At Top Schools, a Spot on the Wait List May as Well Be a Rejection
Your odds of getting off the wait list at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and MIT are close to nothing.
Stanford University's campus in Palo Alto, California
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College applicants who are put on a wait list—unable to rejoice at their success or fully wallow in rejection—may not know just how to feel about the news. At a handful of ultra-selective colleges, the answer is unambiguous: A spot on the wait list is tantamount to rejection.
Last year, Stanford University put 659 hopefuls on its wait list. Just seven—barely 1 percent—were admitted from the list, according to numbers in the school's Common Data Set, an institutional report many colleges publish annually. In the two preceding years, Stanford didn't accept a single person from the wait list. Stanford did not respond to a request for comment on this story.