David Graves      May 4th, 2023 in Blog


In reviewing the deposits we received as of May 1, we are close to but under the number of students we plan to enroll for Fall 2023 (the projected new freshmen number is 6,200 students), so we will be admitting some students off the Wait List. We also need to project out what is called “Melt”, which is when students who have deposited with us then cancel their applications due to any number of reasons (accepted off a WL from another school, decided on a Gap year, personal/medical issue, etc.).  On Friday, May 5th, we will begin offering admission off the Wait List to an initial group of 230+ students for the Fall 2023 term. These WL admission offers will be a mix of in-state and out-of-state students, and our focus is to make sure we have a balance of roughly 80% in-state/20% out-of-state ratio for our enrolling students. For informational purposes, out of the roughly 3,800 students who were offered the Wait List, roughly 1,900 decided to remain on the list, and we will work with the students who decided to stay on the WL.

For these admitted students, decisions will be released at 4 PM EST on Friday and their status page will show a new decision, and an email will then be sent out alerting them to a change in their status. Over the next few weeks/months, we will then see what the response to these offers is, and how our deposits and deposit/cancels are looking. We know that not all students who are admitted off the WL will accept our offer, and we need to give any admitted WL student a window of time to make their decision, so WL decisions will be made in waves dependent on the student responses. I cannot predict when we will complete our Wait List review, and I do not have an exact date for any future offers or when we will be done with the process. Given that our deposit numbers are close to what we predicted for next year, we do not know yet how many Wait List decisions we will need to make. As such, if we were to go deeper into the Wait List after the initial offerings, we would then make small waves of decisions over the next month or two while simultaneously monitoring deposits, withdraws and Wait List responses. We will also look at the Wait List for Spring 2024 in a later review of deposits (after the Fall offers are done) and take action in a later round as needed. In the Wait List letter, we stated that “We intend to finalize all admission decisions for the Class of 2027 as soon as possible, but by mid-July at the latest.”, and we hope it will be well before mid-July but we do not have an exact date to finish WL decisions yet.

When we do make a Wait List offer, we will be making these decisions in the same manner as our other admission decisions, where a decision will be displayed on the status page and an email will be sent shortly after a decision is made to alert the applicant that a status change has occurred. Admitted students have a ten day Commitment Deposit deadline from the acceptance date.  To be clear: WE ARE NOT FINISHED WITH THE WAIT LIST YET. We will finalize things over the next few months, but we need time to get in WL responses and determine the next steps. Only students who are admitted will receive a decision and an email indicating a change in their status.

In reviewing the students who we admitted off the Wait List, there were a variety of individual reasons for the offers that were made. As such, I cannot give an overarching reason for the decisions. We will take into account our earlier reviews of the files, along with a wide range of academic and co-curricular information that we had on hand. As a reminder, the Wait List FAQ has a great deal of information about the Wait List process.

Go Dawgs!