I was looking over Wisconsin’s statement about the percent admitted off the waitlist:
“Although admission from the wait list varies greatly from year to year, over the last three years an average of 28.7% of students on the wait list have been offered admission. We encourage you to join the wait list if you remain interested in admission to UW-Madison.”
What made me curious is that Wisconsin reported only 11 students admitted off the waitlist in Fall 2022. So I did some digging into the data and what follows is a combination of hard numbers + some educated speculation (because Fall 2023 data has not been released) + some basic math.
Short version: For two of the last three years, Wisconsin has admitted only 0.3% of students off the waitlist. In order for their three year average to be 28.7%, last year’s admit rate had to be considerably higher.
The numbers is green are pure guesswork based on prior years. The numbers is red are based on calculations that combine confirmed numbers + the guesswork numbers. The numbers for Fall 2023 seem very high, but Fall 2020 also had a lot of students admitted off the waitlist.
CAVEATS: All of these available offers might have been in Arts & Sciences. Maybe zero were in the colleges of Business or Engineering. Also, numbers admitted off the waitlist does not equal numbers enrolled. Wisconsin may have needed to offer admission to 5 or more students on the waitlist for every student who chose to enroll.
I contacted Wisconsin’s admissions office to ask about these numbers. Their counselor was really nice and very helpful, but he couldn’t answer my specific question about the waitlist. This makes sense because they are pretty explicit on their website about not giving information about waitlist odds.
My final point is that all these data tell us VERY LITTLE about the waitlist situation for this year. Maybe we’ll get lucky and this year will be like last year. Maybe not.
My son will be accepting an offer of admission at a different university over the next few days. If he gets an offer from Wisconsin, he will probably take it, but right now we are assuming that Wisconsin will not be his college home.