December 2023

Summary: Getting waitlisted means that a school considers you good enough to get in, they just don’t have a spot for you. Unfortunately, your odds of getting in are not great: about 20% at moderately competitive schools, and less than 10% at Top 30 schools. Still, there’s a chance, so you should do what you can to boost your odds.

Why did I get waitlisted?

When colleges send out acceptance letters, they really have no idea how many of those students are actually going to accept their offer and enroll there, since many of those students will accept offers from other schools instead. Just like airlines, they get a lot of no-shows. So they make an educated guess based on past results, and overbook their freshman class, figuring that a good chunk of accepted students will go elsewhere.

This is called their Yield Rate: the percentage of accepted students who enroll. And it’s a big source of pride for colleges. If you have a high yield rate, it means that everyone wants to go there. If you have low yield rate, it means that a lot of students use you as their “backup school”; even if you accept them, they’ll likely go somewhere else. (Yes, colleges get rejected too.)

Even the most prestigious universities like MIT and Harvard (see chart) retain only 83-84% of their applicants; that means that 1 in 6 admitted students decide to go somewhere else. Many competitive universities like Duke, Tulane, and Tufts lose about half of their accepted students to other schools. And even juggernauts like USC (one of the hardest universities to get into) loses almost 60% of its students to other universities.

Thus, waitlists.

Since universities don’t exactly know how many of their admitted students will enroll, they create a waitlist of highly qualified candidates who can step in and fill the gaps as needed. The size of the waitlist varies considerably from college to college, and year to year. For example, Yale has about 1,600 openings in its freshman class. For the Class of 2027, they accepted 2,275 students. Since they have about a 70% yield rate, they expect that only 70% of those 2,275 students (or about 1,600) will actually enroll at Yale. So if their estimations are correct, they just filled their class. But just in case their calculations were off, they put another 1,145 student on the waitlist. In a good year, they might accept 100 students at most off the waitlist, which is true of most Ivys. So best case scenario, you’ve got about a 10% chance of getting in off the waitlist.

Overall, what are my chances of getting in off the waitlist?

Unfortunately, not very good (see chart below). While it’s important to remember that figures vary from school to school, and year to year, you’ve generally got about a 20% chance of getting in off the waitlist at moderately competitive schools, but only about a 5-10% chance of getting in at highly competitive schools. Many of the Ivy Leagues like Cornell and UPenn take fewer than 5% of students off the waitlist. And there are years when schools like Amherst and MIT have not taken a single person off the waitlist. (That said, one of my students got in off the Amherst waitlist last year.) The story is a little better at places like UCLA and Stanford, which in the past have admitted 12% of students off the waitlist, and UC Berkeley accepted a whopping 19%, but these numbers can drop precipitously without notice.

Are students ranked on the waitlist?

If college admissions were anything like your neighborhood deli, you’d pick a number and wait your turn. And then as soon as an opening came up, you’d be next in line. Unfortunately, colleges don’t rank their students on the waitlist. There’s no such thing as “I’m number 25 on the list, so I just need 25 students to drop dead or drop out or something.” Instead, it’s much more like a football team where you’ve got different players sitting on the bench waiting for a chance to go in to fill a designated position. If the kicker goes down with a quad injury, you don’t just replace him with the next best athlete. You specifically replace him with another kicker.

That’s how it works in college admissions. If a bunch of engineering majors drop out of the application pool, then the school replaces them with a few engineering students off the waitlist. If you lost your star flute player to University of Michigan, you replace her with another flute player from the waitlist. In this way, colleges put waitlisted students into buckets, or categories, that are important to them. Categories might include: legacy students, minority students, different majors, first-generation students, etc. Because of this, you really have no idea when your number will be called, if at all.

What can I do if I’m waitlisted?

The first thing you should do is check into your college portal (you’ll get an email for this once you submit your application) and you should “accept” your spot on the waitlist. If you’re not interested, you can “decline” a spot on the waitlist; but declining a spot is irreversible, so make sure you’ve thought it through.

The second thing you should do is assume that you’re not getting in (sorry). That means you should accept a spot at your second-choice school. You usually have to submit a non-refundable enrollment deposit of a few hundred dollars ($200-$500). You can always withdraw your acceptance later later on, but you won’t get that money back (sorry again).

The third thing you’ll do is wait. There’s no set date for when you’ll hear whether you got in off the waitlist or not. You’ll usually get a decision by June 1, but sometimes students hear as late as August.

Finally, it’s never a bad idea to send the school an updated letter describing your latest accomplishments and why you think it’s the perfect school for you, highlighting specific programs, courses or professors that appeal to you. It may not move the needle for you, but as long as it’s done well, it can’t hurt. Sometimes just “wanting it more” than the next guy can make all the difference in whom they select. Good luck!

Even colleges get rejected: Universities create waitlists because they have no idea how many of their accepted students will actually enroll there.

Believe it or not, even top-ranked universities like Harvard lose about 17% of their accepted students to other highly competitive schools like MIT, Stanford, UPenn or a even public university that offered a full ride.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of students won’t get in off the waitlist. At top schools, only about 5% will get in off the waitlist. But at slightly less competitive schools, the figure climbs to almost 20%.

If college admission were like a deli, you’d know exactly what number you were on the waitlist. Unfortunately, colleges do not rank their waitlist.

Being on a college waitlist is a lot like riding the bench on a football team; you’re just hoping someone drops out and gives you chance to get in.

Help—I’ve Been Waitlisted!