An admissions officer from a top-20 national research university shared this insight with a former waitlist letter student:

“Once we have heard from all of [the admitted students], we will see where the holes are in the first-year class and make offers. The first round of offers will be at the beginning of May, and we hope to have it all wrapped up by July 4th. Our waitlist is not ranked, because we don’t know who will say yes of the admitted students, and if we need more engineers or teachers, for example, we’ll focus on that during the waitlist process.”