06.16.08
College waitlists
Anyone remember that Boy was waitlisted by two schools?
Well, we haven’t heard anything else from one, but Tulane is still checking in with him regularly if he might still be interested.
Yeah, it is 6 weeks after that May 1 deadline…you’d think it would be settled by now. And it really is on our part. Boy is happily looking forward to San Antonio in August. But we figure it doesn’t hurt to see what might get thrown at us, so we’ll play along with Tulane.
As it happens, what we are seeing is playing out all over this year. Just a week or so ago, the Chronicle has a long article about how nearly everyone is digging into their waitlists to come up with ‘full’ classes.
| From the issue dated May 30, 2008 |
For Admissions Deans, Waiting-List Roulette Gets Trickier
By ERIC HOOVER
For months a four-digit number has hovered over Douglas L. Christiansen. It’s there when he falls asleep and there when he wakes up. The number is 1,550, the size of the freshman class he must enroll this fall — no more, no less.
Although Mr. Christiansen, associate provost for enrollment and dean of admissions at Vanderbilt University, has many qualified applicants, he cannot know exactly how many admitted students will enroll. This year Vanderbilt received a record 16,800 applications, 4,000 more than last year.
That spike complicated Mr. Christiansen’s enrollment projections, as did Vanderbilt’s new residential college, built to house all 1,550 incoming freshmen. “My margin for error,” he says, “was literally not one student.”
So this spring, Mr. Christiansen made a strategic decision. First, Vanderbilt would admit fewer applicants than it needed, guarding against an unexpectedly high number of commitments. Then the university would make up the difference by admitting more students from its waiting list.
Vanderbilt’s move was just one variation on a theme this spring. That theme, of course was uncertainty: A weak economy and a record number of applications at many campuses kept admissions deans up nights. They worried that hitting their desired “yield” — the percentage of admitted applicants who ultimately enroll — would prove especially difficult.
The forecast sparked various strategies. Some colleges deliberately undershot their targets and lengthened their waiting lists. Some did just the opposite.
“You can say with some certainty that this was the most chaotic admissions cycle in recent years,” says David A. Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as Nacac. “Colleges are, more than ever, flying with blinders on, and they’re really limited in terms of what they can predict.”
Ups and Downs
Westminster College, in New Wilmington, Pa., certainly did not predict that it would receive more than 3,000 applications, double its previous record. The windfall prompted the liberal-arts college to create its first-ever waiting list, which it plans to tap if and when any of its 450 incoming freshmen decide not to enroll.
“We’re all very excited about it,” says Bradley P. Tokar, Westminster’s dean of admissions and financial aid. “A wait list is a good problem to have.”
He knows it is a luxury many colleges lack. Only a third of institutions maintain such lists at all, according to Nacac. The practice is unnecessary among less-selective colleges. On other campuses, it all depends on the year.
Take DePaul University, where applications rose 20 percent from 2006 to 2007. Such a big leap necessitated a waiting list last spring, according to Jon Boeckenstedt, DePaul’s associate vice president for enrollment management.
“We were in completely uncharted territory,” he says. Ultimately the university lowered its acceptance rate to 62 percent from 69 percent.
This year, though, DePaul’s applications rose by only 3 percent, so Mr. Boeckenstedt opted against using a waiting list. Instead, his office sought to enroll more students right away, nudging its acceptance rate up to 64 percent.
Some deans have found waiting lists unreliable. Seven years ago, Dickinson College dropped its acceptance rate substantially. After deposits came up short, the Pennsylvania college then tried — but failed — to fill its class by drawing heavily from its waiting list.
Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and college relations at Dickinson, vowed never to repeat that strategy. “Now I’m much more confident in our ability to attract students,” Mr. Massa says, “and I’m more willing to sacrifice our acceptance rate up front than to come in low.”
This year Dickinson accepted 44 percent of its applicants, rounding out its class of about 600 by taking about 20 of its wait-listed students — 10 fewer than 2007.
Over the years, some colleges have developed variations on the waiting list. Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, offers applicants a choice between a regular and a “priority” list. Those who choose the latter get to see what their financial-aid package would look like, and the university tells them when it will contact them. Students who receive offers have 24 hours to send their deposits.
Nearly 500 applicants requested a priority spot this year. Yet Carnegie Mellon’s yield rose slightly, and it had no room for anyone from its waiting list.
