The Waitlist Is Now The Newest Admissions Round

In over 10 years as a college counselor, I’ve seen countless shifts in college admissions. But there’s one trend that absolutely exploded this year: the waitlist.

Colleges are no longer using the waitlist sparingly. Instead, the waitlist has become an active extension of the admissions cycle and, for the colleges, a strategic enrollment management tool. Being waitlisted is the college admissions equivalent of an emotionally unavailable situation-ship: they won't commit to you, but they won't let you go either, and somehow, you're the one left feeling guilty for moving on.

Back in my day, almost everyone applied Regular Decision in January, heard back in March or April, and made a decision by May 1. Simple.

Now? We have:

• Early Decision

• Restricted Early Action

• Single Choice Early Action

• Early Action

• Early Decision 2

• Regular Decision

• And now… the unofficial “Waitlist Round”

Every year, another layer gets added to an already exhausting process.

This year, I saw Georgia Tech waitlist MANY students who were at or above the mid-50% academically, and then begin pulling from the waitlist in early April.

I watched Santa Clara University do what they’ve now done for several years: email students in March asking if they wanted to convert their Regular Decision application into a binding Early Decision 2 application. Think about that for a minute. ED2 for Santa Clara had a January deadline. Decisions were supposedly just around the corner. Yet students were suddenly asked, within just a few days, to commit to attending a university with an $84,000/year cost of attendance - before seeing any financial aid or scholarship offers.

Students quickly figured out the message: If you said YES, there was a very good chance you’d be admitted. If you said NO, there was a very good chance you’d be waitlisted. In other words: “Are we your #1… no matter the financial reality?”

I also saw Indiana University, University of Tennessee, University of Georgia, and multiple Ivy League schools lean heavily into waitlist usage this year, and many started pulling from those waitlists before May 1.

As an IEC, I find this incredibly frustrating. Not because waitlists shouldn’t exist, because they always have, but because colleges are increasingly creating a system where students are expected to emotionally and financially commit earlier… while simultaneously keeping them hanging longer.

Students are required to sign agreements through Common App promising they won’t “double deposit” or commit to more than one school. Meanwhile, colleges have largely moved away from the old norms that discouraged schools from aggressively “poaching” or pulling committed students away late in the cycle.

But here’s the reality: at many large universities, housing is now directly tied to the enrollment deposit. Housing shortages then make students feel pressured to commit quickly just to secure a dorm. This is a system the colleges engineered to improve early commitments, lock down students and improve their yield (the % of accepted students who attend).

To make matters even more complicated, some colleges are now strategically releasing significant merit scholarships at the eleventh hour - either days before May 1 or even after students have already deposited elsewhere. Syracuse did this last year, and schools like the University of Delaware and Union College are doing it this year. The message to students becomes: “We didn’t want you earlier… but now that we need you, here’s money.” That creates yet another emotional and financial whiplash for families trying to make thoughtful decisions.

In the face of all this, most students do exactly what they should do: Once the options are on the table, they pick their “best fit” school from among their acceptances, send in the deposit and then they move on. They pick a school that chose them and: Find a roommate. Sign up for orientation. Buy the swag. Put the sticker on the car. Have the graduation party. Start imagining their future.

Those may sound like surface-level commitments, but they aren’t. Emotionally, they matter. A waitlist from a college is a “no.” So when students pivot toward a “yes,” that’s healthy. That’s resilience. That’s growth. Then suddenly, weeks later, the dream school reappears and says: “Actually… we have a spot. You have just 24 hours to decide.”

With a waitlist offer, students are being asked to unwind all of that emotional work overnight. It is neither fair nor kind. And frankly, it is not healthy for teenagers who have already been mentally beaten up by this process.

Do some of my students still play the waitlist game? Absolutely. In fact, my own daughter accepted a waitlist spot at her dream school a few years ago. It was an emotionally challenging pivot at first, and she is wildly happy now, but the waitlist decision is another hurdle for students to jump at the end of a very long race.

The current college admissions process is fragile, complicated, ever-changing and (most frustratingly) often no longer a meritocracy. How do we fix it? I have no idea.

But, in the meantime, I’ll continue doing what I’ve always done: help students and families make sense of the chaos by building balanced college lists, navigating the emotional highs and lows of this process, and now, increasingly, explaining the growing role of the waitlist in modern college admissions.