---WAITLISTS and DEFERRALS---

 In a 2003 NACAC article on the practice of wait listing and deferrals, Martin Wilder – Executive Board Member of NACAC said, “The waitlist notification offers neither the joy of acceptance nor the finality of rejection.” Being waitlisted or deferred means that a college has not accepted you but thinks enough of you that if any spots are available as the year unfolds, the school will give you a chance to enroll. Waitlists were created to benefit schools, not applicants, and are designed to ensure there are enough interested students to fill enrollment. If a particular college has 2,000 openings in their freshman class and only 1,900 students enroll, a school turns to their "wait-list" to fill enrollment until they have reached an acceptable number. According to NACAC, roughly 30% of colleges use waitlists and students only have a 1-5 chance if they are waitlisted.

 The Waiting Game

Being waitlisted can actually be worse than being rejected because you simply don’t know the status of your application or if the school will call you and ask you if you would like to enroll. Colleges are supposed to send you a letter outlining the number of waitlisted students, and the chance of acceptance. Schools are also supposed to notify you by August 1 (which will probably be after you have sent in a deposit to another school). The waitlist status usually comes at a difficult time in the life of students as they are in the process of receiving other acceptance and rejection letters from other schools.

It often seems better to be waitlisted than rejected outright from a school, but if you don’t know that 2,000 other students have also been waitlisted and maybe a 100 might get in, odds are usually not in your favor. Being waitlisted at a competitive school is even worse, as the majority of students who apply to these schools usually enroll (remember the term yield?), leaving few spots for waitlisted students.

Many of the more competitive colleges have yields that are well over 60%. When a college knows what it's yield is, it knows how many students to accept each year in order to ensure that the proper number of accepted students enroll. If a particular school has 1,000 openings in their freshman class and the schools yield is 50%, the school will probably accept 2,000 students and defer an additional unknown number of students. If the school fails to get its average yield, the school then turns to the waitlisted applicants to fill in any gaps in admissions. Schools have to know their yield or else it could be disastrous as they run the risk of accepting too many students and having too many students who want to enroll in a given year.

It’s a fine balancing act and one that doesn’t usually work in favor of applicants. In many cases, students wait so long to hear from waitlisted schools that by the time they do hear, they have already enrolled in another college.
NOTE: The reason why many schools still have early decision and accept a large part of their class through early decision is that it improves their yield and guarantees filled admission spots.

 What To Do?

If you have been waitlisted, try to find out how many other applicants have been waitlisted by contacting the admissions department and then assess your chances after that. While parents have been known to launch an aggressive “let my son or daughter in” campaign after being waitlisted, we have no sure-fire tips to assist you if you are waitlisted. We would only caution you that depending on the school and the number of student’s waitlisted, the odds are not in your favor.

If you feel the need to try and further yourself in the application process, turn to your guidance counselor to see if they have any contacts in the admissions department at the school(s) you were waitlisted at. Your counselor will probably be more successful at trying to get information and can have a more unbiased conversation with an admissions officer regarding your skills and desires to attend a particular school. Other students have written letters to the admissions department outlining their desire to attend, and if the school has to choose between two students, and one wrote a letter and one did nothing, they may go with the person that expressed the most interest. We would caution you to not call the school and beg them to let you in.

 Some other interesting twists in the deferral process

When colleges have a higher yield in a given year (when more students accept a spot than the school has room for) schools are faced with other unique challenges. Since there are only so many dorm rooms and beds, many schools have found themselves with too many students. The first alternative to this is to make some double-bed dorm room’s triple-bed. Other schools have used space at other local colleges and then there is the reverse deferral. Some colleges have asked accepted students to defer for one year because there are too many students who want to come. In exchange for sitting out a year, the school offers to pay your room & board the following year for one year. This can be worth up to $9,000 per year. Some solutions are not as good, as one school in 2001 actually housed students in a local YMCA when they realized they didn’t have enough dorm rooms. That's really not what you are looking for! Other students have been housed in local hotels and while they may be nicer than the dorms, they are usually not on camps and students are forced to takes buses to and from school.

 Melt

Melt is a slang term used by college admissions officials that refers to students who were accepted, enrolled (even sent a deposit) and don’t show up. There are several reasons why this happens. (1) Some students are enrolling in more than one school and then making a last minute decision. While they may lose several hundred dollars in deposit money, when you look at the overall cost of an education, $400 in deposit money isn’t a big deal for some families. (2) Some families realize that they will not be able to pay $100,000 for their education (sticker shock!) and enroll in a less-expensive school at the last minute. (3) Some kids just get nervous having to go to college or having to move far away and end up enrolling in a local school or not enrolling at all.

This “melt” then has an interesting effect on deferrals. When schools find out that they have students who will not be attending, they quickly turn to their deferral list and try to entice deferred students to come. Since many students have enrolled in possibly their second or third choice school, they jump at this opportunity to abandon ship and enroll in the school they wanted to go to all along. Now the school they just ditched has melt and then that school has to turn to their deferral list and try to get other students to leave another school to enroll with them. And that pattern continues of students jumping from school to school until the enrollment deadline passes and school starts in the fall! While we will discuss corresponding with coaches in chapter 5, this is another good time to mention how important it is to treat every coach you speak to with respect during your recruiting process as you may find yourself placing a last-minute phone call to a coach to see if you can come to their school.

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