Number accepted vs. class entering size

[howyoudoin450]

Hi everyone,
So I am confused about something: How come for most pharmacy schools, the class entering size of new students is always less than the number that got accepted if people are on the waitlist?

 

[chemistress]

Say school XYZ can have 100 people in their entering class. They interview 600. If they were to only accept 100 students, it's highly likely that a lot of those students will decline the acceptance and attend somewhere else. Therefore they have to accept say 300 students. I assume they use numbers from previous years as a formula for how many to accept this year. Also, as students decline, they give more acceptances. So the number of acceptances given will HAVE to be larger than the entering class.

 

[howyoudoin450]

Thanks for your response. So they give acceptances as people decline?

 

[chemistress]

Well one school stated "we accept around 300, and the day that they all accept, we are in big trouble!" So that indicates that this specific school accepts blindly without waiting for rejections. But I assume most schools fill their class and as people decline they accept more.

 

[Twentytwelve2]

Well one school stated "we accept around 300, and the day that they all accept, we are in big trouble!" So that indicates that this specific school accepts blindly without waiting for rejections. But I assume most schools fill their class and as people decline they accept more.

That is kind of silly to accept 300.... I would imagine they accept X number and leave Y number of seats open each interview day. They will create an early waitlist so that they can continue inviting people to interviews since a school is not allowed to interview solely for waitlist spots. The last interview day is prolly 1 seat available and they will waitlist/reject everyone else.

 

[DrDrugs2012]

A high profile case of offering too many admissions made headlines this year as too many applicants accepted admission at Sloan School of Management at MIT. But this is very far from being the norm. Most schools and their respective admissions committees are acutely aware of the general trends in admission statistics. Offers of admission are somewhat binding, therefore, schools are more judicious about making their offers and instead opt not to overfill too early in the admissions cycle thereby avoiding the messy situation of overadmitting a class. Most schools will choose the opposite which is to underadmit initially with the balance of seats being filled off the waiting list. In reality, most schools are still admitting students through orientation because despite the obvious foolishness of it all, some students for one reason or another simply do not show up on the first day of school.