Baylor University
3,354
756
241
32% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 51%.
RECIPES / WAIT-LIST ODDS
Offered, accepted, admitted.
Offer, accept, and admit counts from CDS C2, across every complete row in the corpus, bucketed by C1 selectivity and by federal control, size, and Carnegie class. High-volume near-total admit rows are flagged as data-quality caveats, not dropped silently. Inspired by Roshan Fernandez's May 2026 WSJ story; the numbers here are from the filings, not the article.
CDS C2C1Scorecard
The CDS asks schools how many applicants were offered a wait-list spot, how many accepted it, and how many were eventually admitted. The rate here is admitted divided by accepted wait-list spots. Rows without all three counts are visible as partial data but are excluded from rate medians.
144
schools in the rate analysis, across 180 school-year rows. Another 61 rows report only part of C2, and 6 high-volume near-total admit rows are shown as caveats.
180
13%
22%
6
DOT SIZE = ACCEPTED WAIT-LIST SPOTS · X-AXIS USES SQRT SCALE
■ under 2%■ 2-10%■ 10%+Vertical forest ticks mark each bucket median; reported anomalous rows are excluded.
6 high-volume rows report that at least 95% of students who accepted a wait-list spot were admitted. Some of those values appear verbatim in the source PDFs; at least one inspected PDF leaves the accepted-count row blank, and the published count does not match the source. They are preserved below as source-reported anomalies, but excluded from medians, bucket summaries, and the main chart.
| School | Year | Accepted | Admitted | Reported rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Case Western Reserve University | 2025-26 | 688 | 688 | 100% |
| University of Oregon | 2024-25 | 641 | 631 | 98% |
| University of California, Irvine | 2024-25 | 6,259 | 6,259 | 100% |
| Pepperdine University | 2024-25 | 790 | 785 | 99% |
| Indiana University Bloomington | 2024-25 | 3,059 | 3,041 | 99% |
| Appalachian State University | 2024-25 | 566 | 547 | 97% |
Nine CDS files,
one sharp cliff.
one sharp cliff.
Berkeley is the clearest example of why one wait-list year should not become a rule. The archive has nine Berkeley CDS files with wait-list C2 counts. The success rate was routinely above 25% in older files, then fell below 1% in 2022-23, 2024-25, and 2025-26. Chart idea credited to @neetu_arnold.
ADMITTED FROM WAIT LIST / ACCEPTED WAIT-LIST SPOTS
Hope is allowed.
Planning on it is not.
Planning on it is not.
Across complete CDS wait-list rows in the current corpus, the median school admits 13% of students who accept a spot. That sounds meaningful until you split the schools: the most selective buckets cluster around low single digits, and 23 complete rows are effectively closed doors under 2%. Higher rates exist, but they are concentrated at less selective schools and in years where the enrollment model missed badly. Reported near-total wait-list admit rows are treated as data-quality caveats rather than odds estimates.
| Bucket | Schools | Median success | Weighted success | Under 2% | Median accepted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10% admit rate | 14 | 4.4% | 6.9% | 15% | 794 |
| 10-20% admit rate | 28 | 4.5% | 6.8% | 15% | 1,878 |
| 20-40% admit rate | 21 | 8.4% | 31% | 19% | 1,871 |
| 40%+ admit rate | 63 | 28% | 32% | 9% | 941 |
| No admit rate | 20 | 30% | 18% | 10% | 283.5 |
Boston University
15,751
9,448
n/a
The CDS projection has wait-list scale but not enough complete C2 counts to compute a success rate, so this row is excluded from bucket medians.
Case Western Reserve University
9,168
688
688
100% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 35%.
Stony Brook University
10,563
5,191
3,462
67% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 48%.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville
11,980
3,516
134
3.8% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 44%.
University of California, Berkeley
9,102
6,479
1
0.0% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 11%.
University of Virginia
10,470
6,759
242
3.6% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 17%.
The rows that shape expectations.
| School | Year | Accepted | Admitted | WL success | Admit rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of California-Riverside 40%+ admit rate | 2025-26 | 2.0k | 0 | 0% | 86% |
| Spelman College 20-40% admit rate | 2025-26 | 2 | 0 | 0% | 24% |
| Harvey Mudd College 10-20% admit rate | 2025-26 | 439 | 0 | 0% | 12% |
| Shenandoah University 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1 | 0 | 0% | 77% |
| University of California, Berkeley 10-20% admit rate | 2025-26 | 6.5k | 1 | 0.0% | 11% |
| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.9k | 1 | 0.1% | 42% |
| University of Iowa No admit rate | 2024-25 | 14k | 13 | 0.1% | n/a |
| Wesleyan University 10-20% admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.7k | 5 | 0.3% | 16% |
| Stony Brook University 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 2.9k | 12 | 0.4% | 49% |
| Haverford College 10-20% admit rate | 2024-25 | 718 | 3 | 0.4% | 12% |
| Fairfield University 20-40% admit rate | 2024-25 | 2.5k | 22 | 0.9% | 33% |
| Worcester Polytechnic Institute 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.2k | 12 | 1.0% | 45% |
| Whitman College 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.2k | 12 | 1.0% | 45% |
| Connecticut College 20-40% admit rate | 2025-26 | 471 | 5 | 1.1% | 39% |
| Amherst College Under 10% admit rate | 2024-25 | 623 | 8 | 1.3% | 9.0% |
curl 'https://api.collegedata.fyi/rest/v1/school_browser_rows?select=school_id,school_name,canonical_year,acceptance_rate,wait_list_policy,wait_list_offered,wait_list_accepted,wait_list_admitted&wait_list_offered=not.is.null'