I thought that I might start a list of schools that make heavy use of the waitlist and / or deferral.
Looking at our high school’s Scoir data was eye-opening. There was one school that seemed to waitlist everyone (University of Michigan) and others that deferred a lot of people last year.
I followed up and looked at UM’s CDS data…sure enough, the school waitlisted 30.7% of applicants in 2023-2024. It also accepted only 5.21% of people who decided to stay on the waitlist.
Wellesley was another “waitlister / deferrer” for our high school. Indeed, the CDS showed that Wellesley waitlisted 29.2% of applicants and accepted only 1.6% of those who decided to stay on the waitlist.
Holy Cross waitlisted 42.7% of applicants and then accepted 2.67% of those who remained on the waitlist.
Note that CDS does not track deferrals (that I can tell).
For deferrals (assuming you mean from ED or EA, or rolling admission applicants who do not get a quick decision), it would also be interesting to know the eventual results, so that deferred applicants can get an idea of what chances they have with the new information of deferral.
Honestly, almost everyone does this, and not a little, and they have been doing it for a long while.
There are so many threads on this because it is so massively distressing to applicants. There are lots of schools that cannot be over-enrolled because they don’t have the housing, so they plan to use the WL to finalize the class. But they don’t know if they will need boys or girls, if they can offer FA, if they need a few more science kids or someone who’s intrrested in Latin, etc. So they just put them all on the WL. They don’t know how many of those kids will want to be on the WL and then which they need. Being deferred can be the first step in this.
Rural LACs tend to do this a lot. Look at the CDS for any school where you apply, then brace yourself!
There are many more school motives for deferral and waitlist than those that you list. And schools use waitlist and deferral VERY differently. Further, a scan of Reddit would show there is mass confusion on this topic.
The CDS also does not tell the whole story, unfortunately. Hence the thread.
I’ve definitely seen the waitlist sections of the CDS for NESCAC schools but never noticed a difference between rural and non-rural. Do you think they are a harder sell or have a lower yield that urban LACS? There aren’t really that many urban selective LACs.
That is a high number even for Michigan. I don’t think you will see like 5% coming off the wait list in the future. Especially with direct admit now to Ross and others schools.
Also many just do wait list with a “let’s see what happens” attitude. Many that get accepted off it still can’t afford the school. Seems like a wasteful excercise for many.
I also think you will see higher rejection rates in the future. With 90,000 total applications something has to give.
I never said that it would tell the whole story. I am just posting a question on College Confidential and getting many non-answers to my question, as per usual for this forum.
That’s an interesting question. Schools like Tufts have housed overflow students in hotels since the 70s while simultaneously pushing students into off-campus housing because this was an option for them. Id imagine that Hamilton or Middlebury or Denison might find themselves without those options. Having said that, it’s hard to imagine Tufts or any other school that finds a need for a block of housing, quite possibly in an expensive city, is going to be delighted either.
The schools I’m most familiar with waitlist a high number of students and accept very few off that WL. IMO, WL is often just a soft rejection.
Cornell - the last CDS show 7,729 students waitlisted and only 260 admitted. Cornell also makes use of the guaranteed transfer option for sophomores which muddies the water even further.
Purdue - last CDS - 14,184 WL, 466 admitted off the wait list.
When one asks a question that’s unanswerable, one needs to expect non-answers. The only ones that can provide definitive answers are admissions officers, and none of them are going to come here or to Reddit to post such information.
Every cycle students “analyze” the waitlist to assess chances. It’s a parlor game since nobody knows if Freddy fills the void that the university has. What Freddy needs to do is accept one of his offers received and consider the WL a polite rejection. If he gets off the WL, great. But odds are, he won’t
The question is what schools make heavy use of the waitlist and / or deferral.
Information is out there. Waitlist info comes off the CDS. Deferrals people can potentially see in their high school data (e.g., Scoir). I am just asking what people notice. Nothing more.
Sometimes the truth is reveals in a thousand cuts to the onion rather than a definitive data source.
I note when I dived into CDS waitlist data, it appeared some individual colleges had a lot of variability even from year to year. This makes sense because fundamentally this is an enrollment management tool, and you might waitlist more or fewer people, or accept more or fewer people off the waitlist, depending on exactly what is happening with enrollment at that time.
Of course this means you need to be careful to check many years of CDSes before trying to say anything about a given college’s “standard” practices.
But to avoid being entirely a non-answer answerer–Middlebury has quite the reputation in our feederish HS for making aggressive use of waitlistings for high numbers RD kids, and that seemed to be supported by SCOIR data.
Very few, if any, colleges really have meaningful amounts of data as to deferrals in our data. But reputationally, the feeling is now that Yale is not deferring nearly as many people as Harvard, a deferral from Yale actually means something more than from Harvard.
And at the moment, I would describe the available SCOIR data (which, annoyingly, has been cut back since I first had access) as “not inconsistent” with that notion. Specifically, looks like in recent years, deferred kids went 1 for 4 at Yale, which isn’t bad. At Harvard, none of the 4 deferreds in the database were known acceptances, although technically only three are known Denied, and one is Outcome Unknown (although I am like 99% sure we would know if they were accepted).
Again, though, that is not a particularly meaningful study.
I don’t know any, either. But another statistic that deferred students might find useful is to know how many deferred applicants were admitted later in the RD round. I know MIT publishes this stat, and maybe a few others do, but they’re in the minority.
We didn’t like their style at all. First, after they took DD from the wait list, they messed up FA at ALL schools by changing FAFSA Wrong! That was enough to dislike them. From dream school it moved to “What a mess school.” Also we got least FA out of 20 schools from them. So no love from us. More like greedy school.
Wow! I am so sorry to hear that. I believe I saw your post on this once before. It doesn’t seem like that should even be possible! I hope that you got it straightened out!