One of the best-kept secrets of the admissions process is everything related to being waitlisted and the waitlist. The waitlist is a blind spot with very few data available. How many chances you have to get into the waitlist? How many people make it out of the waitlist? How to get out of it? What’s its purpose?

Most of the applicants I know have never thought much about being waitlisted. At least in my case, it looked like a remote scenario. You either get accepted or rejected. Big fear of being dinged! Great hopes on the big yes! A very black and white scenario, I guess it helps to focus on the application process. It is tough enough to keep performing at your demanding day job while moonlighting as a superhero crime fighter an applicant while managing all the fears of failure and rejection and the paperwork. You do not want to add a layer of uncertainty: “What if I am waitlisted…?” Plus, it seemed to me as a very unlikely outcome.

Then, after waiting for a couple of months to get an answer, it happens to you! You are mentally prepared for a ding or for an admission. And… admissions officers waitlist you! Doubt cripples trough your mind. It is very difficult to process, completely unexpected. What? Waitlist? How? Me! Why? When? Why? Confusion, darkness…

This post is not intended to share advice on what to do in that situation (I have very unpopular yet candid advice on the subject which I will post some other day), but to throw some light and data about the chances of being waitlisted. A quick informal poll among Stanford MBA students (a community I have lots of links with) showed that almost between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 of the current students had been waitlisted at Stanford and about 1 in 2 had been waitlisted by some of the schools they applied to.

If my written account of an informal poll looks like an unreliable source of data (it looks inaccurate to me) you can always check MBA Buzz admission stats. Again it is an informal poll and a small subset (I am sure it is impossible to get real data from the schools) but check the colored dots for the top schools. Admit to waitlisted ratio (AWR) is around 2:1 - 3:1. Check the figures as of today:

School	AWR
London	6:5
Insead	11:1
Harvard	7:3
Stanford	6:3
Wharton	17:10
TOTAL	47:22

This data has some limitations, of course, but it gives some good insight (Math comment: 47:22 is a funny ratio to simplify, 47 is prime and 22 is 2 times 11!). For each two or three admits, there is a person waitlisted! Changes of being waitlisted are actually much more higher than I thought!

I started to research the matter when I got waitlisted at Stanford. Although I was prepared from a practical point of view because I had done my homework and covered all my bases (I did not depend on a single application and had a couple of alternative choices), I was completely unprepared for that outcome from a psychological point of view. I thought it was such a rare happening. I was shocked and confused! When I started to ask for advice, I discovered so many MBAers had gone through the same situation I was taken aback (that is the informal poll I talked about before).

In the greater scheme of things, most of the applicants to top schools get rejected, a few get accepted and even fewer get waitlisted. Getting waitlisted is a rare happening.

However, the moral of the story is: if you have chances of being accepted (qualifications in line with the school statistics, good recommenders, have been interviewed early) you will be better off if you plan for being waitlisted, because there are actual chances that you will!