Topic: | The Waiting Game: College Application |
Posted_By:
seed 2012-12-25 17:45:53 MST |
As spring blooms, so too do the hopes of high school students across the country. Years of hard work—ballet practice, debate tournaments, student council meetings, and…oh yeah, homework—culminate with the college application. One’s destiny boils down to a thirty-minute review of academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, scholastic potential, ability to communicate via the written word, and the impact he or she has had on the community. The waiting game is over. Or is it? Parents of millennial students hearken to a time when early spring of senior year meant pacing along the sidewalk, anxiously anticipating the arrival of the postal worker who seemed an extension of the admissions office. As each day left the student without an envelope—large or small—the anticipation built. Finally, the letters arrived and, with them, the fate of the world as well. Today, pacing amounts to clicking “refresh†in one’s e-mail client hoping that the admissions office will send the “big†message. ADMIT: Verification of my self-worth has arrived and I can die a happy person; DENY: What was the point of taking AP Modern European History senior year when lunch could have been my last period of the day…every day. There is yet another alternative, however, one school counselors rarely discuss with students during the application process despite the fact it affects thousands of seniors each admissions cycle: WAITLIST. Wait, what? You mean to tell me that after waiting three months, during which sleep eluded me and knots so large built in my stomach stress balls were introduced to me as a serious remedy, I am being made to wait longer? Why does the waitlist exist? Admissions offices employ really smart, quantitatively-oriented individuals whose job it is to create intricate matrices in an attempt to predict student behaviors. Sometimes, despite their best intentions, statisticians are incorrect. Waitlists are the safety nets, the mechanism by which admission offices ensure a safe landing, even if turbulence is just a hundred feet off the ground. Suppose, for example, College X seeks an incoming class of 500 students. Obviously the institution must admit more than 500 students because not every student offered admission will attend. But to how many students does the school offer a spot? This is where statistical modeling comes in. If a college’s yield (the percentage of students offered admission that enrolls) is 50%, College X must offer admission to 1000 students to land at a class of 500. And if the prognosticators are off in their projections? This is why the waitlist exists. If College X yields only 45% of the students offered admission, the freshman class is now 450 students. Fifty dorm beds are empty and fifty tuitions are unpaid. This terrifying scenario keeps enrollment managers up at night. Who is on the waitlist? Waitlists are comprised primarily of academically qualified students who, for one reason or another, didn’t quite make the cut. Perhaps the ACT score was slightly below the profile of the admitted students; possibly not enough interest was demonstrated; maybe an honor code infraction occurred in junior year. More likely, it was a combination of many factors that led the admission committee to conclude: We like you, but we just don’t have room for you…yet! Placement on the waitlist is not tantamount to denied admission. It is true that in a few instances—generally with special interest or legacy cases—being put on the wait list is a soft deny, a way to gently indicate one ought to consider another college. For the most part, however, admission from the waitlist is a possibility should the need arise for the institution to utilize this pool of admissible students. Who is admitted from the waitlist? The use of the word pool in the previous sentence was intentional because a more accurate reflection of the students left without a firm decision would be a waiting pool rather than a waitlist. The latter suggests an ordinal categorization, but the truth is until the admissions office knows who is coming, it is impossible to know who they need. For example, suppose that of the 1000 students College X admits 58 are from the state of California. Instead of 29 choosing to attend, though, only 14 accept their offers. This would leave a serious shortage of Californians in the school’s effort to create a geographically diverse community. Waitlisted Californians would shoot to the top of the waitlist. If you are a Californian waitlisted at College X who really wants to attend, it would behoove you to let the admissions office know how strongly you feel. Of course, you won’t know that the school needs Californians so you need to assume that every college at which you are waitlisted needs students like you. How should a waitlisted student respond? Most colleges that use a waitlist will ask waitlisted students to respond with an e-mail or a postcard indicating their desire to remain in contention for what might amount to limited space. At an absolute minimum, students must complete this form and should do so quickly. However, a waitlisted senior should also contact an admissions officer—preferably the staff member responsible for recruiting students at the senior’s high school (if recruitment is structured regionally)—with a letter reiterating his or her strong interest. The note need not be longer than a paragraph or two. Students should also utilize their school counselors. Admissions officers often rely on contact from counselors to understand which students are likely to accept an offer of admission should one materialize. Though the calendar just hit April, May 1—national declaration of intent day—is just around the corner. Even if a student wishes to remain on a waitlist, he or she must submit a non-refundable deposit to one of the colleges to which he or she has been admitted. The waitlist can wait. In fact, students are offered places off the waitlist as late as just weeks before the fall semester begins. More likely, though, a college will finish shaping the class by June. So in this season of eternal optimism, as the post office (or e-mail account) brings admissions results, remember that the waitlist beckons your patience. And if that admission purgatory ultimately yields nothing, greatness awaits you anyway. It might be down an unanticipated path, but isn’t life just one long unanticipated path? |
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