![]() Still, this year’s wait list is about 1,300 names longer than six years ago, school officials said. Northwestern University’s wait list shrunk from about 3,500 last year to 2,8. Some schools declined to provide data to the Tribune, but statistics could be gleaned from college websites and other sources. “It’s just painful … and it really drags out the process.”īecause many institutions closely guard their wait-list numbers, cracking the code of how many eventually get a coveted fat envelope is a subject of intense speculation on online message boards. … This year has been the absolute worst, with more kids on the wait list than ever,” said Laura Docherty, college counselor at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Ill. The end result is that many are left dangling. “It’s become a ping-pong game that both sides play with each other,” said Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Over the summer, a parent can get laid off or reassess skyrocketing tuition costs in tough times, triggering a last-minute shift from private school to State U.Īs a result, it has become increasingly difficult for admissions officers to predict who actually will show up in the fall, so schools have countered with an insurance policy: a larger reserve pool to manage their enrollment, officials say. Many schools are seeing more and more applicants as seniors cast a wider net, applying to more institutions to hedge their bets.Īlso, the recession has interjected its own volatility to the match game. The trend is driven by the lingering economic downturn, along with the unpredictability of the admissions process, experts said. At the same time, the number of students plucked from standby decreased, from 34 percent to 28 percent. In 2010, 48 percent of colleges reported using a wait list, up from 39 percent in 2009 and 35 percent in 2008. The number of schools using wait lists is on the rise, according to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling. That leaves more students consigned to the half-way house of admissions, where they are unable to fully celebrate an admission or properly mourn a denial. While no one tracks the number of college applicants nationwide who are wait-listed, admissions experts and high school guidance counselors agree the ranks have swelled in the last five years. “It’s not really a rejection, but it kind of is,” she said. She may not know her fate until mid-summer. Still, she can’t quite let go of Harvard, which had a record low 5.9 percent acceptance rate for this fall. Of the schools where she was accepted, she narrowed her choices to the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. When the smoke cleared, Lunblad still did not have a definitive path forward. The senior at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Chicago had applied to a dozen of the nation’s most elite colleges.
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