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Rhyme, I would love to agree with you, but this isn't an issue of just 3 months. This isn't even an issue of just 6 months. The reality is that this "process" can be as long as 9 months or more depending on when you submitted your application and how long Rose, her team and Chicago Booth choose to abuse the waitlist process.
I agree the process is long - or well, at least can be - and I think there's some merit to the concept that if they haven't said "yes" to you in 6 months, they probably wont say yes to you in 9, and they should put people out of their misery. I don't think its any kind of intentional 'abuse' though. Unpleasant as it is, at least one has a chance (and as seen by the people getting off the waitlist recently, a real fighting chance not just a token one).
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I get it. Chicago Booth is a difficult place to recruit. It's clearly below H/S, and at best, competitive with W. And no knock to Chicago Booth or its students, but for most applicants Chicago Booth is a hedge against being reject from H/S/W. Add to it it's in the Mid-West and it's obvious Chicago Booth is at a disadvantaged compared to its peers.
I'm of course biased, but I'm not sure I agree its a 'difficult' place to recruit. They get plenty of applications from plenty of qualified candidates. I don't disagree that it tends to come after H/S -- it certainly does -- but that hardly makes the school 'a difficult' place to attract talent. Were talking a top 5 school pretty much any way you want to dice it.
Second, placing people on the waitlist doesn't strike me as a good recruiting strategy anyway. If anything it's a risky one -- the best candidates are the ones most likely to have offers from other programs and even those who are boderline are unlikely to hang around waiting for Booth when they have another yes in hand. The goal wouldn't be to maximize waitlist use, it would be to minimize it. Worse yet, waitlist candidates are historically low yield, precisely because many will have moved on (new job, other admits, etc).
Moreover, last year they had exactly the opposite problem - yield was higher than anticipated and the class ended up being something like 50 people bigger than intended. This creates some obvious challenges -- e.g. ensuring enough class space and courses to accommodate - and some less obvious ones too such as not having enough lockers in the building. Rose certainly didn't plan for that and there's no question this contributed to people being stuck on the waitlist for long periods of time. If you get to know Rose, you'd know she'd never waitlist candidates she didn't seriously consider and she wouldn't keep people on if she didn't think there was a point.
If anything this strikes me as the more reasonable explanation for the waitlist -- given unprecedented yield they have to be more careful with the number of acceptances. It's not 'abuse', its intake management.
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In light of these expectations and my clear sense of what is reasonable and what is not, Rose continues to undercut Chicago Booth's reputation by abusing the waitlist.
I really doubt their waitlist management strategy has a meaningful impact on the schools 'reputation'. I'm sure being put on a waitlist -- for any amount of time -- makes that school less attractive to that particular candidate (after all who wants to be 2nd choice?), but I can't see how it would impact other people's perceptions or the school's overall reputation.
Finally, if someone chooses not to apply to Booth because they don't like their waitlist policies, I'd find that pretty near-sighted. I've never heard of anyone talking about the school's reputation as a function of their admissions process -- and certainly not in a negative light - if anything, people tend to praise it for being more transparent and open than most.
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Chicago Booth doesn't command a yield comparable to that of the top 3, yet it continues to set deadlines that coincide with the likes of H/S/W.
Well, doesn't that make sense? If they set their deadline prior to H/S/W, they risk having a number of people capitulate (at least for H/S), if they set it to after H/S/W they are simply taking themselves out of the running for those candidates outright. While I agree that people will choose H/S over C nine times out of ten, Wharton is less clear cut I think. Finally, if you want to be a peer school to the top programs you can't simply "work around" their schedules, giving them "first dibs". You have to compete head on.
Also, and im asking seriously to anyone who knows, is Booth really the only school that does this?
27 May 2010, 14:27