At Northwestern College, in Minnesota, a dip in applicants led officials to forgo the usual waiting list. Instead, the college has taken at least 200 applicants from its deferral list, which gives students a chance to improve their grades and test scores before receiving a final admissions decision.
Ken Faffler, Northwestern’s director of admissions, expects to enroll 600 new students, as planned, though the college’s deposits have been sluggish. He is baffled by the number of admitted students who have not completed the financial-aid process.
“It’s as if they’re deciding ahead of time,” Mr. Faffler says, “that it’s not going to be financially doable.”
‘We May Need an Oboe Player’
Deans at several small private colleges suspect that the economic downturn has pushed more students to choose public institutions, with their lower sticker prices. That may partly explain why many state universities had big jumps in applicants.
“The economy’s definitely having an impact,” says Terry W. Knaus, senior associate director of admissions at Indiana University at Bloomington. “Students are being more cautious, and they’re not necessarily going to their first-choice school, but to wherever is best for them financially.”
Indiana had nearly 31,000 applications, an 8-percent rise over 2007, and expects to admit very few students from its waiting list. Virginia Tech received 7 percent more deposits than last year, so it had no slots to offer any of its wait-listed applicants. As of last week, neither did the University of Virginia, which saw only a slight drop in yield despite ending its early-decision program.
Other public universities, however, were able to free many applicants from admissions limbo. The University of Wisconsin at Madison plans to admit nearly 800 students from its waiting list, one year after taking only a handful.
After overenrolling by 400 students last year, Madison needed to admit more conservatively this spring, says Robert Seltzer, director of admissions. And he perceived that more students were applying to multiple colleges.
“Just because you’re up in applications,” Mr. Seltzer says, “doesn’t mean you’re going to be up in bodies.”
At some campuses, wait-list suspense may continue into the summer. Harvard University recently informed other colleges that it would offer spots to at least 200 of its wait-listed applicants, up from 50 last year. That move will surely affect other elite colleges, which must replace students who jump ship. Stanford University, for one, has not made any wait-list offers this year, but it has kept a small number of students on its list as a safety net.
Although it’s rare for Harvard and other super-selective colleges to dig so deeply into their waiting lists, it’s not altogether surprising. After all, several such colleges say they purposely admitted fewer students this year.
“Wait lists are very much a function of the way you handle admissions decisions before April 1,” says Lee Stetson, a former dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. “You create a need for a wait list by being more cautious.”
Vanderbilt’s cautious approach this year left it with about 100 spots to fill by using the waiting list. Mr. Christiansen, the university’s admissions dean, says the process helps his staff to shape the class, not just fill it. An applicant with a lower SAT score may get an offer over a student with a higher score.
“Sometimes,” he says, “we may need an oboe player and not a cello player.”
Nancy G. McDuff knows the apparent randomness of waiting-list decisions frustrate many students. “I’m very aware of the anxiety it causes, and I wish kids didn’t have to go through that angst,” says Ms. McDuff, associate vice president for admissions and enrollment management at the University of Georgia.
But she believes the list is a necessary tool that saves the university from headaches, such as overcrowded dormitories. “If we enroll too many students” she says, “someone from campus housing’s going to look for me in the dark when I go to my car.”
This year Georgia planned to admit a class of 4,800. It offered 1,400 applicants a spot on the waiting list, and nearly 1,000 accepted. The university promised 200 of them that they could enroll next spring. Yet Georgia already has more than enough deposits, so Ms. McDuff figures the university will take no more than a handful for the fall.
So perhaps all the wait-listed students who mailed cookies, cupcakes, and candy to the admissions office acted in vain. Including the young woman who sent a box of red and gray M&M’s, some stamped with her name, some with “Wants UGA.”
http://chronicle.com
Section: Students
Volume 54, Issue 38, Page A1
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 16, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Admissions is weird. I am more familiar with the UK system but August was always a crazy month there (you accept an offer but it is conditional on getting certain marks in your A-level exams. It isn’t confirmed until your A-level results come out in August; then universities scramble to fill empty places.) There is was further complicated by the university having global student number quotas that they needed to meet to get their funding, so if one department was going to undershoot, someone else had to make up the slack. Complete nightmare.
I think it is this uncertainty in the process that got me thinking about just what we did need to do in relation to admissions. And, of course, the risk the universities take with putting more on the waitlist is that potential students would rather have the “bird in the hand”. Heck, the differences between some of them are not that great.