Receiving an admissions decision: Admit, deny, or waitlist
About this video
On decision day there are three possible outcomes: admitted, not admitted, or wait-listed. The speaker explains that colleges use wait lists to meet enrollment targets, reviewing them after the May 1 deadline, and advises treating the wait list as a long shot, though you will be released from another commitment if admitted off a wait list.
You'll be able to
- name the three possible admissions decisions.
- explain why colleges use wait lists and when they turn to them.
- describe a sensible way to respond to being wait-listed.
Key words
- Wait list
- A list of students a college may admit later if spaces open up after admitted students decide.
- Enrollment target
- The number of new students a college aims to have in its class.
- Yield
- The share of admitted students who actually choose to enroll.
Transcript
- Ok so this is decision day and you're about to get to decisions that you've been waiting for, for sometime. The outcomes can be three. One, you're admitted. Horray for you! That's pretty exciting, and so you're going to have an option immediately, and so that's something that you should jump up and down about.
Two, you're aren't admitted. And that's ok, but in that case you just need to move on, and say, 'Well, that was one of 'the choices that I made, but...' rather than even being too disappointed, just let that go and lean towards the admitted decision. And the third one, of course is the wait list.
Some institutions will invite you to be on the wait list. The wait list is a way that institutions ensure that they meet their full enrollment targets. So in fact, they over admit their class, knowing that they are not going to yield the entire class, and then they wait for those decisions to come in in May one.
After May one, really in the middle of May or so, colleges and universities will determine whether they have the ability to turn back to the waiting list, and then they consider those students they've invited to the waiting list in a secondary review. It is really, really hard to tell what the outcome will be and actually, I feel if I was a gambler, I would say that you should look at the wait list, as one that going to be a long shot, in most cases.
becuse there are a lot of students on it, they're not going to take too many students from the waiting list, and if you're fortunate to be one that they invite back, that's wonderful. Good new about wait list is if you, even if committed, which you probably have to the student, to the institution you were admitted to, that you chose from those you were admitted to, they will release you from your commitment if you're admitted from a waiting at another university.
So there's no issue here in terms of your ability to accept that wait list offer.
Video © Khan Academy, used under CC BY-NC-SA. Watch on Khan Academy. Puzzicle is not affiliated with Khan Academy.