When do waitlist decisions come

Based on our estimates of the percentage of admitted students who will attend, we admitted about 1, students. To help with the uncertainties, we also keep a wait list of students.

We usually offer more than applicants a spot on the wait list. Not all of those students will choose to remain on the wait list. We will reconsider all of the students on the wait list again in May, when we know how many admitted students choose to enroll.

We will have no idea how many people, if any, we will take from the wait list until the second week of May. You should, however, continue to get good grades, as we may call your school to check on your academic progress. But remember, any statistic against you or for you is associative but not causal. So, if a foosball champion decides to go somewhere else, we may, or may not, go out of our way to try to find another foosball player.

It just depends on what the list looks like. No, but we do consider whether admitting international students from the wait list would put us over our international student limit.

Here are some things you should NOT do: Submit additional documents or a whole new application. Your chances of getting off the college waitlist primarily depend on five factors:. Ultimately, how likely it is you'll be admitted off a waitlist really depends on the particular school you've been waitlisted at.

Very popular and selective schools get applications from thousands of qualified students each year—many of whom end up on the waitlist—making it super difficult to determine how good your odds are of being admitted.

Moreover, the year you apply can have a big effect on how many applicants a college decides to admit off its waitlist. This happens because both the quality and number of applicants usually change slightly each year, along with the specific needs of the school for example, a school might want to admit more majors one year than it did the previous year.

Let's take a look at some real-life examples. At Dartmouth , a highly selective school that's also part of the Ivy League , "the number of candidates offered admission from the wait list varies, from zero in some years to dozens in others. Similarly, here's what NYU says about its waitlist candidates :. While during one recent year, we were not able to admit any students from the waitlist, in others we were able to admit hundreds of students.

And here's what the UC system says on the topic additional link ours :. There is no way to tell how many students, if any, will ultimately be offered admission for any particular year. As you can see, in general, there's no easy way to determine your odds of getting admitted off a college waitlist.

College waitlist acceptances can vary dramatically from year to year, mainly as a result of the changing number of qualified applicants and the school's needs. Many top colleges and universities make their waitlisted applicant numbers publicly available. You can see the difference in the two admissions cycles, and In , many students decided to defer college for a year when colleges went remote due to the COVID pandemic.

As a result, colleges dug deep into their waitlists. In , the opposite happened. Application numbers shot up; also students who had been accepted but chose to defer for a year would also be joining the new freshman class. Together, this meant very few students at top-tier colleges were taken off waitlists. At Harvard, not a single student was accepted from the waitlist.

We already mentioned that the year you apply to college has a big effect on your chances of being waitlisted at schools you apply to. In fact, college waitlist numbers were even higher than usual this year. The COVID pandemic has made it really difficult for colleges and universities to predict how many students they need to admit in order to fill their freshman class.

The pandemic upended the normal application process and admissions patterns, leaving schools saddled with a lot of unknowns about the future—including how many students they should admit. Because of this, many highly qualified applicants have been waitlisted this year.

Doing this gives the school a large pool of excellent applicants to extend admissions offers to if previously accepted applicants opt to attend another school. The test optional policy has made these top schools even more attractive to college applicants. In fact, according to a recent New York Times article , Harvard University saw a 42 percent increase in applications and Colgate University experienced an percent increase in applications in All of these factors have resulted in top schools waitlisting many more students than in previous years.

If you've been waitlisted at a college, you'll need to take certain steps to ensure you're ultimately able to attend college without issue. Regardless of whether you choose to stay on the waitlist or not, here's exactly what you'll need to do if you're offered a waitlist spot. Do you want to stay on the college waitlist in the hopes you'll get admitted, or would you rather decline the invitation and just go with a different college? After you've gotten a waitlist invitation, take time to consider whether you truly want to be on the waitlist for this school.

Ask yourself the following questions:. Once you've made your decision about whether to stay on the college waitlist, it's time to move on to Step 2. If you've been offered a spot on the waitlist, know that you won't be automatically added to it— you need to officially accept the invitation in order to confirm your spot.

This usually needs to be done by a certain deadline, typically in mid-April or by May 1. Check with the school or look at your waitlist notification letter to figure out when the deadline is. If you fail to confirm your placement by this deadline, you will not be placed on the waitlist and will have indirectly declined your spot on it.

If you've decided to not be put on the college waitlist and would rather decline your spot, be sure to notify the college of your decision by the deadline, ideally as soon as possible.

How and where should I send my transcript? Waitlisted Applicants FAQ. What does it mean to be waitlisted? What should I do next? In a typical year, we complete our admission from the waitlist by mid-June. How many applicants are offered admission from the waitlist? Again, the number of admission offers we can extend is contingent on the number of responses we get to our initial offers of admission, and we will have a better idea of what space is available after the admitted student response deadline.

Why was I not offered admission? Can I appeal my admission decision? Is the waitlist ranked? When will I know if I am admitted off of the waitlist?

What can I do to improve my chances of being offered admission from the waitlist? What happens if I place a deposit at another college or university? If I am offered admission, will I be considered for financial aid? If I am offered admission, can I defer my enrollment? Students admitted from the waitlist are not eligible for deferred enrollment. Can I be considered for another school, college, program, or campus at NYU?