Getting waitlisted by a top college almost always ends in rejection

If your application to one of America's top 40 colleges and universities is waitlisted, don't hold your breath.

New data from U.S. News and World Report found that a number of selective schools, including Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Middlebury College, and Bucknell University, have each accepted less than four percent of waitlisted applicants since 2011.

Stanford University has the lowest acceptance rate for waitlisted applicants — in 2014, just one percent of those waitlisted there were eventually accepted.

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The data isn't exhaustive — some colleges, including ivy league universities like Harvard, Brown, and Yale, didn't release figures about their waitlist acceptance rates. Still, admissions officers admitted to Bloomberg that most students who are placed on waitlists don't have very good odds of being accepted. "There are students who might think the wait list is a neat way to know they were close to getting admitted," Jim Rawlins, admissions director at the University of Oregon, told Bloomberg, "but there's others who will wish they'd just been denied."