Waiting Lists Have Plenty of Company
By JACQUES STEINBERG and ERIC PLATT
For those families running the college admissions gantlet for the first time, the use of waiting lists can be among the most bewildering aspects of a process that offers no shortage of bewilderment.
How can a college (or a college admissions blog) possibly explain to an applicant that Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh has offered 5,025 students places on its waiting list this year, for a freshman class that will likely be less than a third that size, or that the number of applicants extended similar invitations at Cornell (2,988) is nearly equal to the number of students in the current freshman class (3,179)?
At least part of the answer can be found in a front-page article in The New York Times last April on the waiting list at Duke (3,382 applicants, nearly twice as large as the incoming freshman class). In it, the dean of undergraduate admissions, Christoph Guttentag, was quoted as comparing his task to that of an artist finishing an ambitious work — and the waiting list to his materials.
“I have no idea what I’m going to need to finish sculpting the class,” he said. “From an institutional perspective, it’s important that I have some flexibility.”
Another part of the answer, though, lies with applicants themselves. With so many students hedging their bets and applying to so many colleges, the colleges themselves can’t quite be sure at this time of year — as the May 1 deposit deadline looms at most — who will say yes.
In the chart above — which, we emphasize, is a work in progress and inherently limited in scope — we present waiting-list figures from a sampling of more than 60 colleges and universities that responded to queries from The New York Times’s Choice blog.
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