Was your child waitlisted at the University of Chicago? If so, you may wonder if they’ve got a genuine chance of earning admission to the Class of 2027 or if a maybe from UChicago is more of a polite rejection. The short answer: being waitlisted by UChicago is no polite rejection. Waitlisted students to UChicago have a real shot of getting in. But let’s dive in!

UChicago Does Not Release the Waitlist Acceptance Rate

Any figure that purports to represent the UChicago waitlist acceptance rate is false and misleading. After all, unlike many peer institutions, the University of Chicago does not report its waitlist figures in the annual Common Data Set.

In fact, UChicago’s Office of Institutional Analysis lists only one Common Data Set — for the 2021-2022 academic year — on its website. And in that one Common Data Set, the school neglected to report its waitlist data for the UChicago Class of 2026.

Talk about a need for more transparency! How hard would it be for UChicago’s Office of Institutional Analysis — an office, through its own words, charged with “managing major external reporting processes for the federal government, rankings agencies, and other partners” — to publish these statistics? It sure does seem like this office is out to lunch!

Your Chances of Admission After Being Waitlisted at UChicago

While the University of Chicago does not publish its waitlist data, we can share from our 30 years of helping students earn admission to the institution that UChicago regularly turns to its waitlist.

In fact, UChicago turned to its waitlist before the May 1, 2023 National College Decision Day for the Class of 2027. How do we know? Because, as we so often do at Ivy Coach, we’ve already had students admitted to the UChicago Class of 2027 — and they earned admission weeks ago!

Your Chances of Admission to UChicago After Being Waitlisted with Ivy Coach’s Help

Over the last 30 years, around 43% of students who first come to Ivy Coach after being placed on the University of Chicago waitlist earn admission.

So why does Ivy Coach enjoy the success it does with the UChicago waitlist? It all comes down to our secret sauce of optimizing a student’s chances for admission after being placed in the in-between. It’s a two-step process that proceeds as follows:

1. Complete Ivy Coach’s PostMortem application review. We know it sounds like torture — but it’s necessary. First, we have to see what a student did right and what they did wrong. The narrative we help students present after being waitlisted must be consistent with the student’s story as presented in the application — just told in a much more powerful and endearing way. It can’t be out of left field!
2.  Send in a powerful Letter of Continued Interest. Most students correctly know that they should submit a letter after being waitlisted, and most know they should do so expediently. Yet most students send the wrong kind of letter — a letter abounding in superfluous brags and updates. Ivy Coach’s Letters of Continued Interest contain no updates or brags. It’s an important reason our wonderfully weird love letters frequently work. We inspire admissions officers to want to go to bat for our students.

Why Ivy Coach’s Waitlist Approach Works with UChicago

The University of Chicago loves to be loved. It’s why the school marches to the beat of its own drum by asking what we’ve long dubbed the weirdest essay prompts in elite college admissions, prompts that include for the 2022-2023 admissions cycle:

“What advice would a wisdom tooth have?”

“Was it a cat I saw? Yo-no-na-ka, ho-ka-ho-ka na-no-yo (Japanese for “the world is a warm place”). Może jutro ta dama da tortu jeżom (Polish for “maybe tomorrow that lady will give a cake to the hedgehogs”). Share a palindrome in any language, and give it a backstory.”

Are you getting the idea? In addition to asking applicants a long “Why UChicago” essay prompt, the school’s admissions officers want to know that students wrote an essay just for them and not for any other university.

It’s why when Ivy Coach’s students send Letters of Continued Interest to the University of Chicago, which is essentially a way of demonstrating your enduring love for the institution after being placed in waitlist limbo, they so often work. Like with people, colleges that appreciate being loved tend to always appreciate being loved.

Getting Started with Ivy Coach to Get Off the UChicago Waitlist

If you’re interested in optimizing your child’s case for admission to the University of Chicago’s Class of 2027 — where Ivy Coach has already helped students earn admission off the waitlist — fill out our free consultation form and indicate that UChicago has waitlisted your child. We’ll get back to you to outline Ivy Coach’s waitlist services.