Decisions, Decisions – 2017 Regular Decision Waitlist Edition
We Admit It! We wish we could send good news to all of our wonderfully talented applicants. Unfortunately, the small class size that makes William & Mary appealing to so many also forces us to make several tough decisions among our very qualified students. As a result, we are not able to admit all of the students who are competitive for admission. While it may not feel like it, a waitlist decision is a positive one. We absolutely, 100%, genuinely wish we had more spaces in the incoming freshman class. If we did, we would have offered one of these positions to you.
It’s tough being on a waitlist, mainly because you are being asked to continue to wait. While this can be both confusing and frustrating, we hope this decision leaves the door open for you to continue considering W&M. This being said, we of course encourage you to fully explore the other universities that have offered you admission, and to submit an enrollment deposit by the May 1 deadline.
If you remain sincerely interested in W&M, you can accept your spot on our waitlist by completing the online form linked in your decision email.
What then? As stated above, we encourage you to focus your immediate attention on exploring those schools that have offered you admission. Knowing how impressive your application was, we have no doubt that you have many great options. If, after doing that, you still remain interested in W&M, you are welcome to email your regional dean with any updates, as well as a note of continued interest, in mid-to-late April. This note of continued interest does not have to be an extensive essay (you’ve already written enough of those with your actual applications), but should convey why you are interested in W&M and why you see yourself thriving as a member of our community.
Should we determine that we are able to admit additional students from the waitlist, we will consider any new information that you have sent us since your waitlist decision, along with your original application materials. If you are no longer interested in W&M, you can simply complete the online form linked to your decision email in order to withdraw your name from our waitlist.
There’s no way for us to predict whether or not we will go to the waitlist, and, if so, for whom and to what degree. Generally, we are able to determine whether or not we will be admitting students from the waitlist by early-to-mid May. If we are able to admit additional students, we will automatically consider those students who elected to remain on the waitlist. Should we get to that point, we will provide updates via this blog. All students remaining on the waitlist will get an update from us via email by mid-June. Our Waitlist FAQ page is also a great source of information.
While we do wish that we could have sent you more positive news, please know that we think incredibly highly of you. Your many accomplishments will, without question, provide you with great options for next year. Should you remain interested in W&M, we encourage you to accept your spot on the waitlist, keep in touch, and stay tuned. Whether the conclusion of your college search lands you in Williamsburg or elsewhere, we wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
Brad Harlan
Assistant Dean of Admission
Comments are closed on posts older than one year, but we still want to hear from you. If you have a comment or question for us, please email admission@wm.edu.
Hi,
I have a few questions. If I accept my place on the waitlist, does that mean that I have to go to W&M if accepted? I’m just confused because I won’t hear back until after the deposit deadline for other schools, so am I allowed to make a deposit to an other school? Then, if accepted off the waitlist, can I “undo” my deposit to the other school and come to W&M? Also, if accepted off the waitlist and for whatever I decide not to go to W&M, can I not accept my waitlist acceptance?
Thank You!!
Also, can waitlist students attend accepted student’s day to see if they want to remain on the waitlist?
@Michael. great questions:
1) If you accept your place on the waitlist, and then receive an admission offer to W&M, you do not have to attend. After receiving an admission offer from the waitlist, our office will give that student roughly 1-2 weeks to decide whether or not they would like to attend W&M. Should a student decide to not accept our admission officer, we of course understand, and wish them all the best.
2) We absolutely encourage you to submit an enrollment deposit to another school that has offered you admission. We will not know if, and to what extent, we will be utilizing our waitlist this year until after the May 1 matriculation deadline.
3) If you are extended an admission offer from the waitlist, and decide that you would like to attend W&M, you would simply contact the school to which you were previously committed in order to let them know that you will no longer be attending. You would then submit your enrollment deposit to W&M, and solidify your position as a member of our Class of 2021.
4) Day for Admitted Students is for those students who have received admission offers through Early Decision or Regular Decision. We encourage you to focus your visit efforts in the coming weeks on those schools where you have already been offered admission. While we always welcome students and families to visit campus, such a visit will not be something we consider if and when we are able to make admission offers from the waitlist. Should you receive an admission offer from the waitlist, we would of course be happy to host you on campus in order to help you make your final college decision.
I’m hurting but thank you, William & Mary, for writing this graceful post. It was comforting.
