Caltech Waitlist (2024)

FAQs

How many people get off the Caltech waitlist? ›

Some colleges, such as Caltech, create only small waitlists. According to the latest statistics colleges supplied to the Common Data Set, for Fall 2022 admissions, Caltech offered a position on its waitlist to 195 students and eventually admitted 13%, or 15 students.

Waitlist: a student is waitlisted to Caltech and has until mid-April to opt-in for reconsideration should space become available in the class after May 1. Students are strongly encouraged to send in supplemental materials to support their application. Deny: a student is denied admission to Caltech.

What Are My Chances of Getting Off the Waitlist? According to recent data from the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, colleges on average admit 20% of students off the waitlist. At the most selective institutions, that figure was 7%.

Caltech is overall a much more specialized school, so fewer students apply and an even more select few are admitted. To know how to get into Caltech, or Harvard for that matter, you'll need to be crystal clear about why you want to attend.

No. Being waitlisted means you have met the requirements, but you will be admitted only if a spot in the incoming class becomes available for you. If a college has rejected your application for not meeting its requirements, you will not be added to their waitlist.

Waitlisted vs Deferred: The Differences

While waitlisted students remain in limbo, deferred students become part of the regular applicant pool. Waitlisted applicants might face a longer wait for a final decision. Additionally, deferred applicants still have a chance at admission, which differs from outright rejection.

Caltech's waitlist acceptance rate can indeed be quite competitive, as the number of admitted students from the waitlist varies each year depending on the actual yield of accepted students who choose to enroll.

There's no set timeline for hearing back when you're waitlisted. It could be weeks or months before you receive an official acceptance or rejection. Colleges may accept you from the waitlist as space opens up or wait until after National Decision Day on May 1.

Once a university can better gauge its enrollment numbers, the school can begin to offer vacant spots to candidates from the waitlist. The waitlist isn't ranked; instead, admissions officers review the school's institutional needs and decide whom to admit from the waitlist based on those factors.

At some highly selective schools, only a handful of students, if any, may get in off the waitlist each year, while at other colleges, your chances could could be 20% or higher. These numbers can fluctuate from year to year, though, so it's difficult to provide definitive percentages.

Do colleges waitlist overqualified applicants? ›

It is true that some colleges may waitlist overqualified students. This practice is known as yield protection, and its purpose is to ensure that the college maintains a high yield rate, which refers to the percentage of accepted students who actually attend.

While many colleges will waitlist hundreds or even thousands of students, not all of those students will accept a spot on the waitlist, making the pool and the chances of getting in slightly better in some cases. According to NACAC, 20% of all students who chose to remain on waitlists were ultimately admitted.

Is Caltech Harder to Get Into Than MIT? Both of these schools are equally difficult to get admitted into. And, as you may have already known, both schools are remarkably challenging and competitive.

The California Institute of Technology, also known as Caltech, is not as famous as other elite colleges and universities like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Harvard and Princeton are almost as hard to get into as Caltech.

The school has produced 46 Nobel laureates, 58 U.S. National Medal of Science recipients, 11 National Medal of Technology Recipients, and 6 Turing Award winners. Caltech alumni have gone on to have prestigious careers and research in engineering, astrophysics, physics, IT, geology, and other fields.

To give you the stats (bc again, you're an MIT-minded student and probably want the hard data), in Fall 2022, 763 students were offered a spot on the waitlist, and 682 of them accepted spots on the waitlist. Unfortunately, zero students were accepted off the waitlist.

Admissions Rate: 2.7%

If you want to get in, the first thing to look at is the acceptance rate. This tells you how competitive the school is and how serious their requirements are. The acceptance rate at Caltech is 2.7%.

Your Chances of Admission to Cornell After Being Waitlisted

Over the last 25 years, Cornell admitted an average of 4.1% of waitlisted students. Over the last five years, that figure has stood at 3.86%, though it was 5.87% for the most recent Class of 2027 when 362 students earned admission out of limbo.

At UC Berkeley, 24% of waitlisted students were admitted in 2023 — but less than 1% got off the waitlist for the fall of 2022, according to the Chronicle.