For admissions hopefuls, wait on the list ends

But yesterday, their anxiety came to an end: These 1,472 students placed on the wait list learned that none of them would gain a spot at Princeton.

High school seniors Brian Murphy and Elizabeth Ballou had been hoping that Princeton’s yield number would be low enough to give them a chance to attend. But their applications, put aside at the end of the regular decision round to be reevaluated by the Office of Admission if spaces in the class opened up, will not get a second read. Yet the six weeks they spent on the wait list illustrate the uncertainty of admission limbo.

Murphy, who is from West Long Branch, N.J., and attends Communications High School, placed his deposit at Cornell after learning he had been wait-listed at Princeton. Though he said he plans to major in government at Cornell, he would have preferred to study international relations at the Wilson School.

“For me, I would personally drop everything for Princeton because it was my first choice, so just being on the wait list is kind of awesome to begin with,” Murphy said in an interview three weeks ago.

Though Princeton was his first choice, he did not apply early action to Princeton because that would have meant he could not apply to other schools early. Instead, he applied early to Fordham and Rutgers, which he considered safety schools.

Ballou attends the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies in Richmond, Va. Though her high school perennially sends a number of students to Princeton, she said she did not intend on applying to Princeton until she visited the campus last fall for the Princeton Creative Arts and Humanities Symposium. At the Symposium, Ballou sat in on a seminar with professors and stayed with a student from her high school.

After her brief time at the school, Princeton became one of her top choices.

“I had never been to the campus before, and I thought it was stunning,” Ballou said.

But after she was wait-listed at Princeton this spring, she chose to place a deposit at the University of Virginia and turned down a wait list offer from the University of North Carolina in order to take a place on Princeton’s.

In an April interview, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said that she expected about half of the students to accept their placement on the wait list this year, consistent with previous years. Murphy and Ballou were among those hoping for another chance to be accepted to Princeton.

“If the opportunity is given to you, why would you not take it?” Murphy said.

“I was actually honored to be wait-listed because it sucks to be rejected outright, so I definitely wanted to put my name on the wait list just to show that I was still committed,” Ballou said.

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The number of students that are admitted off the wait list varies greatly from year to year. Last year, 19 of the 1,248 students placed on the wait-list for the Class of 2015 were admitted. The Class of 2014 had 159 students admitted from the wait list, the Class of 2013 had 31, and the Class of 2012 had 86.

The Office of Admission considers admitting students from the wait list after May 1, the deadline for admitted students to commit to the University. In order to avoid removing students from other universities’ classes in July and August, the Office of Admission suspends wait-list activity by June 30.

After the regular-decision acceptances were released in late March, Rapelye said that because the University did not know how the new single-choice early action application program would affect the yield, the Office of Admission offered admission to a “very conservative number” of students. They were hoping that the first round of acceptances would yield a class just under the target size of 1,300, after which they would begin accepting students off the wait list.

In the letter wait-listed students received informing them they had been placed on the wait list, they were encouraged to update the University with new accomplishments from their senior year, which both Murphy and Elizabeth did.

In addition, Director and Educational Consultant of IvySelect College Consulting Michael Goran said he suggests that his clients reiterate in these updates why the University is the best fit for the student.

“If you’ve gone back and visited again, specific things about classes, programs, etc., articulating that again shows that you’re really serious and committed to attending the school,” Goran explained.

When Murphy’s high school counselor called the Office of Admission to inquire about the wait-list status, she was told Murphy could send in an additional letter of recommendation by mid-May.

After initially updating her Princeton admission officer with developments since submitting her application in December, Ballou had been avoiding contacting the Office of Admission in order to prevent coming off as “obnoxious,” she said.

But even if she were to have gotten in off the wait list, Ballou said she would not have immediately decided on attending Princeton. She said the financial aid package would have played a large role in her decision to accept Princeton’s offer. Ballou was accepted to her other top-choice school, the University of Chicago, but decided not to attend after not receiving a financial aid package.

“I had to think for a really long time about whether I wanted to maybe go there instead and take on a lot of debt, and I decided that probably would not be worth it in the end,” Ballou said.

Ballou said that even if she were accepted, she is concerned that she would not receive a financial aid package from Princeton as well.

While waiting, Goran also advises his clients to “psychologically” commit to the school at which they have made their deposit.

“It’s possible that you may get off the wait list, but it’s not very likely,” Goran said. “If something happens, terrific; if it doesn’t, so be it ... It’s a pleasant surprise. It happens from time to time, but they don’t happen on a regular basis.”

After the May 1 deadline passed and Ballou began to await news from Princeton, she said in an interview on May 3 that she was “starting to get kind of excited about UVA” and had been planning out her dorm room on designyourdorm.com. The following week, she said she became interested in living in one of UVA’s residential colleges, called Brown College. It was modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an academic village and is a small community of what Ballou calls “weird, creative people.”

“I’m applying there, and I’m hoping that if I don’t get in to Princeton, [Brown College] is going to provide me with that driven but amiable atmosphere that I liked so much at Princeton,” Ballou said.

Murphy’s high school counselor was told by the Office of Admission during the first week of May that the class was filling up and they were unsure when they were going to the wait list.

“We probably won’t hear anything for a while,” Murphy said in an interview on May 2. “I guess it’s really hard to do anything other than wait.”

“I’m so hopeful that one of these days I’m going to get a call from Princeton, but the possibility is feeling more distant now,” Ballou said on May 3.

But yesterday, both Murphy and Ballou received letters from the Office of Admission informing them that the Class of 2016 was over-enrolled and that students will not be accepted off the wait list. Princeton has yet to release its yield statistics.

For Murphy and Ballou, the wait ended.