Ross (Michigan) 2013 - Calling All Waitlisted Applicants

can try to ans my own question
looks like one third.


Q: Being waitlisted can be a real drag for an applicant. Last year you put 472 people on the waitlist and admitted 131 of them. Do you have guidelines on how big your waitlist should be?

A. It’s more natural. It happens when we review an application and we’re just not sure that we have a place yet. It’s not a matter of we want to have only 100 people on the waitlist and that’s the only number we allow. We let it be as big or small as the evaluators see fit. But we try to minimize the stress of being on the waitlist. If an applicant is waitlisted in round one, we communicate with them again in round two to say if there is a positive decision, we will let you know with the round two folks, if not sooner. If you don’t hear from us that means you will remain on the waitlist, but know that we are still reviewing you. When we get to the summer, we try to release as many folks as we can. If we know that we only got ten spots in the class that we are flexing, we are not going to keep 300 people on the waitlist. So we try to winnow it down as much as we can as we go.

For the second evaluators, we highly encourage them not to waitlist people. So I ask them, ‘If you had to tip the scales one way or the other, which way would you go?’