Parent life / Admissions season, a Tuesday morning in a New York kitchen
Wait Lists Are Not Ranked. We Ranked Ourselves Anyway.
Schools tell families plainly that their wait lists have no order. In our kitchen, over one pot of coffee, my wife and I assigned ourselves a place.
Andover's admission office answers the question every wait-listed family asks with admirable flatness: "The waiting list is not ranked." There is no set limit on how many students are on it. Openings come, if they come, "as early as April or as late as August." And: "Additional information is not necessary."
Additional information is not necessary. It is the most ignored sentence in American education.
In the spring of 2015 the eldest, then four, was admitted to one kindergarten and wait-listed at two others. The letters were warm and beautifully typeset, and neither contained anything so vulgar as a number. On a Tuesday morning, over coffee, my wife asked me where I thought we were. I said third. I do not know why I said third. It felt sporting.
She moved us to the middle. Nothing in either letter, she pointed out, had earned us third. I proposed ninth, then a dignified upper half, then began a number I abandoned halfway out of my mouth. We spoke with great exactness about a line neither of us had ever seen.
Beaver Country Day School's wait-list page is similarly clear. If you want to stay on the list, contact the office by March 25. "Only those students who contact us by this date will remain on the waitlist." Nothing moves until after the April 10 enrollment deadline, and then only pending availability.
In March 2026 New York magazine reported on a brutal kindergarten admissions season and quoted a father it called Mark, a pseudonym. His son had been wait-listed at two boys' schools he had fallen hard for, and admitted at one school he considered a safety. Mark withdrew his son from both wait pools and sent a deposit. "We're about one of a hundred that have been wait-listed," he told his wife, "and we don't know where we are on the list."
One of a hundred. That is the most useful number anyone has ever said about a wait list, and it is the only one that isn't on the list.
My wife turned the enrollment form from the school that had said yes around on the table so it faced me, and put a pen on it, and said nothing, which is her most effective argument. The eldest, meanwhile, had ranked all three schools herself, instantly and without appeal, by playground. She was the only person in the house with a list in order.
I signed the form. The coffee had gone cold. The eldest is a junior now, and both wait lists are, for all I know, still out there, in no order, with or without our name. They cross my mind less than I expected. Third, though. I still think third.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- New York: It Was a Tough February for New York’s Fanciest 5-Year-Olds nymag.com
- Andover waiting-list questions andover.edu
- Beaver Country Day: Waitlist FAQs bcdschool.org
- Public NYC parents discussion of private-school decisions reddit.com