Waitlists Might Be Getting Bigger, Niche Survey Shows

What’s going on with waitlists this year?

It’s the same refrain each year from families: Will there be more or less waitlist movement than usual? How likely is it that my child will get off the waitlist at their dream school?

Typically, the answer is that it depends on the institution and how, exactly, they use their waitlist. But a new survey from the college search website Niche indicates that, across the board, students are, in fact, being put on waitlists at higher rates than they were five years ago. The May 2026 survey, shared first with Inside Higher Ed, asked nearly 3,000 students who are primarily Niche users about their admissions results, finding that 32.4 percent had been waitlisted at least once this year.

It’s the first time the company has conducted the survey, but compared to a similar survey from 2021, that number has increased by more than 12 percentage points over the last five years.

Institutions may be letting more students onto their waitlists as yield rates—or how many admitted students ultimately attend the university—become increasingly complicated, experts told Inside Higher Ed. Students, on average, are applying to more universities, according to Common App data, which means it’s increasingly likely that a given admitted student will end up enrolling elsewhere. Uncertainty surrounding international enrollment has also made the yield rates less predictable over the past two admissions cycles. In 2025, a significant number of international students were ultimately unable to get their visas in time to attend college in the fall, leading to some last-minute waitlist admissions at institutions such as Duke University.

Historically, waitlists have been an “insurance policy” for institutions, allowing them to hit their enrollment goals after some admitted students opt to go elsewhere, said Jim Jump, a longtime director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. That’s still true, but changes to how students apply to colleges, especially the most selective institutions, could shift how colleges approach their waitlists.

“As kids are applying to more schools, it’s harder for colleges to know how serious an application is. Did a student apply to five places and I’m one of the five or did they throw in an application to 26 [institutions]?” he said.

Those yield rates have always been important, he noted, but amid an increasingly fraught funding environment for higher education, broadly, colleges are especially concerned about meeting enrollment—and tuition—goals.

It can be challenging to get a birds-eye view of how colleges are using waitlists from year to year. Only the College Board, via its Common Data Set, collects information about how big waitlists are and how many students are admitted off of them. However, College Board does not publish that data as a dataset that is accessible to the public; rather, individual institutions publish their own Common Data Sets on their websites annually.

Who Gets on Waitlists?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, students were increasingly likely to be placed on a waitlist the more colleges they applied to. Of students who submitted just 1–3 applications, only 7.7 percent were waitlisted somewhere, while students who submitted more than 16 applications had a greater than 70 percent chance of ending up on a waitlist.

But it wasn’t just how many applications a student submitted that affected their chance of ending up on a waitlist, according to the survey. For those who submitted 1–3 applications, about 4 percent of their applications, on average, were placed on a waitlist. That number was around double—7.8 percent of applications—for those who submitted over 16 applications. The data doesn’t differentiate between whether the other applications were acceptances or rejections.

Students from private schools were significantly more likely to be placed on a waitlist (50 percent), as were full-pay applicants, meaning they require no substantial financial aid (44.9 percent).

Jump said that, in theory, waitlists aren’t an equity issue. But by the time institutions get to the point of admitting students from the waitlist, he said it’s more likely that they will go for full-pay students in order to ensure they meet revenue goals.

The report also noted that selective—but not highly selective—institutions rely more on waitlists. That’s likely because yield rates skew higher at the most selective institutions, the report suggests.

As for who gets off the waitlist, 19.6 percent of the respondents who were placed on a waitlist received an acceptance. About 8 percent of all waitlisted students said they switched or planned to switch where they were attending after making a deposit at one college. Almost no students switched from a more selective institution to a less selective one.

Lisa Carlton, the president of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, an association of independent college counselors, said the results of the survey reflect what she’s seen among her clients in recent years.

“It’s a pretty big increase in the percent of kids, especially those kids who tend to be going for the more selective schools,” said Carlton, who has been a college counselor for more than 20 years. “The amount of waitlist activity has really changed and, really sadly, pushed things past May 1 for a lot of kids.”

Eliana Bennett, a high school senior in rural Pennsylvania who participated in Niche’s survey, told Inside Higher Ed that she was offered a spot on the waitlist at three colleges. She said she didn’t specifically opt into any of them, but she was still offered spring admission to one university and a spot at another school, where waitlisted students don’t need to opt in. But once she sent in her deposit to Northeastern University, which is where she ultimately decided to go, she wasn’t interested in switching schools. She’d already begun to picture herself at the Boston institution and gotten excited about the unique opportunities there, like its famed co-op program and study abroad opportunities. Plus, she’d already selected housing, she said.

“It’s a lot to be like, OK, everyone else is already committed; most people have found their roommates already, so then it’s hard to find someone that would want a roommate,” she said. “I think most people, unless it was an amazing school or your dream school or something like that, wouldn’t think about switching after the [housing] deadline.”

Carlton added that it can be confusing for students to be let off the waitlist—especially significantly later than Decision Day on May 1.

“I think it gives colleges that [necessary] ability to select if their class doesn’t build out the way they thought it would be. I do think the volume of it that we’ve gotten to is challenging for students and is probably not always in the students’ best interest to have this process go so long,” she said.

Still, she noted, about half of her students who are admitted via the waitlist end up switching.

Whitney Soule, the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said it doesn’t surprise her that more institutions are relying on waitlists compared to five years ago. But she also noted that no two institutions use their waitlists exactly the same.

“There are so many forces that make enrollment management more volatile than ever, especially over the summer,” she said. “You need to have the right number of students but also the programs full—all the things an enrollment manager is responsible for, including revenue … I think it’s a very complex part of enrollment management that’s highly concentrated in a short amount of time.”