentage down and increase the underrepresented racial groups. It is not as bad as 20 years ago that they will notify alumni to find students from certain groups in June!!, but they do have targets and try to fill them. Even if they would pull students from the WL and offered a position to the following class, it would be from the underrepresented group where they know they would face problems again to hit their targets. What would be the incentive to pull WL students from group X for z-list when they are already over-matriculated for this year and next year they will have no difficulty in finding competitive candidates? They want to present a balanced class profile because it looks good in the presentations to the alumni ($$$$), the reports to the senate and various interest groups (think Summers and NOW), the faculty grant applications for federal funding, the presentations to the Wall street money crunchers for bonds, and of course the students and faculty. If there is suddenly a 45/55 women/men, the screams and complaints from activists will hit the roof. They are now 52.5% men in the class. Assuming that some development/special cases are men so they will be obligated to take them, we can conclude that the unhooked students will be primarily women. We are talking about a town where people complain even for kindergarten classes if they are not gender balanced.</p>
<p>Check this from the Harvard Magazine last fall:
“As for gender parity among undergraduates, that was not attained until 2007. The percentage of men had begun inching downward year by year after 1992, in what Fitzsimmons calls “a long, difficult battle”: Harvard’s reputation as a male-dominated institution deterred talented female students from applying.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So it looks like if all 25 accept, there will be no second wave. 
I wonder if it includes z-list too, but I guess we won’t know. Good luck, everyone!</p>
<p>This is so depressing. If Ana1’s analysis works, male students will have no chance at all regardless what sub-group then belong to.</p>
<p>It is free for all. Everyone can present their opinion, whether it is just for the entertainment value to pass the time, or for intellectual analysis.</p>
<p>Some food for thought. Fitzsimmons also said in the same article: “(Percentages in the admitted group tend to mirror percentages in the applicant pool. All along, he says, the policy has been “to admit the best people regardless of gender.”) Dean of admissions and financial aid William R. Fitzsimmons says there are still barriers to raising the representation of black and Hispanic students in particular. For poor, nonwhite students, he explains, “Every piece of the playing field is tipped against you.” Students may attend schools where the quality of instruction is so low, they would be lost as Harvard freshmen. Their schools may have eliminated extracurriculars such as music and sports. The admissions committee considers students’ records in context, but at a certain point, admitting very disadvantaged students may set them up for failure—and deny admission to others who have worked hard and excelled in higher-resource settings.”
[How</a> Harvard students, and their college experience, have changed since 1986 | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2011](<a href=“http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/the-twenty-first-century-student]How”>http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/the-twenty-first-century-student)</p>
<p>Is the z list for legacy/development cases or do unhooked applicants get these spots as well?</p>
<p>Also , if you were offered a spot on the z list would you take it? (I think my kid would rather just get going next year)</p>
<p>A whole variety of kids get “z listed” (some students write when they respond to the wait list notification that they would like the chance to take a gap year-- which is a clear message–Z LIST ME…I know of one student several years ago who was not hooked but wrote that and was Z listed… obviously I don’t want to commit a post hoc, propter hoc fallacy but I would hazard a guess that her letter might have had something to do with the Committee’s decision. )</p>
<p>Could someone explain to me what exactly the z-list is? I’ve seen the term thrown out a few times around CC, but I never figured out what it really is.</p>
<p>z list=forced gap year, admitted for the following class, here will be class of 2017</p>
<p>Some gap year ideas from other H students
<a href=“http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/gap-year/index.html[/url]”>http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/gap-year/index.html</a></p>