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Still, I'm surprised at just how much of a long-shot the waitlist turns out to be.  I'm thinking that a significant portion of Yale's 1052 waitlist folks would have wanted an offer of admission.  The fact that only 60 received them - a bleak 5.7% - suggests that lots of people had their hopes dashed in the process.  Think about it: Yale had an overall acceptance rate of 9.9%  People who get waitlisted may think that they're one step closer to the goal of admission.  But in fact, their odds of admission have plunged.  Almost everyone on the Yale, Cornell, and MIT waitlists will be waiting forever.

I suspect that waitlists of such tremendous size must be doing triple or quadruple duty.  Some kids are legitimate candidates for admission simply on academic merit.  Others may have been waitlisted to satisfy an anxious alum, or some other target of institutional advancement.  Still others might be the talented quarterback and sharpshooting guard who will cut to the front of the line if, and only if, the even-more-talented quarterback and even-more-accurate guard matriculate elsewhere.  Perhaps a few applicants offer that ever-alluring ability to pay full freight - the better to balance college budgets in treacherous times.  

I don't think that universities have a duty to trim these lists.  They're neither a promise of admission, nor a suggestion that an applicant's prospects are rosy.  But waitlist members are inevitably hopeful.  It's hard to know what sort of kismet is required to bounce any particular applicant off of these enormous queues.    When it comes to places like Cornell, Yale, and MIT, however, the best advice is:  don't kid yourself.  Hell doesn't freeze over all that often.

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