How to Survive the Waitlist

You've been waitlisted at your top B-school choice. What do you do now? The answers vary by school, but hard sells rarely work anywhere

by Kerry Miller

Imagine spending months putting together a B-school application and waiting 8 to 12 weeks for a decision—then comes a decision that isn't really a decision at all. You're on the waitlist.

It you find it confusing, you're not alone. As with many aspects of the B-school admissions process, there are no uniform rules for how to proceed. You could sit back and wait for the school of your choice, actively market yourself to the waitlisting school, or move on to Plan B.

Sara Neher, admissions director of the University of Virginia's Darden School, says she understands the confusion many waitlisted applicants feel because even she had a misunderstanding at first about what the waitlist means in the B-school context. "At the undergraduate level, the waitlist is typically very small, and it's very rare to come off the waitlist," she says. "At business school, that's not [necessarily] true."

Shifting Numbers

At B-schools such as Darden that have multiple deadlines, being put on the waitlist is often more like a deferral—waitlisted candidates from Round 1 are considered along with the rest of the applicant pool from the next deadline, becoming, in effect, Round 2 applicants. Schools with rolling admissions may waitlist more people early on in the process until the admissions office has a better handle on what the entire applicant pool for the year will look like.

The number of students put on and accepted from a school's waitlist can also vary significantly from year to year, depending on a variety of factors, including application volume and yield. Last year, for example, MIT-Sloan waitlisted about 150 applicants—about 5% of the total application pool—50 of whom were ultimately admitted, according to data the school provided to BusinessWeek.com.

Four years earlier, when B-school application volume was nearing an all-time high, MIT waitlisted a slightly higher percentage of applicants, but accepted only a dozen. At Darden, Neher speculates that higher application volume so far this year—and the school's record-high yield last year—might mean more applicants will find themselves on the waitlist.

Don't Read Between the Lines

Highly selective schools with perennially high yields typically have small, not very active waitlists. At Harvard Business School—where 91% of accepted applicants ultimately enrolled—not a single applicant was accepted from last year's waitlist, according to Admissions Director Deirdre Leopold. (For more details on waitlist acceptances and policies at a number of leading B-schools, see table.)

Schools also have differing attitudes about the amount of contact they expect to have with waitlisted applicants. Some schools, such as Harvard, maintain a strict "wait and see" approach and contend that they don't use the waitlist to reevaluate credentials. However, many B-schools do invite additional information from waitlisted applicants about new GMAT scores, say, or a promotion at work that might tip the balance. Some of these schools will even provide feedback to waitlisted applicants to help point out weaknesses or gaps in applications. Still other schools don't actively solicit new information but don't disregard it either, leaving it up to applicants to decide what might help.