Baylor University
3,354
756
241
31.9% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 51.3%.
RECIPES / WAIT-LIST ODDS
Should you get your hopes up about a wait list?
Inspired by Roshan Fernandez's May 10, 2026 Wall Street Journal story on ballooning college wait lists, this recipe ignores anecdotes and looks across every complete C2 wait-list row currently visible in the collegedata.fyi CDS corpus, with high-volume near-total admit rows treated as data-quality caveats.
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. This page uses the success rate that matters to an applicant: 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
13.2%
21.5%
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, and at least one row has a blank accepted-count cell that the extractor filled from the admitted-count row. 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 | 100.0% |
| University of Oregon | 2024-25 | 641 | 631 | 98.4% |
| University of California, Irvine | 2024-25 | 6,259 | 6,259 | 100.0% |
| Pepperdine University | 2024-25 | 790 | 785 | 99.4% |
| Indiana University Bloomington | 2024-25 | 3,059 | 3,041 | 99.4% |
| Appalachian State University | 2024-25 | 566 | 547 | 96.6% |
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
| CDS year | Offered | Accepted | Admitted | Success |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-16PDF | 3,760 | 2,445 | 1,340 | 54.8% |
| 2018-19XLSX | 7,824 | 4,127 | 1,536 | 37.2% |
| 2019-20PDF | 7,531 | 3,975 | 1,098 | 27.6% |
| 2020-21XLSX | 8,753 | 5,043 | 1,651 | 32.7% |
| 2021-22XLSX | 11,725 | 6,871 | 359 | 5.2% |
| 2022-23XLSX | 8,456 | 4,655 | 44 | 0.95% |
| 2023-24PDF | 7,001 | 4,820 | 1,191 | 24.7% |
| 2024-25XLSX | 10,894 | 7,853 | 26 | 0.33% |
| 2025-26XLSX | 9,102 | 6,479 | 1 | 0.02% |
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 13.2% 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% | 31.2% | 19% | 1,871 |
| 40%+ admit rate | 63 | 28.1% | 32.0% | 9% | 941 |
| No admit rate | 20 | 30.4% | 17.5% | 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
100.0% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 35.3%.
Stony Brook University
10,563
5,191
3,462
66.7% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 48.2%.
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 43.6%.
University of California, Berkeley
9,102
6,479
1
0.02% of students who accepted a spot were admitted from the wait list. The same CDS row reports a normal admit rate of 11.5%.
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 16.8%.
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 | 0.0% | 86.1% |
| Spelman College 20-40% admit rate | 2025-26 | 2 | 0 | 0.0% | 23.8% |
| Harvey Mudd College 10-20% admit rate | 2025-26 | 439 | 0 | 0.0% | 12.3% |
| Shenandoah University 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1 | 0 | 0.0% | 77.0% |
| University of California, Berkeley 10-20% admit rate | 2025-26 | 6.5k | 1 | 0.02% | 11.5% |
| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.9k | 1 | 0.05% | 42.4% |
| University of Iowa No admit rate | 2024-25 | 14k | 13 | 0.09% | n/a |
| Wesleyan University 10-20% admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.7k | 5 | 0.29% | 16.5% |
| Stony Brook University 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 2.9k | 12 | 0.41% | 49.0% |
| Haverford College 10-20% admit rate | 2024-25 | 718 | 3 | 0.42% | 12.4% |
| Fairfield University 20-40% admit rate | 2024-25 | 2.5k | 22 | 0.89% | 33.3% |
| Worcester Polytechnic Institute 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.2k | 12 | 1.0% | 44.9% |
| Whitman College 40%+ admit rate | 2024-25 | 1.2k | 12 | 1.0% | 44.9% |
| Connecticut College 20-40% admit rate | 2025-26 | 471 | 5 | 1.1% | 39.2% |
| 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'