At Harvey Mudd, 0 of 439 Waitlisted Students Were Admitted. At Santa Clara, 263 of 268 Were.

For its Fall 2025 class, Harvey Mudd College offered 685 applicants a place on its waiting list. 439 of them took it. None was admitted. That same fall, Santa Clara University offered 405 applicants a place, 268 took it, and 263 of those 268 were admitted.

Both schools call it a waitlist, and both report it in the same section of the same standardized form. A family reading "you have been offered a place on our waiting list" in April cannot tell from the letter which of those two situations they are in — but each school publishes the answer for its own most recent class.

This is a count from the 49 schools in our Real Acceptance Rates corpus whose Common Data Set answers all three waitlist questions with usable figures. It is not a survey of American higher education, and nothing here should be extended past the schools named.

The Denominator Decides Almost Everything

Section C2 of the Common Data Set asks three separate questions: how many applicants were offered a place on the waiting list, how many accepted a place, and how many were ultimately admitted from it. Three numbers, three different groups of people.

The rate that matters is admitted divided by the number who accepted a place — not divided by the number offered one. Being handed a spot and taking a spot are different events, and the gap between them is large. Miami offered 22,147 applicants a waitlist place for Fall 2025 and 9,077 accepted. Temple offered 2,030 for Fall 2024 and 354 accepted. Rhode Island offered 1,430 for Fall 2025 and 60 accepted.

Once you know that, the choice of denominator stops being a technicality. Santa Clara admitted 263 waitlisted students for Fall 2025. Against the 268 who accepted a place, that is 98.13%. Against the 405 who were offered one, the same 263 admits becomes 64.94% — a number that describes a school that is much harder to get into off the waitlist than Santa Clara actually was, because thousands of people who never joined the list are being counted as if they had. Miami's Fall 2025 figure moves the same way: 703 admits is 7.74% of the 9,077 who accepted a place and 3.17% of the 22,147 who were offered one.

Every rate in this article is admits over the number who accepted a place, and every rate appears next to its denominator. Both counts are published in the same table of the same filing, so there is no reason to conflate them, and a rate computed against "offered" makes every school in the corpus look more selective than it was.

What the 49 Filings Show

Taking each school's most recent published cohort:

• The median school admitted 9.12% of the applicants who accepted a place on its waiting list. That median lands exactly on Barnard, which admitted 150 of the 1,644 who accepted a place for Fall 2025.
• 16 of the 49 admitted under 5%.
• Two admitted nobody at all — Harvey Mudd, with 439 people on the list, and Denver, with four.
• Four admitted more than half, though one of those four is Iowa's filing, which has a single person in the denominator.
• Among the 47 schools where at least 50 people accepted a place, the spread runs from 0.00% to 98.13%, with the same 9.12% median.

Here are both ends of that spread, each with the cohort it describes:

Stony Brook is the row that shows the scale involved at the low end: 2,894 people accepted a place on that list for Fall 2024 and 12 were admitted. Ohio State's is the oldest cohort in the table, Fall 2023, and is stated as such because a waitlist figure describes one class and nothing else.

The extremes are not two lonely outliers, either. Michigan admitted 1,663 of 18,435 for Fall 2025 (9.02%), UW-Madison 1,088 of 4,317 (25.20%), Rochester 262 of 741 (35.36%), and UNC Chapel Hill 2,099 of 5,258 (39.92%). Same instrument, same name, same section of the same form, doing very different amounts of work.

Two Denominators Too Small to Carry a Rate

Two of the 49 schools are excluded from the 0.00%-to-98.13% spread, and the reason is arithmetic rather than judgment. Iowa's most recent filing, for Fall 2025, reports 12 applicants offered a place, one accepting, and one admitted. Denver's, also Fall 2025, reports 22 offered, four accepting, and none admitted. Printing those as 100% and 0% would put Iowa above Santa Clara and Denver level with Harvey Mudd, and neither statement would mean anything: one person changing their mind moves Iowa's figure by 100 points. Rhode Island sits just over the line with 60 accepting a place and nine admitted — enough to report, thin enough that the denominator belongs in the same breath as the rate.

That is the standing rule in this series. Wherever a rate appears, its denominator appears with it, in the same sentence or the adjacent column, so a reader can see how much weight the percentage can hold.

A Low Rate Is Not Evidence of Anything Wrong

A waitlist that admits few people is doing what a waitlist is for. Schools do not know in advance how many admitted students will enroll, and the waiting list is the reserve they hold against that uncertainty. In a year when the class fills from the regular admitted pool, the reserve goes unused — that is the mechanism working, not failing.

So there is no motive to read into any of these figures, and we are not offering one. No school in this corpus publishes a reason for its waitlist numbers, which means any account of why Harvey Mudd admitted nobody for Fall 2025, or why Santa Clara admitted nearly everyone, would be invention. A single year is also not a forecast. A school that admitted no one off its waiting list may simply have had its class fill that spring, which is why every figure above carries its cohort. Next year's filing is the only thing that will report next year.

What the data supports is narrower and more useful: whether a waitlist offer is worth much is a question about one specific school in one specific year, and that school has already answered it in public.

A Filing-Quality Note

Five filings in this corpus report the number accepting a place as exactly equal to the number offered one: Marquette across three consecutive cohorts (1,397 for Fall 2025, 452 for Fall 2024, 200 for Fall 2023), Iowa for Fall 2024 (13,969), and Arkansas for Fall 2025 (389).

Every single person offered a waitlist place taking it is implausible at that scale, and the repetition across three consecutive Marquette filings points to a cell that was filled rather than a count that was taken. The suspect field is the denominator itself, so these are reported as filing artifacts and no rate is computed from them. We are describing what the form shows, not what happened at the school, and we assign no motive — this is the same class of defect we track in Common Data Set filings that disagree with themselves, where the ordinary explanation is clerical.

The Check You Can Run Yourself

This takes a few minutes and needs nothing but the school's own PDF.

1. Find the school's Common Data Set — usually on the institutional research office's website — and open Section C2.
2. Read all three lines: number offered a place on the waiting list, number accepting a place, and number of wait-listed students admitted.
3. Divide the number admitted by the number accepting a place. That is the rate.
4. Note the entering class the filing covers, and quote the rate with that year attached.
5. Check the denominator before you trust the result. If only a handful of people accepted a place, as at Iowa and Denver, the percentage is not describing anything. And if the number accepting a place equals the number offered one exactly, treat the figure the way we treat Marquette's and Arkansas's.

Run it for two schools on your list and the point of this article becomes obvious in a few minutes. The answer is the school's own, in its own filing, about its own most recent class.

Where to Go From Here

Waitlist figures arrive as a late-spring concern, but they are a list-building input, because they tell you what a spot on a given school's list has been worth there. Our free college list builder works from rates we have already checked this way, and the application deadline tracker keeps the dates straight once the list is set. If you want to talk through how a specific school's published numbers should factor into your decisions, a free strategy call is a good place to start.