Receiving word of being waitlisted to the school of your dreams isn’t easy, but it’s by no means a polite rejection. If you or your child was waitlisted to Tulane University’s Class of 2029, waste no time before swinging into action by carrying out the steps listed in this blog to optimize the odds of getting off the waitlist and onto Tulane’s historic campus!

Tulane University Waitlist Acceptance Rate and Statistics

We’ve compiled 16 years of waitlist acceptance rate data from Tulane’s Common Data Set to get a sense of how admissions officers at this highly selective college go about the waitlist process. Let’s take a look:

Tulane University Class Year	Number of Students Waitlisted to Tulane	Number of Students Who Chose to Join the Tulane Waitlist	Number of Students Accepted Off the Tulane Waitlist	Tulane Waitlist Acceptance Rate
Class of 2029	TBD	TBD	TBD	TBD
Class of 2028	4,192	2,290	432	18.86%
Class of 2027	4,062	2,168	43	1.98%
Class of 2026	6,232	2,271	3	0.13%
Class of 2025	5,072	1,871	0	0.00%
Class of 2024	12,813	4,486	72	1.60%
Class of 2023	5,412	1,371	0	0.00%
Class of 2022	10,384	3,111	2	0.06%
Class of 2021	5,596	1,672	0	0.00%
Class of 2020	3,881	1,168	0	0.00%
Class of 2019	3,413	921	0	0.00%
Class of 2018	3,152	872	0	0.00%
Class of 2017	2,774	705	327	46.38%
Class of 2016	3,483	996	0	0.00%
Class of 2015	3,745	1,009	15	1.49%
Class of 2014	4,617	2,485	105	4.23%
Class of 2013	3,881	2,081	132	6.34%

Your Chances of Admission After Being Waitlisted at Tulane

Even a world-class statistician would likely look at the chart above and be left scratching their head. A nearly 50% waitlist acceptance rate one year, and then nearly a decade of admitting virtually no waitlist applicants at all! How could anyone purport to understand the method to this madness?

It might look a fair bit confusing, but this year-to-year variation in Tulane’s waitlist acceptance rate all boils down to one crucial factor: yield rate. Yield simply describes the proportion of admitted students who end up choosing to enroll. The lower the yield, the further Tulane admissions officers will have to dip into their waitlists. Some years, a.k.a. that period between the Class of 2018 and 2026, when very few, if any, waitlisted students were admitted each year, Tulane presumably boasted a pretty impressive yield rate that did not necessitate they pull from the leftover crop of waitlisted applicants. 

For the Classes of 2017 and 2028, on the other hand, Tulane appeared to have overestimated the number of admitted students who would enroll, causing abnormally high waitlist acceptance rates during those years. The reality is that no one can predict Tulane’s yield rate, and the likelihood that any given admissions cycle will produce high or low waitlist acceptance rates is largely the luck of the draw. But that’s not where this road ends.

Your Chances of Admission to Tulane After Being Waitlisted With Ivy Coach’s Help

Ivy Coach is the go-to expert for helping waitlisted seniors get into Tulane using our two-fold method of optimizing admissions odds in the days following being waitlisted. It’s a two-step process that goes as follows:

1. Complete Ivy Coach’s PostMortem application review. First, we have to see what a student did right and what they did wrong. The narrative we help students present after being waitlisted can’t contradict what the student showcased on their application. It must be consistent with the student’s story conveyed in the application — just told in a much more powerful and endearing way.
2. Submit a powerful Letter of Continued Interest. Most students correctly know that they should submit a letter after being placed on a college’s waitlist, and most know they should do so promptly after learning of their decision. Yet most students send the wrong kind of letter — a letter abounding in updates and brags. Ivy Coach’s letters contain no updates or brags. It’s a critical reason our wonderfully weird love letters so often work. We inspire admissions officers to want to root for our students.

Getting Started With Ivy Coach to Get Off the Tulane Waitlist

If you’re interested in Ivy Coach’s assistance with optimizing your case for admission off the Tulane waitlist, fill out our complimentary consultation form, indicate that Tulane has waitlisted you, and we’ll write back to outline our Tulane waitlist service.