Admission at your school is either fixed date, rolling, or a combination of the two. Whatever your method, you are going to be sending each applicant a letter of acceptance, a deferral until some criteria is completed, a regret, or placement into the waiting pool of candidates.
Waiting pools are a good thing—it means your school is in demand and there are more than enough mission-appropriate students for the seats you have. It could be in one grade, several, or the entire school. Your waiting pool is fundamental to maintaining a mission-appropriate student body. In fact, ISM lists a waiting pool as one of its Stability Markers, designated to sustain excellence in student programs.
As you admit students, your goal is to build a community with the right mix of mission-appropriate children (number of boys and girls, for example, in coed schools).
Your waiting pool is not a “top-of-the-list, first-in list” You need to explain your waiting pool carefully to parents, so they don’t think that their child will get the first seat that opens. While it may not be what they want to happen—after all, people will commit themselves to being first in line for many things—but, if you consistently explain that the waiting pool is made up of students who are mission-appropriate but who you just don’t have the room for, parents will understand. They need to realize that the waiting pool is unranked.
The clearer you are, the better—beliefs are not easy to break. In a blog from a few years back, dedicated to parents of kids in San Francisco, the topic of private school wait pools elicited some interesting comments. For example:
- “It does NOT mean your child didn’t make the cut. It could mean the Admission Director wasn’t sure if you would enroll if accepted.”
- “[School] send out their letters (we got waitlisted). We speculate that we didn’t donate enough (yuck).” Note: The poster then clarified they did not think they donated enough to the parish affiliated with the school.
A string of commentary addressed what the posters thought was a pattern of accepting children based on proximity of the neighborhood, while others picked out some gender diversification.
One parent drew an accurate picture of a wait pool. “I think the wait lists are really based on our process. Schools said ‘no’ outright to both our kids for HS and K rather than wait-listing us to be polite … I think wait lists are a legitimate mechanism for filling classes with suitable students, since many schools get far more great kids applying than they can possibly admit and not all offers are accepted.”
It’s essential to call your wait pool just that—a pool. The image then is a group of students waiting for a space. A wait list is vertical, implying there is a pecking order.
The Morristown-Beard School, NJ, typically receives three times as many applications for its 9th grade than there are seats. Hillary Nastro, Director of Admission, told NJ Family.com that once the seats are filled, mission-appropriate students are placed in the wait pool, and “not ranked in any way. The Admissions Committee will reconvene and discuss things like: Do we need a girl or a boy to keep gender balance? And those with the most current information in their file are given preference.”
Allison Brunhouse, Pingry School’s Director of Admission and Enrollment, said “Our waiting pools are filled with really qualified kids whom we wish we could have taken,” she says. So if your child is wait-listed, she says, it doesn’t mean he’s lacking. “We would never want an offer in our waiting pool to be interpreted as they’re being less than [qualified].”
On the ISM Admission e-list, a Director of Admission describes his school’s “wait pool in terms of the students who are mission appropriate and for whom we don't have space. I also describe it as when we go to the wait pool, we are trying to create as diverse a class as possible looking at gender, ethnicity, learning style, personality, etc. By using that language, it allows us to select the most desirable candidate, not the one who has been in the wait pool the longest.”
Miya Dickman, Admission Director at Kent Denver School (CO), shared her school’s explanation to families who have been placed in the wait pool. The language assures the family that placement in the wait pool is not a reflection of the student’s ability to succeed.
"The Committee has reviewed your application, and unfortunately is unable to offer STUDENT admission at this time. However, the Committee was impressed with STUDENT and would like to keep him in our wait pool in the hope that we can still find a place for him in the 6th grade. I want to assure you that the Admission Committee did not arrive at this decision easily or quickly. The process of making decisions about a young student’s admissibility is complicated. Every year we find ourselves with a number of wonderful young people to whom we cannot offer admission. I trust that you will help STUDENT understand that this decision does not determine his future growth or potential as a student.
"We may be able to accept students from the wait pool if families decline our offer of admission. Our capacity to admit wait-pooled students varies from year to year, and we will contact you if an opening becomes available for STUDENT.
"The wait pool is not ranked. If spaces do become available, the Admission Committee will reconvene to review the applications of students who show a continued interest in Kent Denver School. To that end, please return the Wait Pool Policy form that has been mailed to you to let us know if you would like to remain in the wait pool.
“We are very appreciative of the efforts of our applicants and families throughout the process, and we want to make sure they understand that, and that not being accepted to our school does not determine their future growth or potential—in our view, nor should it in theirs,” she said. What’s important is that this is the message you convey to your families: Their children are still great, you would love to have them, and when the right space opens up, they will be the first to know.
Additional ISM resources of interest
ISM Publication The Admission Funnel: How to Streamline the Private School Admission Process
Additional Resources for ISM Consortium Gold Members
To The Point Vol. 7 No. 7 Evaluate Prospective Students on More Than Grades
To The Point Vol. 10 No. 4 The Admission Process: Prospective Parents Need an Education
Ideas & Perspectives Vol. 31 No. 10 The Third Iteration of ISM Stability Markers
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