We plan to make the final wave of freshman decisions available today, March 6th, at 4 pm ET. For some students, you will be offered a place on our wait list. Every year our office has to predict approximately how many students we can admit in order to enroll our freshman class, but we can never be sure how many students will enroll until after the May 1 commitment deposit deadline has passed. If the number of students who say they will be attending UGA is lower than we expect, we may need to go to our wait list group in order to get the size that we want for our freshman class. UGA is committed to ensuring that all students have a wonderful experience during their time here. For incoming first-year students, this includes providing on-campus housing, ensuring they can enroll in necessary classes, and supporting them to graduate within four years. However, we have a limited capacity for freshmen, with a maximum enrollment of 6,250 students for the fall semester. We have taken a conservative approach with our admission offers and plan to utilize the wait list to meet our enrollment targets if deposits trend as expected. Based on the number of students who choose to enroll, we may admit several hundred students from the wait list, particularly in-state students, as they have the highest likelihood of exceeding our enrollment estimates. This year we have roughly 5,300 students on the wait list. We carefully monitor the deposits coming into the University to see where we are in comparison to the predicted freshman numbers. The FAQ can answer information on wait list numbers, past year wait list data, and other details (such as no, the wait list is not ranked).
Rules of the UGA Admissions Blog
If you have questions about your specific decision, I do not suggest you post them on this blog. As well, do not give out or request personal academic information in your post, as we would then need to delete these posts. We are not able to answer questions about individual students here because we will generally not have your information in front of us and we cannot disclose individual student information in a comment. I would recommend talking with both your family and high school counselor first, then reviewing this previous post on suggestions about how to react to an admissions decision, and finally reading the FAQ’s available from your status page. In addition, please do not post any comments disparaging another student or individual, as these comments will be deleted (see the rules in the upper right-hand corner under About the Blog).
The Wait List FAQ can answer some questions, but the most important thing you need to do is decide if you want to remain on the wait list. Follow the instructions on the status check to let us know if you want to stay on the wait list or if you want to decline this option and move forward with admission at another college. If you decide to stay on the wait list, you should still move forward with an alternate college plan as we will not know about any wait list options until May at the earliest. If you select to stay on the wait list, we will know that you still want to attend UGA if an opportunity opens up. The key word in wait list is wait as this is not a quick process. So please be prepared to wait.
There are three options for the wait list reply. You can say no, please do not consider me for the wait list. The next option is to remain on the wait list, but only if it is for the Fall term. The third option is to remain on the wait list and be considered for both Fall and Spring terms. This is so that if there is space available for the Fall term, we will look at all of the students who have asked to remain on the wait list. If the only space available is for Spring term, we will only look at students who said Fall or Spring. Once you select an option, you cannot change it so be sure to think about your decision before you make your selection. In late April, we will reach back out to anyone who said yes to verify that they still want to remain on the wait list. We will be waiting to offer Spring term to students after we have moved forward with the WL for Fall, and this is due to the expected numbers we expect to admit for Fall from the wait list.
Things to Remember:
- UGA does not use the GPA from a HS transcript, but instead we calculate our own HS GPA based on core academic courses. For our admitted freshman, roughly 93% of their core grades were A’s, and 8+% were B’s, with most of these strong grades coming in Honors/Accelerated/AP/IB/DE courses. In our holistic review, we also look at grade trends to see how a student has progressed through their HS years.
- UGA looks closely at academic rigor, specifically what a student will take over four years as compared to what is available. This is not based simply on the number of AP/IB/DE courses, but instead we look at the overall coursework over four years in the five core areas and the progression of rigor over those four years.
- When we are looking at activities in the holistic review (clubs, sports, pt work, artistic activities, etc.), we are looking at depth and time commitment in these areas in addition to the actual organizations.
- As stated on the FAQ, the wait list does not have a “ranking” of students from 1-X number, and you do not need to send in a “continued interest” communication, as we assume anyone who replies to stay on the wait list is still interested.
- When we go to the wait list, we will be looking at a student’s academic information, our holistic review of their file, and the space available in the first year class.
We will most likely not know details about the wait list until early May, and it may be mid July before we finish making wait list decisions. Please be patient with our office and read the FAQ before asking questions as it can give you a great deal of information. If you do not feel like you can wait until later May through July for a decision, it may be that the wait list option is not for you.