<p>How do they choose who to waitlist?</p>
<p>In broad general terms for any school, imagine all applicants being ranked from 1 to N. Schools admit far more applicants than they can handle, because they know many applicants will choose to attend somewhere else. So a school has to guess (from many years of experience) the percentage of applicants admitted that will actually enroll (the yield). Schools don’t want more students to show up than they have seats or beds for, so to be on the safe side, they often admit fewer than they actually think they need to admit to fill the available seats. Then when they see how things settle, they can admit the last few from the waiting list to arrive at their desired number of enrollees. </p>
<p>So the bottom line is, who gets waitlisted is a bit random, depending on where the cutoff in the ranked list is.</p>
<p>Another reason a student might be waitlisted is that the school wants to find out how badly the student really wants to attend the school. If the student initiates no further contact, she might never get the call with the admission offer. This could be important at schools where fit is a major concern.</p>