For the vast majority of this year’s college applicants, the question of where they’ll go to school in the fall has already been answered. But some applicants and their families are in limbo, waiting for and holding out hope that a campus they want to attend will say yes to them.

“UCLA is right here, I see it right now from the window of my office,” said Mohsen Kargahi, whose 12th grade daughter attends Hamilton High School in Los Angeles.

“My daughter has been there many, many times, she has [an] emotional connection there,” he said.

Kargahi is one of the parents who say the waitlist process is an emotional rollercoaster that needs more transparency.

Kargahi reached out to LAist to ask if UCLA’s move to accept more in-state applicants would bode well for his daughter. He also wants to know how long he’ll wait, how other UC campus waitlist decisions affect UCLA’s decisions, and whether merit has anything to do with the waitlist process.

His type of questions, anticipation, and anxiety flood online platforms as parents inform each other whether their child has been accepted off a waitlist or not.

Here’s why colleges create waitlists

Every spring, college admissions officials engage in a process that will lead to the filling of as many possible open seats for the fall semester. A percentage of the applicants a college admits will end up enrolling somewhere else, so the college has to admit more students than it has slots for to hit that target.

Waitlists give an admissions office a buffer to fill those seats.

“Depending on how many students accept the offer of admission and sign up for Student Orientation, Advising, and Registration, we will determine if additional offers need to be made based on space availability,” Andrew Wright, director of admissions at California State University, Long Beach, said via email. The campus is one of the most in-demand universities among the CSU system’s 23 schools.

He said the final admissions decisions are made by mid-June, give or take, depending on open seats.

“I would ask that students remain patient as offers continue to be reviewed,” Wright said.

Royce Hall at UCLA.

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Zack Simone via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr

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Admissions officials ask applicants to confirm they want to be on the waitlist to help ensure that those applicants are eager to accept an admission offer, which helps the university meet its enrollment targets.

“That capacity can vary significantly from one year to the next,” said Gary Clark, UCLA’s executive director of undergraduate admissions and interim vice provost for enrollment management, via email. “The number of waitlist admission offers in one year is not predictive of what may happen in subsequent years.”

UCLA says it monitors enrollment deposits made by freshmen on May 1 and by transfer students on June 1 to “determine whether we have any additional capacity to admit more students.”

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is another CSU campus in high demand. A spokesperson said the university would notify students no later than July 15.

But not all CSUs use waitlists.

Cal State Northridge received more than 48,000 applications for the fall 2022 semester. That’s less than half the total for the system’s campuses in San Diego and Long Beach. CSUN “does not use waitlists for our domestic and international undergraduate admissions process,” according to CSUN spokesperson Carmen Chandler, but the university's music department does use waitlists.

What we know about college waitlists in Southern California

Waitlist data is not widely shared.

The CSU and UC campuses in Southern California that LAist contacted either did not share information about how many students were put on waitlists last year or the university official we needed was out of office.

Shirleen Achieng graduated from UC Irvine in 2020.

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Courtesy of Shirleen Achieng

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UC Irvine did speak broadly about how waitlist selection works.

“Students offered the waitlist have shown that they are very likely to be successful in their applied to major if they are admitted, but who fall just outside of our initial selection for that major,” Dale Leaman, the executive director of UCI’s office of undergraduate admissions, said by email.

“These are very strong applicants, but because of capacity limits we cannot admit all of them. If there is capacity in their specific major after the initial set of acceptances, then we can offer them admission,” he said.

The application and admission data portals for the UC and CSU systems do not include yearly waitlist sizes and how many students were admitted from those waitlists. UCLA’s waitlist info is publicly available amid other data in something called the Common Data Set.

Never tell me the odds! (But what are the odds?)

From the information that is out there, one can deduce that an applicant’s chances of being accepted off the waitlist at the most selective universities are less than slim.

UCLA received more than 149,000 freshman applications for fall 2022. That’s the most of any of the system’s nine undergraduate campuses. According to numbers provided by the university:

• 16,979 applicants were offered the choice of being on the waitlist
• 11,169 applicants agreed to be waitlisted
• UCLA admitted 367 applicants from that waitlist

That’s just over a 3% chance of getting admitted if you’re on the waitlist, and the chances were lower the previous year. Those are not good odds if you’re dead set on going to UCLA, even when you do account for more spots going to California students.