@Anonymous, thank you for your mature and thoughtful comment. Wherever you end up next fall, whether it is William & Mary or elsewhere, you are going to accomplish great things. Our office wishes you all the best.
hi, for reasons I don’t feel comfortable sharing on here, I have to make a decision by May 15. W&M is my #1 ultimate favorite top school EVER and would love to go. However, I must decide my May 15 and want to know if there is any reason I could hear back by then (with a yes or a no). If not, I will not stay on the waitlist and get my hopes up, but if yes, I must know because I will accept my spot IMMEDIATELY!!!!! Please let me know!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Maria, thank you for your note, and for expressing your sincere interest in attending William & Mary. We will not know if, and to what extent, we will be able to make admission offers from our waitlist until after May 1. As mentioned above, we encourage you to focus your attention on the schools that have already offered you admission, and to submit an enrollment deposit at one of these institutions by the May 1 deadline. If we are able to make admission offers from our waitlist, and should you be one of the students we contact, you would simply notify this other institution that you will no longer be joining their freshman class. At this stage of things, we simply cannot make any guarantees as to how many admission offers we will be able to make from our waitlist, and when we will be able to make them. If you would like to keep W&M as an option, then you should complete the form linked in your decision email. If this process/timing does not work for you given your situation, then we of course understand, and wish you all the best at whichever school is lucky enough to have you as a member of their freshman class.
Thanks for the updates! First deferred, then waitlisted. My son has a lot of patience (got it from his mother) but even he is looking forward to a final decision and hoping it is in early May. Me, I can’t wait for this to be over;).
@Bill13, it is our pleasure to assist you throughout the college admission process. While I am sorry that we were not able to provide your son with better news at the end of last month, please know how much we have enjoyed learning more about him. We appreciate your ongoing patience and understanding. If we are able to make admission offers from our waitlist this year, we will begin doing so around early-to-mid May. You are welcome to contact our office anytime should you have any questions about this process.
If we do get admitted after being on the waitlist, when do we get notification of any financial aid or scholarship money (if we get any if we’re waitlisted)?
@Skyler A., after a student is admitted from the waitlist, our Financial Aid Office contacts that student with their financial aid package if they completed and submitted a FAFSA. We then provide the student with 1-2 weeks in order to decide whether or not they would like to accept our admission offer. This time allows the student and their family to process all financial information, and to ask any follow-up questions, before having to make a final decision. In terms of merit-based aid, all applicants were already considered for all of our merit-based scholarships and awards. As such, we are not able to provide students from our waitlist with any merit-based awards.
Hello! Do you know if you will be using the waitlist this year?
@Stacy, yes, we will be using our waitlist this year. A more definitive update will be posted to this blog by the beginning of next week. If you are a waitlisted student, and haven’t already done so, please be sure to complete and submit the waitlist response form emailed to you at the end of last week. You are also welcome to contact your regional dean (http://www.wm.edu/admission/undergraduateadmission/contactus/meetthecommittee/) in order to express your continued interest in W&M.
Has the admissions committee already begun accepting students from the wait-list or will this take place at a different time?
Thank you!
Also, how formal should the letter/statement of continued interest be?
@Anonymous, we have indeed started to make a limited number of admission offers from our waitlist. We will post a more definite update on this process early next week. The letter/email/statement of continued interest should simply be a few paragraph explanation of why you envision yourself at William & Mary, and why you remain so interested in our university. This does not need to be overly formal, but should effectively convey your interest in W&M.
Will sending a letter of continued interest this late impact the waitlist decisions? This is the first I’ve heard of such a requirement.
@Anonymous, this letter of continued interest is not a requirement in order to be considered for admission from the waitlist. It is simply an option for those students who wish to express their interest in W&M in addition to submitting the waitlist response form that was sent to them via email. Should you wish to submit such a statement of continued interest, you are still welcome to do so.
When will we be alerted of our waitlist status? W&M is my top choice and I am starting to get a bit stressed.
@Anonymous, the first step for any waitlisted student is to complete and submit the most recent waitlist response form sent out via email on May 5. In addition to submitting this completed form, students are also able to send our office a statement of continued interest (elaborated upon in above comments), as well as any updates/accomplishments that were not included in their original applications. All such information will be taken into account as we progress through our waitlist deliberation process. Last year, this deliberation process continued through late June, and it is likely that this year’s process will follow a similar timeline. Given this, we are simply not able to provide you with a definitive update as to when waitlisted students will be hearing from us. We know that this is likely frustrating to hear. All of us here in the Admission Office appreciate your ongoing patience as we carefully process things on our end.
Will students who do not get off the waitlist be notified that all the open spots are filled?
@Anonymous, yes, we will continue to keep our waitlisted students updated as we progress through our waitlist review process. All students on our waitlist will receive an update from our office via email by around mid-June.
How important are grade updates on the decision for waitlist people? Would having 1 C but improvements on other grades be worth sending in?
@Anonymous, it’s hard to give a definitive answer here, simply because we take many different factors into account as part of our holistic review process. Should a student elect to submit recent grades to our office, they will indeed be reviewed in conjunction with that student’s other application materials.
I am well aware of the fact that the waitlist numbers fluctuate from year to year, but how many students are you expecting to take off this year?
@Laura, you are correct that the number of students we have admitted from the waitlist has varied tremendously in previous years, and is therefore difficult to predict. In 2013, we offered admission to 96 students from the waitlist, in 2014, we offered 56 students admission, in 2015, we offered 187, and in 2016, we offered 153. We anticipate that the number of students we will extend admission offers to this year will fall somewhere within this four year range.
Have you started to take out of staters off of the WL?
