College Admissions Purgatory: Appeals, Waitlists, Deferrals, and Letters of Continued Interest

One of the worst parts about college admissions is that tens of thousands of applicants will neither be admitted nor denied outright. They’re like the boy or girl strung along by their crush who can’t make up their mind whether to ask them to prom. Or they get asked only after their crush’s first and second choices say no.

Many of these issues come down to Early Decision and Action processes that I discussed in the previous video. These programs serve the needs of institutions at the expense of student’s wellbeing and flexibility.

Most early applicants are deferred until the regular admissions deadline when their application is considered among all other applicants. Deferred applicants often scramble to complete a battery of RD applications before the January 1 deadlines.

A 2020 data assessment by Ivy Coach crunched the numbers to determine which Ivy League universities admit ED applicants deferred to the regular admissions pool. They estimate that, on average, 90 percent of deferred students are eventually denied. Brown admitted only 7 percent of deferred students, for example. Occasionally, deferred students are offered a spot on the waitlist, a kind of double-limbo. Deferral is the enrollment management equivalent of texting “hey, you up?” after going home from the party alone.

Another tool in the enrollment manager’s kit is the elusive waitlist. No applicant knows why they’re “invited to join” the waitlist rather than outright denied. They might assume they’re a borderline applicant, but that isn’t always the case. Perhaps the enrollment major is worried about putting enough butts in the seats for a given major.

Waitlists are like contestants on The Bachelor “invited to join” the rose ceremony when everybody knows in advance Arie will choose either Hannah or Becca. But hey, better than an outright rejection, right? I’m doubtful.

Waitlists are a special kind of hell for applicants because universities provide no guarantees that they will notify applicants of admission or rejection after the National Decision Day on May 1. Carnegie Mellon added an added layer of confusion with a tiered “priority waitlist,” whereby some students received their decision by May 10, with the remainder hearing back by June 1. Almost everyone is fiercely resistant to admissions by lottery, but in practice, waitlists are precisely that.

Universities want to see how many students submit enrollment deposits and admit students from the waitlist depending on the number of spaces available at the university or specific programs. Applying to highly in-demand programs decreases the likelihood of gaining admission off the waitlist or after an appeal for reconsideration. Waitlists and appeals are similar, except if the former are contestants on The Bachelor; the latter are the thousands of rejected contestant applications begging for their 60-second video submission to get a second look.

The first and worst waitlist case I ever encountered was in 2012 when I worked for UT-Austin. UT that year offered a few hundred students an invitation to join the waitlist. Some years, everyone gains admission off the waitlist. In other cycles, maybe only a handful get in. Few students were offered admission off the waitlist in 2012. A student who had been communicating with me throughout the cycle sent a handwritten note on the back of a Google Maps printout showing the route from Plano to Austin. She brought our office cookies in April after I insisted that we had no power over waitlists. But who were we to refuse fresh-baked snickerdoodles? Admissions counselors aren’t monsters or dentists, after all.

Enrollment managers, on the other hand, subjected this student to an insidious purgatory. She received the notification in early May that she was not offered admission off the waitlist. She called me, crying. Because so many enrollment deadlines had already passed for her backup universities, she began the groveling process at her backup schools (that she had declined) for them to allow an exception. She put down an enrollment deposit elsewhere only to receive a phone call a few days later from senior UT staff that they had made a mistake. They actually intended to admit her from the waitlist, but someone had hit the wrong button. Congratulations, you’re a Longhorn!

Most universities are relatively stable in how many students they invite to join the waitlist and subsequently admit, but it isn’t easy data to find. Universities are rarely forthcoming with their waitlist statistics. NACAC reports around 20 percent of waitlisted students will eventually gain admission, but the range varies widely depending on the university.

Cal Tech and Drexel admitted 1 percent of their waitlisted students for Fall 2018. In the same admissions cycle, Boston University recorded 3,446 students who joined the waitlist, with only a single student gaining admission. Case Western Reserve admitted zero among 9,908, like a lottery ticket where everyone is a loser.

Indiana University admitted 427 out of 467 (91 percent), while UC-Berkeley admitted one-third of their waitlistees. Some universities rank their waitlisted students, whereas others don’t, so you can never be quite sure why a decision went one way or the other. A lack of waitlist transparency casts doubts on students who do succeed because they wonder if they’re a genuinely desirable applicant or a number to meet an enrollment metric, particularly if they’re an underrepresented minority. Maybe it was due to the university’s needs, or perhaps you just didn’t make the cut.

An additional layer of hell is the “letter of continued interest” along with other “invitations” to improve your candidacy, an especially fun time for Fall 2020 enrolling students coping with the pandemic during the spring and summer. Prep Scholar provides several helpful tips for the devastated student stuck in limbo. They suggest writing an unsolicited letter of interest, sending resume updates, midyear grade reports, staying in touch with your assigned admissions counselor, and even retaking the SAT/ACT.

Students experience waitlist fatigue, a kind of non-adaptive choice switching whereby even after gaining admission off the waitlist to their dream school, they decide to enroll elsewhere. Others suffer from plan continuation bias where they’re unable to accept that the admissions door has almost undoubtedly closed, so they exhaust every avenue to overturn a decision. What the waitlist means for most applicants is yet another battery of essays.

How many tens of thousands of additional essays are written at the end of the admissions process only for the vast majority of students to still not gain admission? Many Redditors report simply copy and pasting their continued interest essay for their varied waitlisted universities. I can’t say I blame them.

Many universities have made a sport out of a student’s desperation into a kind of Groveling Olympics. They generously “allow” students to submit recommendation letters, placing additional burdens on already overextended high school staff. Because others have less-clear policies about updating the application, there’s always an ambiguity around which universities do or don’t want additional materials.

Applicants are fooled into thinking they exercise some level of control over their outcomes. Implicit in appeals or continued interest letters are a kind of special pleading where the applicant is attempting to establish themselves “as an exemption to a generally accepted rule without justifying the exemption.”

Really, really, really badly wanting to enroll doesn’t distinguish you from the thousands of other hopefuls. That didn’t stop an extended family coming into our office wearing burnt orange with a three-ring binder filled with football game ticket stubs, multigenerational Longhorn gatherings, and a bedroom decked out in all things UT.

Naturally, families assume that an unfavorable decision must certainly be a mistake of the decision-makers—the furtive fallacy. But since universities routinely make mistakes, it gives students a sliver of hope. Errors on the university decision release side add another layer of cognitive distortions on top of the madness.

If elite universities cared about their applicants, they would limit or eliminate practices like waitlists, appeals, deferrals, and letters of continued interest.