And the anxiety of the unknown can extend well into the summer.

“Our goal each year is to release the freshman waitlist as early as we can, preferably by early July,” said UCLA spokesperson Ricardo Vasquez via email.

But the odds are much better at some CSU campuses.

For the fall 2022 semester, Cal State Long Beach enrolled over 9,300 new undergraduate students. The campus places about 10% of the enrollment goal on a waitlist, which means that nearly 1,000 students were put on the waitlist. CSULB said they "typically admit about 30% of the enrollment goal from our waitlist each year," said Andrew Wright, CSULB’s director of admissions, via email. “[B]ut this is depending on the number of students who accept the initial offer of admission and enroll in the fall.”

At Cal State Fullerton, “When a prospective student receives an offer to be on the waitlist, they must choose to accept the waitlist. We don’t automatically place people on the waitlist,” said spokesperson Ellen Treanor.

Beyond that, campuses contacted did not share details about how they place applicants on waitlists.

Admission decisions are made by people, not an algorithm

At UC Irvine admission decisions, including waitlist decisions, are made by “committees of senior admission staff, with input from our provost, with input from our office of institutional research, with input from our enrollment management analytics team,” said UCI’s Leaman.

In early May those committees were meeting 2-3 times a week, he said, in hopes that applicants on the waitlist would be notified of admission decisions by June 1.

There’s also a complex calculation process going on among applicants. Many have been accepted to multiple campuses within California’s two public university systems and are weighing various factors to decide where to enroll.

That dynamic leads UC Irvine to keep a close eye on the waitlist decisions neighboring campuses are making.

“This year, since all the [UC] campuses are growing, or trying to grow, especially the more selective campuses like ours, we have to be cognizant of what’s going on at [UCLA] and [UCSD],” Leaman said.

Admission processes happen behind closed doors, and that leads many families to wonder what’s going on.

Go somewhere else, then transfer

California’s public higher education system — the community colleges, UC, and CSU systems — have been working on making transfer from a community college to a university easier. Despite challenges in the transfer path, transfer rates from community colleges to UCs and CSUs have gone up.

“We do encourage students to consider the transfer pathway if UCLA remains their goal,” spokesperson Vasquez said. “We enroll at least one new transfer for every two new freshmen each year.” He said that 93% of UCLA transfer students come from California community colleges and the transfer admission rate last year was 24%.

While first year admission to a university can be determined by high school grades, classes taken, essays, socio-economic factors, and other variables, transfer only takes into account a few of these variables.

“The terms of transfer are definitely more transparent than the terms of first-year admission,” said Julie Posselt, a professor of higher education at USC.

Parent wants waitlist transparency

While a higher proportion of California white and Asian high school students are graduating with the classes they need to enter college compared to their Black, Latino, and Native American peers, the proportion of 12th graders overall graduating with those courses has increased in recent years.

The problem is that many high school graduates who qualify for UC and CSU admission are being turned away from the most in-demand campuses. And that generates resentment among parents who say their kid merited admission to the campus they want to attend.

“Of course, as a parent, I would say, 'why didn’t you accept my daughter [in] the first place?'” Kargahi said.

Mohsen Kargahi is helping his 12th grade daughter navigate the waitlist process.

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Courtesy of Mohsen Kargahi

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He admits that’s a selfish question. He’d like admission officials to reveal how these decisions are made.

In turn, those officials say —

“Oh no, that’s internal working,” UCI’s Leaman said.

Leaman stressed to applicants and their families that when a university doesn’t admit an applicant, it should not be interpreted as a sign that the student is not worthy or has not accomplished a great deal.

“The students who are waitlisted are just incredible students,” Leaman said.

That’s true for Kargahi’s daughter. Despite her desire to attend UCLA, she’s already informed UC Berkeley that she plans to enroll there in the fall, even though she’s holding out hope.

“She still goes and checks her UCLA application status once in a while,” Kargahi said on Monday.

Many of these aspirations are built up by concepts and terminology, like “dream school” that build up the college application process as a type of search for a golden ticket.

“We have a whole approach to college going right now that is about imagining impossibilities and optimizing opportunities. And there's nothing wrong with that,” USC’s Posselt said. But research shows, she added, that once students are enrolled and finish their first academic terms at campuses that may not have been their first and second choice, students still end up “happy and successful.”