There is no real reason why our college wait listed 1,001 of you. As far as anyone can tell, the University generally knows what its yield rate (percentage of students who accept an offer of admission) will be but they under admit by about 100 students to stay safe and not overbooked while holding down their admissions rate at the same time. For instance, last year, Yale accepted an abysmally low 7 percent (70 students) of its unfathomably high 1,001 wait listed applicants, while it had its lowest admit rate in the school’s history.
But if they know they’re going to need to fill so few spots, why do they need such a large pool to choose their 70 from? The Admissions Office has to figure that a student who is offered a place on the wait list might reject her spot, or if she accepts her spot and is eventually admitted, she might deny the offer, which would explain the jacked-up number left waiting. But this is Yale, so if students are accepting their spots on the wait list in the first place, logically, they would drop their previous plans to enthusiastically attend. So it is still unclear why the Admissions Office needs to keep a potential 1,001 students on-tap in college admissions purgatory. This number is so large that Yale could almost fill an entire class of 1,300 students with its wait list alone.
They probably just want options, which is why this process is so shitty.
Again: this sucks. We’re sorry. Yale can be an asshole.