Dear Mrs. Thompson,

This wait list thing is killllllinnnnnggggg me.

— A Hopeful Future Pelican

While I have not received these actual words in my inbox this year, much of the email that we admission officers receive from wait-listed students (or their parents) after decisions are released could be summarized in the above sentiment. And we don’t blame you one bit. The wait list is a place that can feel like admissions purgatory. The door is still open… kind of? Not really? Maybe? Maybe not? Should I even try? I don’t want to get my hopes up… if only I knew something about how all of this works! In my experience as a college counselor, these were the kinds of conversations I routinely had with my seniors who were on wait lists. 

So, die-hard wait-listed prospective Pelican, we know it’s somewhat anxiety-provoking to be on our wait list. Perhaps you have had Loomis among your top schools (maybe the top!) for a while now, and you’ve learned you have been placed on the wait list. What does this actually mean? Does it mean anything? Is it just a nice way of saying no?

Genuine admission: sometimes, a wait list offer is just a nice way of saying no. In my former college guidance work, I knew colleges who had thousands of applicants on their wait lists. These schools used programs like Early Decision (or ED2, or Early Action, or EA2, or Priority, or deferred guaranteed admission, or any other of a myriad of options) to fill the majority of their class rather than finalize their enrollment in late spring with a wait list. Yet these schools made wait list offers anyway, knowing the chances of admission for those candidates were often quite low. Why? For many reasons, possibly including but not limited to:

• Sending a nice message to a competitive candidate (the “too good to deny” approach);
• Maintaining a positive relationship with a school (the “we can’t deny their competitive candidates or they won’t send us strong ones next year” approach);
• Not wanting to alienate people who are already connected to the school in some way, such as alumni or current parents (the “they’ll be mad and not support the school anymore” approach).

For these and other reasons, a wait list offer is sometimes viewed by schools as an easy way to say “no” nicely and not make people mad. I can personally attest from my annual phone calls and emails at decision release time that many are still mad about getting a wait list offer, so I never really bought into this logic myself. More than once I’ve been asked by a parent after a deny decision why we didn’t “just” put their child on the wait list, despite being gently told that due to the competition for admission, we would not offer admission to the student later. Students, it seems that admission officers aren’t the only ones who don’t want you to receive bad news!

But how do you know if your wait list offer is “real,” or whether it’s just someone deciding to let you down easy? It’s not like you can easily call a school and ask, “Hi, I’m on your wait list. Is this, like, a ‘just being nice’ kind of wait list, or do you really think I have a shot here?” And if you do, how do you know if they’re just telling you what they think you want to hear?

I may not be able to answer that exact question, but what I can tell you is this: wherever you are waiting on a wait list, know that that it’s difficult if not impossible for admission officers to know from year to year how things will ultimately land, not only with how many new students say yes, but what type of new students say yes. At many boarding schools like Loomis, for example, new students are admitted into every grade, and because most of our housing is single gender, we have to be specific regarding the number of beds according to grade and gender available in each residence hall. We don’t have a lot of wiggle room, and for Loomis, we also have a limited enrollment that only enables a certain percentage of day students each year, as well. Additionally, there may be an over- or under-representation of certain types of students who said yes to us. Think about that ubiquitous example of the oboe player – what if you’re passionate about oboe and what we really need are French horn players? The same holds true for offers from the wait list. These demographic and institutional factors are not just important contexts, but the primary factors that will impact your ability to be taken off a wait list.

To make wait-list activity even more unpredictable, not only is wait-list activity determined by who and how many say “yes,” it’s also determined by what happens after students say “yes” to other schools. If we are fully enrolled but another school goes to its wait list, and one of our newly enrolled Pelicans has been on that wait list hoping for a place … it could mean not only happy news for them, but also their withdrawal from Loomis, and happy news for someone on our wait list. And the domino continues when we then take someone we didn’t anticipate from our wait list, and they’ve already said yes elsewhere... you get the gist.

So now that you know how unpredictable the whole wait list scenario is, what can you do about it? First, know that the term “wait list” has everything to do with the first word and, in my experience, nothing to do with the second.  I have never worked at a school where the wait list is an actual list. A much more accurate term which many schools now use would be wait “pool,” because the wait list consists of a group of applicants who are pretty much all treading water waiting to be called on deck. There’s no actual “list,” because whom we admit from the wait list depends on who is enrolled.

As noted above, often those admitted from a wait list are offered a place because they fit the demographic group the school needs. So, if you fit that demographic, how can you maximize your chances of being selected among the others in the same demographic on the wait list-that’s-not-a-list?

This is where the concept of “demonstrated interest” comes in. Assuming the above criteria have been met, at this point, we are looking for students we feel somewhat confident will say yes to our offer – and say yes fairly quickly. We are trying to close out our class, turn our attention to the next cycle, and, yes, take a summer vacation. Students who can demonstrate continued interest in attending Loomis by sending us an email – I reiterate, students, not parents or counselors – are the ones we are most likely to prioritize after the factors listed above are considered. Demonstrating interest in the schools you are still, yes, interested in is extremely helpful, because it helps schools to sort out the ones who accepted the wait list offer over a month ago and who are no longer interested from the ones who are most likely to say yes. Like you!

So, what can you do if you are on a wait list?

1. Wait.
2. Send an email. Judiciously. Don’t send one every day, but if you sent one a month ago, it’s okay to send another one, just checking in and reminding us that you’re still interested. If you haven’t sent anything at all, don’t panic! There’s still time to demonstrate you’re still interested. But know that usually no news means just that: no news. Go back to #1.  
3. Recognize that you will end up at the school you are meant to go to, and if you don’t get off a wait list, it likely has nothing to do with you and everything to do with everyone else – which is how a lot of admission decisions are made. And if you get an email from Loomis asking for a call, call us back. It’s likely that you’re coming out of that pool and onto the deck – and we hope you’ll forgive the wait and join the team!