College waitlist acceptance rates at 126 colleges

The big picture

• At the 125 colleges that also report how many students were offered a spot, 558,114 were offered one and 311,198 (56%) accepted it.
• Across all 126, 315,063 students stayed on a list and 69,016 were admitted from it. That's 22% of those who stayed, but a few big public universities that take thousands off their lists pull that number up. The 5 that admitted the most, University of California, Santa Barbara (9,603), University of California, Irvine (5,737), University of California, San Diego (5,284), Virginia Tech (4,295) and Purdue University (3,916), account for 42% of all waitlist admits. Without them the pooled rate is 16.2%, and the median college is lower still, at 8.8%.

Colleges that admitted almost nobody

Among colleges where 20 or more students stayed on the list, 8 admitted fewer than 1 in 100 of them (fall 2025 entry unless noted). Counting the colleges where fewer than 20 stayed, it's 10, as in the press kit's chart of all 126.

• Smith College: 0 of 741 who stayed
• Harvey Mudd College: 0 of 439 who stayed
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 1 of 4,317 who stayed (under 0.1%)
• University of Florida: 1 of 2,737 who stayed (under 0.1%)
• Florida State University: 5 of 2,358 who stayed (0.2%)
• Washington and Lee University: 2 of 604 who stayed (0.3%)
• California Institute of Technology: 1 of 211 who stayed (0.5%)
• Fairfield University (fall 2024): 22 of 2,477 who stayed (0.9%)

The most selective colleges

Colleges that admitted under 10% of all applicants, by the share of students who stayed on the list and got in (fall 2025 entry unless noted):

The highest in this group are Johns Hopkins University (18.2%) and Claremont McKenna College (13.0%).

Colleges that took a lot of students off the list

Among colleges where 20 or more students stayed on the list, 24 admitted 30% or more of them. Counting the colleges where fewer than 20 stayed, it's 27, as in the press kit's chart of all 126.

At these colleges the waitlist works as a second admission round. If you're on one of these lists, stay on it.

Expect these numbers to move from year to year

How many students a college takes off its waitlist depends on how many admitted students sent deposits that spring, so the number can change a lot from one year to the next. Use these figures to set expectations, not to predict your result. 5 colleges had fewer than 20 students stay on the list, so their rates mean very little. They're marked * in the table and left out of the lists above.

What to do if you're waitlisted

1. Accept the spot at every college you'd still attend. It costs nothing, and the numbers above only count students who opted in.
2. Put down a deposit at a college that admitted you, by that college's deadline. Don't wait on a waitlist with no seat anywhere.
3. Send one short update if the college invites it: new grades, an award, and a clear line that you'd enroll if admitted. Follow the college's instructions. Some ask for nothing extra.
4. Compare money too. If a waitlist offer comes, ask how financial aid works for waitlist admits, and compare it with your other offers using net price, not sticker price.

Building next year's list, or helping a younger sibling? The planner sorts colleges into reach, target and likely, so a waitlist at one school isn't your whole plan. It's free, needs no account, and keeps your info in your browser. Testing rules have changed too: see which colleges require the SAT or ACT for fall 2027.

The full table

All 126 colleges, lowest waitlist admit rate first. Each college's name opens its admissions page, and the source link opens its Common Data Set. Download the table as a spreadsheet: waitlist-acceptance-rates.csv. It adds how many students were offered a spot, each college's total applicants and admits, its overall admit rate and the 18 colleges we left out, with the reason. Charts and a methods note for reporters are in the press kit.

* Fewer than 20 students stayed on the list: treat the rate as rough. CDS file is the college's own Common Data Set file. CDS page is the college's own CDS page, which links each year's file. CDS copy is the same file in College Transitions' public CDS collection, used where we haven't linked the college's own copy.

How we built this

• The figures come from Common Data Set section C2 (waitlist) for each college, as read from the college's CDS file into our planner dataset. 144 colleges in our dataset report how many students they admitted from the waitlist.
• We left out 18, because the rate needs a count of students who accepted a spot. Binghamton University, Bowdoin College, Brown University, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University, Centre College, Harvard University, Loyola Marymount University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Oregon State University, Swarthmore College, The College of Wooster, University of Delaware and Vanderbilt University don't report how many students accepted a spot. Quincy University and University of Maryland report no students accepting a spot. That leaves 126.
• The rate is the number admitted from the waitlist ÷ the number who accepted a waitlist spot. We'd also leave out any college reporting more students admitted than accepted a spot, or more accepting than were offered one.
• The CSV is rebuilt from the dataset with every update, and a test fails if the file and the dataset disagree.