Hey! So I too am waiting on several top 20 wait lists and haven't even been accepted anywhere yet. However, I wanted to make this post.
When it comes to large sample sizes like we have in med school applications, it would be quite rare to see extremely large fluctuations in the number of people accepted year to year. So, last year for Wash U, 1090 people were interviewed, 381 were accepted, and 124 enrolled (stats from usnews and comparable to years prior if my memory serves me well). This means that 3.07x the class size was accepted overall. We have usually heard that Wash U is fairly conservative on their initial acceptances, so it would be very hard to see them accepting over 200 people initially (it would not make sense to accept way over the top, initially). This means that ~180 people will come off the wait list at some point.
Your next question is probably, "Well, what if this year is different?" To answer that question we have to ask ourselves, "What has changed this year?" If we look at trends from over the last decade we find that Wash U is at the lowest they have been in a decade (not by much), so if anything more people would decline the acceptance and open up more spots on the wait list (unlike NYU which has jumped from the mid 30s to 3 in the past decade). Yes, more people are applying to medical school and the class sizes are not getting any bigger so there will be slightly more selectivity each year (though it would be EXTREMELY unlikely that this would reduce 381 acceptances to some number like 300). In terms of financial aid, I don't have a huge grasp on this year versus past years, though it probably is nothing that would make a huge difference.
So, what should you takeaway from all of this? There is a very low probability that wait list movement will be any different this year than it has been for years in the past. I myself have found it very hard to keep waiting (esp. because I'm on a few top tier wait lists and haven't gotten into any school yet), but it's the only option as of now!
Best of luck to everyone!
