If your teen is wait-listed at a college-should your teen hold out hope for a positive admission decision from that school?
Because your prospective college student hopefully applied to multiple colleges and was accepted at others, my recommendation is NOT to miss the admission acceptance deadlines at other colleges in hopes of being moved from wait-listed to accepted at another.
Wait listed students sometimes NEVER HEAR BACK from colleges that wait listed them. And while it is possible that they will later be offered admission by a wait-list school, the offer is not likely to come before the May 1 deadline to accept admission offers from others. Wait-list status changes-when they do occur-often happen between May 15 and July 1. The other downside of being admitted from the wait-list is that merit scholarships are often already given out to other students at that point. Even some of the need based grants (the grants that come from a specific dollar amount awarded to the college) are exhausted by that point.
I like the certainty of accepting the best option of the colleges that have accepted a student. That allows the student to move forward and leave the anxiety of whether they will get in behind.