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Record Wait List Led by Amherst, Yale, MIT Brings High Anxiety

April 16 (Bloomberg) -- Anxiety for U.S. high school seniors, always high this time of year, is growing after elite colleges put record numbers of applicants on waiting lists.

Yale and Princeton universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amherst College are among top-ranked U.S. schools that increased, by as much as 50 to 90 percent, the number of students told this month they may be accepted only if those already admitted decline to attend.

The expanded waiting lists -- Yale put 1,052 students on hold, up 22 percent from last year; Princeton placed 1,526 on hold, up 93 percent -- are the result of new acceptance and financial-aid policies and record applications, college officials say. While the new numbers game doesn't mean more openings, it has left wait-listed students, including Nancy Wang, holding out hope for their dream schools.

``It definitely is creating a lot of stress,'' said Wang, 17, who is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and English, and plays on the badminton team. Wang, a senior at Great Neck South High School on New York's Long Island, is in the maybe pile at Harvard University, her aspiration, after winning admission to Williams College, in Massachusetts. ``If the overall result is your getting in, then I would say it's worth it,'' she said.

Harvard and Princeton eliminated early admission for this year, forcing more students into the regular-decision pool. As a result, MIT and other schools deepened their waiting lists, hedging against the possibility that their admitted students will take offers from competitors such as Harvard.

Tension in the House

``It's a year of uncertainty and a year of waiting,'' said Joan Koven, a Haverford, Pennsylvania-based consultant to families seeking advice on admissions. ``It's crazy.'' She said schools' waiting lists are filled with a ``reserve army'' of students eager to jump into slots.

A rejection would almost have been better than the agony of delay, said Christopher Shih, another Great Neck senior. He said tension increased at home after he was wait-listed at Columbia University, the New York school where his mother studied engineering.

``It's always good to have hope, I guess,'' said Shih, a varsity tennis player who won admission to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He and thousands of other students must commit to a school by May 1 by making a deposit.

``The fact that there are many more kids on waiting lists this year means that there are many more kids who will remain restless through the end of May,'' said Lawrence Momo, director of college counseling at the private Trinity School in New York, and the former head of undergraduate admissions at Columbia. ``Most kids when they get to April of their senior want very much want to have the process over and done with.''

Uncertain Yields

Part of the reason the wait lists are overloaded is colleges' increased uncertainty about the so-called yield, or percentage of admitted students who will actually enroll.

``The students they are taking are so good that they have to imagine the students they admit will have many choices,'' said Stephen Singer, the director of college counseling at the private Horace Mann School, in New York.

Colleges' wait lists ``make sure they can fill their needs so they don't come up short,'' said Jeff Lowe, the college adviser at the public Princeton High School in New Jersey.

Marlyn McGrath, director of admissions for Harvard's undergraduate arm, said the college admitted 1,948 students, 110 fewer than last year, to fill a class of 1,656. The school, the nation's oldest college, saw a 20 percent increase in applications.

McGrath declined to say how many applicants Harvard put on the wait list, or how many may yet be invited to attend.

`Anxiety Producing'

``By definition, being on a wait list is anxiety producing if it's a college you very much want to go to,'' she said.

Changes to early-decision programs and increased financial- aid packages at Harvard and Yale pushed more students into the regular-decision process at many schools.

``It really kind of blows our procedure for the wait list out of the water,'' said Tom Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst College, in Massachusetts.

Amherst placed 1,400 students on its wait list, up 40 percent from a year ago, to help fill a class of 440, he said. The school offered admission to nobody from last year's list.

One student now in Amherst's limbo is Kathlyn Pattillo, a senior at the private Westminster Schools, in Atlanta. She is captain of the varsity crew team and performed social work as a volunteer in Panama last year.

This week, she plans to visit schools that accepted her, including Trinity College in Connecticut and Tufts University outside Boston. She also will be waiting to hear again from Amherst. The liberal-arts school, founded in 1821, has 1,650 students and is the alma mater of novelist Scott Turow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

``For me, getting on the wait list is a huge honor in itself,'' Pattillo said. ``At least, I still have a chance.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Frankston Lorin in New York at jlorin@bloombereg.net

Financial Aid Podcast Live: How to Pay for College in Uncertain Times

The Financial Aid Podcast is hosting a select group of financial aid, media and industry leaders to participate in a live podcast addressing the recent news regarding the credit crunch. Learn how you, as a student, parent, or family member can pay for college in 2008. Student questions such as the following will be addressed:

• What is the current status of the student lending market? Will loans be available to me?
• I keep hearing that loans might not be available from some lenders - what does that mean for my Stafford loan?
• What is the government doing - or what should they do - to help make paying for college a reality for most students?
• Where can I find scholarships, grants and other financial assistance?
• What do "tighter credit requirements" mean to me?

Show will air live April 9 at Noon EST.
Register Now to ask your questions in advance!

Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission

New York Times

April 1, 2008

The already crazed competition for admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.

Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied — or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.

Columbia College admitted 8.7 percent of its applicants, Brown University and Dartmouth College 13 percent, and Bowdoin College and Georgetown University 18 percent — also records.

“We love the people we admitted, but we also love a very large number of the people who we were not able to admit,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College.

Some colleges said they placed more students on their waiting lists than in recent years, in part because of uncertainty over how many admitted students would decide to enroll. Harvard and Princeton stopped accepting students through early admission this academic year; that meant that more than 1,500 students who would have been admitted in December were likely to have applied to many elite schools in the regular round.

Many factors contributed to the tightening of the competition at the most selective colleges, admissions deans and high school counselors said, among them demographics. The number of high school graduates in the nation has grown each year over the last decade and a half, though demographers project that the figure will peak this year or next, which might reduce the competition a little.

Other factors were the ease of online applications, expanded financial aid packages, aggressive recruiting of a broader range of young people, and ambitious students’ applying to ever more colleges.

The eight Ivy League colleges mailed acceptance and rejection letters on Monday to tens of thousands of applicants. Students could learn the fate of their applications online beginning at 5 p.m. on Monday, so three of the colleges said they were not ready to make public their admissions data. But the expectation was that they would also turn out to have been more competitive than ever.

“For the schools that are perceived to have the most competitive admissions processes, there has been this persistent rise in applications,” said Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale.

Ten years ago, slightly fewer than 12,000 students applied to Yale, compared with the 22,813 who applied this year, Mr. Brenzel said. Yale’s admittance rate — the proportion of applicants offered admission — was nearly 18 percent in 1998, more than double the rate this year.

“We’re really happy with the class,” Mr. Brenzel said of the students offered admission. “On a day like today it’s also easy to be aware of the incredible number of fantastic students who you have to turn away, because you know they would be successful here.”

At Harvard, as at Yale, the applicant pool included an extraordinary number of academically gifted students. More than 2,500 of Harvard’s 27,462 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test, and 3,300 had 800 scores on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class.

Admissions deans and high school guidance counselors said they spent hours at this time of year reminding students who had been put on waiting lists or rejected entirely that there were other excellent colleges on their lists — and that rejection was often about the overwhelming numbers, rather than their merits as individuals.

“I know why it matters so much, and I also don’t understand why it matters so much,” said William M. Shain, dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin. “Where we went to college does not set us up for success or keep us away from it.”

By ALAN FINDER