<p>Too hard to tell - AFAIK Chicago doesn’t release data on the # waitlist offers. I doubt they will. See this:</p>
<p>[College</a> waitlists: using last year’s statistics to predict this year’s odds of admittance ? Ellen Richards Educational Services](<a href=“http://www.ellenrichardseducationalservices.com/college-admissions/college-waitlists-using-last-years-statistics-to-predict-this-years-odds-of-admittance/]College”>http://www.ellenrichardseducationalservices.com/college-admissions/college-waitlists-using-last-years-statistics-to-predict-this-years-odds-of-admittance/)</p>
<p>Notice that the schools with historically lower yields often waitlist very high numbers of students, like JHU (3700), Cornell (2600), CMU (4500), Dartmouth (1800), and Emory (3100). Some of them are equal or nearly equal to the # students they accepted in the first place. Notice that Yale and Stanford, which have high yields, had 996 and 999 students on the waitlist, even though Yale has a much smaller class; that makes sense because its yield is about 6% lower. Princeton, which has a yield 10-14% lower than the other two, placed 1,451 on the waitlist despite having the same class size as Yale. Finally, notice that often even those with larger waitlists usually don’t accept more students off them than the students with smaller waitlists. It’s a way to increase yield by gauging student interest, and many of the schools with lower yields (like WashU, Tufts, Vanderbilt) don’t release the # waitlists. I think that’s partly why Harvard doesn’t release the # waitlists - they don’t want the world to see that they engage in as much yield protection as some of their peers do. My guestimate on the # waitlist offers from Chicago is 3,500+.</p>
<p>One interesting statistic would be a “waitlist yield” - not the # waitlisted students who enrolled after being taken off the waitlist, but the # students who accepted a spot on the waitlist out of all waitlist offers. That would be a proxy for how much the university is using the waitlist to gauge student interest and improve yield. It would make sense that if a student didn’t accept a spot on JHU’s waitlist, it’s often (though not always) because he got into a comparable or better school, and if his best option is a lower-ranked school, he’d probably accept a spot on the waitlist (even if he doesn’t end up enrolling).</p>
<p>If the numbers stated before are right, Chicago’s “waitlist yield” would be 70%, which is much, much better than Chicago’s “overall yield.” (Compared to the yield of some previous years, that’s 2x the proportion!)</p>