@Anonymous, yes. Throughout our waitlist review process, we will admit both in-state and out-of-state students.
How many out of staters do you expect to take off the WL this year?
@Anonymous, that is difficult to say, simply because that is entirely dependent on what changes we see take place within our freshman class over the coming weeks. For a general idea of the total number of students we admit from our waitlist each year, please see our above response to Laura.
If I haven’t been offered admission now, should I be worried?
@Anonymous, last year our waitlist review process continued through mid-to-late June. As mentioned in our latest blog post (Mid-May Freshman Waitlist Update), this is a day-to-day and week-to-week process. While we do not know exactly how things will play out at this point, there is indeed still a chance that we will be able to extend additional admission offers over the coming weeks. We appreciate your ongoing patience. Hang in there!
Chances of getting off the wait list, while they vary YOY, are quite small. W&M offered waitlist status to almost 30% of the applicants last year; 14,382 applicants, 4115 offered wait list.
If you want to get even more depressed;) remove the 5,253 that were offered admissions. That leaves 9,129 applicants that could be offered either waitlist or be denied. Doing so gets you to the fact that last year W&M waitlisted 45% of the applicants who were not admitted.
In the end W&M admitted 154 students off the waitlist last year. Using the waitlist spots offered of 4115 you get to 3.7%. Using the wait list offered and accepted number of 2037 you get to 7.5%.
It seems excessive to me, they know within a range the percentage of how many wait listed students are going to turn them down. I’m pretty sure it’s not anywhere close to 92%. Maybe they do it to make students feel better, I feel students would be better served if they waitlisted about 1,200, in which case you can figure about 600 will accept. Over the last 10 years the high was 242 the low was 14 (ouch!) and the average was 95.4. So why offer to waitlist to 4115 knowing about 50% will accept?
Thanks,
Bill Wine
Thank you Bill… that was very helpful, even if it did make me super depressed :(.
@BIll13, thank you for your comment, and for your interest in our waitlist review process. While the statistics that you present, generally speaking, are roughly accurate, there’s more to the story. Of the entire pool of students to whom we initially extend a waitlist offer, only a portion of those students will elect to remain on our waitlist. Going even further, over the course of the late-spring/early-summer period, as we continue to check-in with our waitlisted students, even smaller portions of those students will continue to elect to remain on the waitlist. It is only these students who continue to elect to remain on the waitlist that we potentially extend admission offers to. To be clear, we understand that the number of students to whom we initially extend waitlist offers may seem, from an outside perspective, to be quite large. However we also need to be cognizant of the fact that we will not know exactly what our freshman class will look like until after May 1, at which point we need to have some flexibility in terms of rounding out the final pieces of our class – our needs may vary from year to year in terms of how we elect to accomplish this. It is at this point that it is beneficial to have a talented pool of students on our waitlist, which provides us with such flexibility when finalizing our entering freshman class. We consider ourselves quite fortunate to have such accomplished students in our applicant pool. It is always humbling to learn about each and every one of these students, and we genuinely wish that we could offer admission to more students than we have space for.
Thank you very much for clarifying that. We have been very impressed with the way William and Mary has been handling the waitlist process. Your thorough responses are helpful and we appreciate you keeping us informed with new developments.
@Anonymous, it is our pleasure to assist our families in any way that we can. We understand that this process can be a bit stressful, and want to do all that we can to help our families feel informed. We sincerely appreciate your ongoing patience.
Have you already extended decisions to as many waitlisted students as possible and are waiting to hear from them before possibly reviewing the waitlist again on June 15th? Or are you still actively taking students off of the waitlist?
Thank you!
@Anonymous, we just posted a response to this question in the comment section of our “Mid-May Freshman Waitlist Update” blog.
I just want to say how incredibly helpful this blog has been! WM is certainly a class act to update in this way and provide all this valuable information about the Wait List progress, etc. As a parent of a wait-listed student it has made it a bit easier for sure. It has been such a tough time in our home waiting for the phone to ring every day but these updates have made this difficult process …more bearable. 🙂
Thank you WM Admissions!!
@Mom In Waiting, it is our pleasure to assist our families through this process. We are glad to hear that you have found these posts helpful! Thank you for your ongoing patience. Wherever your student ends up this fall, we are confident that they are going to accomplish great things.
Hello- my student is on the wait list but has not received a phone call or email. Has the decisions been released for the Fall 17 wait list. We are patiently waiting.
@Mom, additional waitlist updates have been posted to this blog on May 18 (Mid-May Freshman Waitlist Update) and June 23 (Final Freshman and Transfer Waitlist Update). An email was also sent to waitlisted freshman applicants on June 9. In short, our entering freshman class appears to be full. If your student is still interested in W&M, they should complete and submit the form that was linked in our email sent to them on June 9, and they are also welcome to email their regional dean (our Meet the Committee page is linked in the above blog post) in order to express their continued interest. Should you have any additional questions, you are welcome to contact our office at admission@wm.edu or 757-221-4223. Thank you for all of your ongoing patience throughout this process.