Last year, 2,178 students were accepted to the Class of 2015. An additional 1,800 students were put on the waitlist. Of these 1,800, about half chose to remain on the waitlist. Only 50 were later accepted.
These numbers should concern us. They mean Dartmouth's active waitlist is almost as big as its pool of accepted students, which is totally unnecessary and even unfair given that the College's yield is typically around 50 percent and its pool of accepted early decision applicants usually consists of over 400 students. Many on the waitlist simply don't have a legitimate mathematical chance of being accepted. Their only hope is that nearly all of the students accepted through regular decision don't matriculate and that nearly all of the waitlisted students offered admission don't matriculate either.
Dartmouth doesn't really need to have 800 to 1,000 students in reserve to fill a few or even 100 spaces. As a practical matter, of course, Dartmouth can't eradicate the waitlist, since it is necessary for refining the size and makeup of each class. "We planned on using the waitlist to build up to our desired first year class size," Dean of Admissions Maria Laskaris said about the '15s. What Dartmouth can do though is limit the waitlist to a more reasonable size.
The problem with our large waitlist is that it acknowledges students' qualifications for Dartmouth academic, social and extra-curricular life, and thus allows them to hope they might go to school here, when the chances that they'll actually be accepted are slim to none.
The college admissions process is already far too long: four years of high-school, SATs, essays, recommendations, tours, ACTs, SAT IIs, APs, interviews, early decision, deferrals, etc. Our waitlist right now just makes the whole thing even more overwhelming.
Dartmouth's long waitlist is not unique or even particularly egregious. Almost every top school in this country has the same problem we have. Duke, for example, has a waitlist of more than 3,000 people for a class of 1,650. To a certain extent, the growth in the size of waitlists over the last few years is natural. Prolific seniors are sending out more applications to colleges and making it a lot harder for colleges to predict who's going to say yes on May 1. For no good reason, we've turned a once useful admissions tool into a mass purgatory. We need to bring our waitlists back to scale.
Last year, Duke admissions officer Christoph Guttentag told The New York Times, "What we could have done, had we had another week, was to look at everybody on the waiting list and say, Do they all need to be on?' Of all the priorities that was not in the top two or three." I understand his point. Admissions officers are busy sorting the yeses' from the maybes' they can't focus on sorting the maybes' from the nos.'
What bothers me about the prevailing attitude, however, is that admissions offices acknowledge that most people on the waitlist don't have a chance and yet still do nothing about it. Expediency doesn't justify complacency. It may be more convenient to defer students and review their applications later, but it's duplicitous to leave them hopeful when they almost certainly won't get in. The Admissions Office should do whatever it takes hire more admissions officers, work hours, etc. to rectify the situation.
By April 1 students want to know yes' or no' already. They want to be able to tell their grandparents and teachers and family friends and everyone else where they are going. They want to buy their college's sweatshirts and t-shirts and pajamas. They want to meet their new classmates. They want to research courses. They want to find a roommate. They want, above all, to know what the next four years of their lives have in store for them. They deserve to know. They're tired of waiting.
