Your guess is good as almost anybody’s, except perhaps the Deans of Admissions who came up with the magic numbers:
- Princeton: 1,331, down from 1526 (The Tigers only have 1300 students)
- Yale waitlisted 769 students this year, versus last year’s 1,052 applicants, (only 60 came off the waitlist)
- MIT, which waitlisted 454 students this year. against 700 only 35 came off.
- Cornell, meanwhile, waitlisted 3,223 students this year, compared to 3,432 last year with 40 were accepted.
- U Penn last year, about 1,000 Penn applicants were waitlisted, –no numbers yet.
- Last year, Harvard Harvard went deep into their waitlist– accepting more than 200 applicants from its waitlist. No numbers yet this year.
- Columbia and Stanford have yet to announce waitlists for this year.
Read the artcile at the Princeton Newspaper for some nice comments
Time Magazine Chimes in with a timely article on the Waitlist:
Even the most selective colleges end up using the waitlist to fill out their classes. In 2006, colleges admitted on average 29% of students from the waitlist. For the schools, that’s not a bad thing. Rather than assign waitlisters a numeric rank and pluck them from the top in order, most schools reassess the whole pool of kids to try to ensure a well-rounded campus. “It’s a great way to shape the class and meet our institutional priorities,” says Dick Nesbitt, director of admissions at Williams College. “Maybe we could use a few more artists or a few more math or science researchers.” Williams waitlisted 1,000 applicants this year for a class of 538 and last year admitted 52 from the list.
