Ugh. Your child has been placed on the waitlist.
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This means that they have not been accepted-but the college could still accept them. The best way to think about this is to pretend that you are at the airport and that you have been bumped from an overcrowded flight. You might get on it. You might not.
Waitlists Put You in Limbo
In the meantime, however, you have to wait in limbo until you hear one way or the other. All colleges accept more students than they can accommodate because they know that not all admitted students will choose to attend their school.
If your child is put on a waitlist, it means that the admissions committee will look at their file again if the school has fewer students accept spots than they anticipated. Generally, schools don’t even begin to look at this until after the May 1 deadline for deposits.
Therefore, your child may not hear if you have been accepted from the waitlist until May, June, or even later.
Increase in the Use of Waitlists
There has been a considerable spike in the number of students being placed on waitlists in recent years. According to a 2018 report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, 40% of American colleges and universities used a waitlist for fall 2017. And some schools that never used waitlists before-like the University of California campuses and the City University of New York, have recently started to use them.
Moreover, the size of college waitlists has also increased, with schools waitlisting an average of 10% of applicants. The New York Times reported that Duke University placed 3,000 students on the waitlist. Both Stanford and Yale each offered 1,000 students a waitlist spot. Colleges put an average of 10% of their applicants on the waitlist. When asked whether they wanted to remain on the waitlist or be taken off of it (and no longer considered for admission), over 50% of waitlisted students opted to stay on the waitlist.
How Many Students Are Accepted from Waitlists?
The most elite colleges accepted very few applicants off the waitlist, admitting only about 14% of them.
The number of students placed on waitlists has skyrocketed for two main reasons. First, more students from the U.S. and internationally are applying to college. This makes the competition for spots at elite schools, especially fierce. The second reason why we have seen such an increase in the use of waitlists is that students are applying to too many colleges in the first place. As a result, schools are having a hard time predicting their enrollments, and they use the waitlists to help manage the unknowns about how many admitted students will attend.