WAIT LISTED IN COLLEGE LIMBO

May 1 is the deadline by which multitudes of high school seniors must commit to the college of their choice. For most, it's a happy opportunity to turn the tables in the admissions game by choosing which college's offer to accept.

For hundreds of thousands more, however, the act of sending off a deposit to secure a place in college will be bittersweet. These are the waitlisted.

Just as they have in the past, college admissions offices have offered positions on their wait lists to hundreds more applicants than they have any reasonable expectation of admitting. For example, Yale offered wait list spots to 1052 applicants this year-more than the total number of applicants admitted during the regular admissions process exclusive of early decision admissions. Of those, they are likely to send offers of admission to only a handful.

This year, the generic excuse for over use of the wait list seems to be uncertainty brought about by changes is early decision policies coupled with a tendency on the part of high school seniors to apply to more colleges. Historically, however, one need only consult admissions statistics reported in the colleges' Common Data Sets to learn that most colleges have consistently demonstrated an uncanny ability to pinpoint their so-called yields, i.e., the number of accepted students who will choose to enroll. For that reason and neither of the justifications now being circulated for expanding wait lists even more this year is sufficient to justify putting so many young people's lives on hold, and robbing them of so much of the joy of transitioning from high school to college.

Wait listed students, at least those who wisely applied to one or more safety schools, must still write a check by May 1 in order to hold a place in a school that has already laid out the welcome mat. Yet unlike their friends who have made a clear choice among established option, students on one or more wait lists are still hoping against hope to get the nod from their dream school even as they mail off hundreds of non-refundable dollars to a school they have not resolved to attend. Worse still, there are some who have not been accepted elsewhere and whose only hope for attending college at all next fall depends on the beating overwhelming odds.

Partly because colleges who rank their wait lists are required to provide rank information to applicants who request it, most college choose not rank their lists. This leaves

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