Uncertainty on wait lists as US colleges face enrolment disruption

Times Higher Education

March 2, 2022

Paul Basken

Selective US universities are confronting new challenges in guessing which of their accepted students will enroll this autumn, with substantial dollars and status at stake for both the institutions and their applicants.

The perennial chore of estimating student yield rates and generating appropriately sized waiting lists has been heightened this year by a variety of factors that include and predate Covid-related disruptions, among them the de-emphasizing of standardized tests and other attempts to improve racial and economic equity as well as the growing ease of coordinated online application systems.

Such changes, according to experts, offer institutions and applicants more options. However, they also raise stresses for students and their families while threatening universities with losses to bank accounts and reputations if too many or too few of their admissions offers are rejected.

“I do understand why the most selective colleges are concerned,” said Robert Kelchen, professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “The pandemic scrambled the admissions landscape, and wealthy students apply to more colleges than in the past.”

Chronic volatility was a feature of selective US college admissions even before the pandemic. Examples include Princeton University, which accepted 101 undergraduate students from its waiting list in 2017 and none in 2018. Several other institutions – including Dartmouth College and Cornell University – also saw sharp year-to-year variations in their waiting list acceptances over the past decade or so, according to a tally by The Daily Princetonian student newspaper.

Some institutions had managed to tamp down those fluctuations only to see them flare up during the pandemic, when admissions offices were confronted with large jumps in the numbers of students who deferred their acceptances rather than begin their post-secondary lives in online formats. Stanford University admitted 259 students from an 850-member waiting list for the 2020-21 academic year, after taking only eight through that route a year earlier, according to the educational consulting company IvyWise.

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