Waitlisted from Boston College: What to Do

If Boston College just placed you on the waitlist, you are one of several thousand students in the same position. BC operates one of the larger waitlists among elite private universities relative to the size of its incoming class, and the odds of earning admission from that list vary dramatically from year to year. In some cycles, BC admits hundreds from the waitlist. In others, it admits a handful. Your job over the next few weeks is to make sure that if Boston College reaches into the waitlist at all, you are someone the admissions office wants to fight for.

Here are the numbers. For the most recent cycle with published data (the 2024-2025 Common Data Set, reflecting the Class of 2029), BC offered 7,444 students a place on the waitlist. Of those, 4,139 accepted a spot. From that pool, 352 were admitted, a waitlist acceptance rate of approximately 8.5%. That is a meaningfully higher rate than what you see at most peer institutions, and it suggests that roughly 1% of the enrolled first-year class came off the waitlist.

But the historical pattern is volatile. For the Class of 2027, 116 were admitted from 8,671 waitlisted, a rate of about 1.3%. For the Class of 2026, the number was just 13 to 55 depending on the data source, a rate well below 1%. For the Class of 2023, in a pandemic-influenced cycle, 273 were admitted, a rate of about 9.2%. For the Class of 2022, just 16 were admitted out of nearly 3,800.

The swings are driven by yield. BC fills a significant share of its class through two rounds of binding Early Decision, where the acceptance rate is roughly 30%, nearly triple the Regular Decision rate of about 12%. When the combination of ED commits and RD accepts hits the enrollment target, the waitlist barely moves. When yield comes in lower than projected, BC reaches in, sometimes substantially.

Accept Your Spot on the Waitlist

BC will provide instructions in your admissions decision for how to join the waitlist. Follow them immediately. The waitlist is not ranked, so there is no positional advantage to timing your response, but you must formally opt in to be considered. If you do not accept your waitlist spot, your application will not be reviewed again.

Commit to Another School Before May 1

BC cannot predict when or whether they will need to turn to the waitlist, and any offers that do come will arrive after the May 1 deposit deadline. Put down your deposit at another school. Choose the best option from those that admitted you and invest in it genuinely. If BC comes through later, you can switch and lose the deposit. If it does not, you need to feel excited about where you are heading.

Less than 1% of the students sitting on BC's waitlist are admitted in most years. Those are not odds that justify sitting around waiting without a backup plan.

Write a Letter of Continued Interest

Boston College does not prohibit letters of continued interest, and at a school where the waitlist includes thousands of students competing for a small number of spots, a compelling LOCI is the single most important tool you have to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pool.

Your letter should be up to 650 words, roughly the length of a Common App personal statement, and it should function as a love letter to Boston College. Not a brag sheet. Not a resume update. Not a list of schools that admitted you. A love letter that makes the admissions officer reading it understand exactly who you will be on BC's campus and why this is the only place where your academic, personal, and spiritual goals can be fully realized.

Boston College's identity is inseparable from its Jesuit mission, and your letter needs to reflect that you understand what that means in practice. BC is not simply a highly ranked university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. It is a school founded on the Jesuit principles of intellectual rigor, service to others, formation of the whole person, and care for the world. The idea of "men and women for others" is not a slogan at BC. It is the animating philosophy behind the curriculum, the campus culture, the service programs, and the way students are expected to engage with the world.

Your letter should connect your particular academic hook and personal story to BC's Jesuit mission in specific and genuine terms. If you applied to the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, reference specific departments, faculty, or courses that connect to your intellectual interests. If you applied to the Carroll School of Management, talk about how the school's integration of business education with ethics and social responsibility aligns with the work you want to do. If the Lynch School of Education or the Connell School of Nursing drew you, articulate what it is about BC's approach to those fields that you cannot find elsewhere. If BC's service culture resonates with you, whether through programs like 4Boston, the Appalachia Volunteers, or campus ministry, explain how that connects to who you are and who you want to become.

And if it is genuine, if it does not conflict with your own religious beliefs or conscience, and if you can write about it with sincerity rather than performance, make an explicit connection to how you value the Jesuit intellectual tradition and the opportunity to develop your Catholic faith at Boston College. This is not a suggestion to fake religious devotion for strategic advantage. Admissions officers at a Jesuit institution can spot insincerity about faith from miles away, and a hollow invocation of Catholic identity will hurt you far more than it helps. But if your faith is a real part of who you are, if the idea of attending a university where the spiritual and the intellectual are not treated as separate domains genuinely excites you, if you are drawn to campus ministry, the theology curriculum, the Ignatian tradition of reflection and discernment, or the way BC integrates moral formation into every corner of student life, then say so. Most applicants to BC will not touch this in their LOCI because they are afraid of being too personal or because it does not occur to them that a school might actually want to hear about it. At a Jesuit university, faith is not a footnote. It is foundational. A student who can articulate a sincere desire to grow intellectually and spiritually within that tradition is a student Boston College was built to serve.

Do not write generic sentences about BC's beautiful campus, strong athletics, or vibrant student life. Those could apply to a dozen schools. The admissions officer reading your letter needs to feel that you have thought deeply about what your four years at BC would look like and that you are drawn to the specific intellectual, spiritual, and communal life that makes Boston College different from every other school on your list.

Do not brag. Do not list your accomplishments. Do not open with "My name is..." and do not recite the sentence "Boston College is my first choice and I will absolutely attend if admitted" without backing it up with the kind of specificity that makes that claim believable. Any genuinely significant updates, a major award, a strong set of mid-year grades, or a meaningful new development, should come from your guidance counselor, not from you in the letter. When you brag, you become less likable. When you show the admissions officer a vivid portrait of yourself contributing to the BC community, you become someone they want to advocate for.

Address the letter to your regional admissions representative and submit it promptly. Do not wait until late April or May. The primacy effect matters: admissions officers tend to form attachments to the students who make compelling impressions first, and those impressions stick when the committee turns to the waitlist.

Have Your Guidance Counselor Make an Advocacy Call

At a school with a class of roughly 2,500 first-year students across four undergraduate divisions, individual advocacy still matters. A phone call from your school counselor to your regional admissions representative can reinforce your candidacy in ways that a letter alone cannot.

Your counselor should communicate that BC is your top choice, that you will enroll if admitted, and that your academic performance has remained strong. If there are genuinely significant new developments worth sharing, the counselor is the appropriate person to deliver them. When advocacy comes from a third party, it carries more credibility than self-reported achievements.

If your counselor resists making the call, push back. Counselors at other high schools will be calling on behalf of their students, and a counselor who refuses is creating an unnecessary competitive disadvantage.

Keep Your Grades Up

Your mid-year transcript matters. A strong finish to senior year reinforces the academic profile that made you competitive at a school where 90% of enrolled students graduated in the top 10% of their high school class. A noticeable dip in performance can take you out of contention. Continue performing at the level that got you here.

Make sure your school has sent your updated transcript to BC. If it has not, follow up now.

If you'd like help maximizing your chances of getting off the waitlist and into your current top-choice colleges, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.