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Inviting waitlisted prospective graduate students to visit?

Brian Leiter

A philosopher elsewhere writes:

Does it ever make sense for a department to invite waitlisted prospective graduate students to visit?

I am aware of a department that invites all accepted and waitlisted students to visit, offering to pay for the accepted students' travel but not for the waitlisted students'. On the one hand, this gives the waitlisted students an opportunity to make a more informed decision, which can benefit both the student and the department. On the other hand, it risks a host of logistical complications and social tensions during the visits (both because waitlisted students might feel awkward being around accepted students and vice versa, and because the waitlisted students may feel the need to perform—or worse, compete—in hopes of improving their standing), and it may even make waitlisted students feel that their best chance at admission is to visit, even if doing so is financially perilous.

I know of other disciplines that invite waitlisted students, but they pay for them to visit.   Inviting waitlisted students to admission events without paying for them is perverse and exploitative in the way my correspondent worries.  Comments are open:  please use a real email (which will not appear), and in your comment indicate your position in the academy (e.g., philosophy professor, graduate student, professor in phyics, etc.).

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8 responses to “Inviting waitlisted prospective graduate students to visit?”

  1. R

    I am a graduate student. I suspect that most departments will not be able to cover the travel expenses for all their waitlisted students. I am aware of some departments that only invite a select few waitlisted students, likely those with a higher chance of admission. This is concerning for me.

    In my experience, the best option would be to not invite any waitlisted students to visit in person. Instead, the department could offer a separate online visit option for both waitlisted and accepted students who cannot attend the in-person visit due to scheduling conflicts or visa restrictions. Another option is to have a hybrid format, with some portions of the in-person visit conducted online.

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  2. Colin (philosophy prof., former DGS)

    Last year at UW, we made all our recruitment events online, which made it easy to include a number of waitlisted students.

    We did worry that this might put us at a disadvantage, since most other departments were doing in-person recruitment. But, in the end, we had the majority of our initial offers accepted, and barely tapped our waitlist. By that measure, our recruitment actually went better than in most recent pre-pandemic years, when everything was in person.

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  3. Graduate Student

    In 2017, I was waitlisted at two top 10 schools. Both of them flew me out, and I was eventually admitted to one of them. Anecdotally, flying out waitlisted students seems to be a common practice for "top" departments.

    I think it's a good practice to fly out waitlisted students that have a decent chance of being admitted. I would have struggled to commit to a school without visiting, and I think paying to visit as a waitlisted student would leave a bad taste in my mouth.

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  4. Bob

    Inviting both accepted and waitlisted applicants can create very awkward social situations. During one of my campus visits, a waitlisted student repeatedly lobbied me, who had been admitted, to accept an offer from another department, so that he might get my spot at the department we were visiting.

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  5. John

    I hold a PhD but am no longer in academia. When I was applying to PhD programs (a little more than a decade ago), I had at least 2 programs that I can recall at which (a) I was waitlisted, (b) I was invited to visit in person, but (c) I was asked to cover the cost of the visit myself. I also had 1 school invite me to visit without specifying whether I had been admitted or waitlisted, saying that it was inviting all students who had been either admitted or waitlisted. I forget whether they had not yet made final decisions on this question or whether they simply did not share them with applicants.

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  6. W

    I applied to PhD programs in my senior year of undergrad. I’m a first-generation college student from a dirt-poor blue collar family. One of the programs I applied to — a “top 20” program, for context — waitlisted me but invited me to the visit on the condition that I’d pay my own way. This put me in a really tough spot. On the one hand, I felt that turning down the invitation to visit was tantamount to removing myself from consideration. On the other, I had almost no money to my name and no one to ask for help, plus traveling for the visit would have required taking off a few shifts as a line cook, the job I’d held throughout college, imposing an additional burden. I ended up deciding not to visit because of this. It was a really awkward position to be put in. Thankfully, I was accepted outright elsewhere!

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  7. Ph.D. Candidate

    I would not have ended up in my current Ph.D. program if not for the department paying for my visit while waitlisted (a standard practice here). Recalling from about 4 years ago, there were 12 of us–roughly half accepted and half waitlisted. All I knew is that I was "toward the top" of the list… which, for all I knew, all of us were told. But it was still an immensely fun visit and I never felt pressure to put on a show. If anything, it made me proud to see the kinds of people I had managed to compete with coming out of undergrad at a young age (I recall meeting people with NYU's MA in bioethics and someone with a JD from Georgia State). When I was accepted on April the 15th, I withdrew my other waitlists immediately because by then my current program was my top preference within my handful of waitlists–if not for the visit, I likely would not have done that and at least humored some other possible offers (including from a funded terminal MA that was a better immediate fit for my core interests).

    A general point: a relatively few number of students get accepted at first. The most competitive applicants will, typically, yes multiple acceptances. It is unlikely that, with the exception of the absolutely most well-respected programs, that the initial accepted lot will be the actual entering lot.

    Not only do I think it makes sense to invite waitlisted students; I think it is a mistake, pragmatically, to not do so unless you *expect* the accepted lot to be the actual entering lot. But that is overwhelmingly an unrealistic expectation for the vast majority of programs.

    I should lastly note that a couple of people in my cohort did not visit at all, which I think is… something else. I cannot relate to that but it sounds scary to me even now.

    Reply
  8. Valerie Dawson

    I've been very interested in these comments, as my daughter is currently applying to Ph.D. programs in Cognitive Science. For the life of me, I can't understand why programs don't agree to adhere to a common notification date. She is currently abroad on a fellowship, so traveling back to the U.S. for visits is a major undertaking. She's tearing her hair out trying to figure out where/when to visit given she's been accepted at one program, waitlisted at several, and has no info from several more… and various of them are inviting/requesting her to visit asap. I realize this is the epitome of a first world problem, but surely there is a better way to manage this process that is more respectful of applicants' time, money, and existing commitments.

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