Pomona College aims for a first-year class of 450, but sometimes it takes some finessing to get there. Pomona admissions says that they waitlist about 8% of Regular Decision applicants, and the Pomona waitlist has been slowly growing. For students enrolling for fall 2023, there were 587 students on the waitlist. The next year, the list had 680 students hoping for a spot. And in the 2025-2026 Common Data Set, Pomona reported that 716 of 1017 waitlisted students chose to accept the offer to wait and see.
The rise in the number of students on the waitlist isn’t shocking, because the overall acceptance rate for Pomona has been dropping for years. The college has become more well-known, more well-respected, and more popular with students looking for an intimate liberal arts experience in a California setting with strong community and impressive resources that belie the size of the college. The same year that the waitlist acceptance rate was 3%, the overall acceptance rate was 7%.
As the waitlist has gotten longer, the number of students accepted off of the waitlist has decreased, from 62 to 58, to 31 over those same three years. Most recently, the waitlist acceptance rate when only accounting for waitlisted students who opted-in to the waitlist was only 4.3%. If one accounts for all waitlisted students, it was only 3%.
In this post, we give you the guidance you need to be in that tiny group of people who actually make it into Pomona through the waitlist route.
We help strong students beat the waitlist odds. Contact us to learn more.
After a waitlist decision, it’s normal to feel a mix of disappointment and hopefulness, but also helplessness. Waitlists aren’t all the same, and it can be confusing to try to figure out what to do next. We have four clear steps that give you actions to take that truly make a difference.
Step One: Join the Waitlist
First, you need to complete the Waitlist Offer Response form. You are not on the waitlist until you complete the form. You have time to do this, as the deadline isn’t until basically first-year decision day for accepted applicants, but they also ask you to do it “as soon as possible.” Waiting to until the last minute is possible, but it doesn’t do much of anything for your chances of getting in — it may even hurt your application. So, don’t wait.
Step Two: Pick a Backup School
Pomona is the dream. We get that. But it’s also not the reality yet and, statistically, is an unlikely outcome. You are going to do what you need to in order to increase your chances, but in this moment those chances are tiny. So, you need a backup plan.
The best backup plan is a place to land. Commit to your first-choice school that you actually got into, submit the deposit, and then breathe deeply.
If you don’t have an option that you are excited about, that’s a bummer and we feel your pain. Remember that transferring is an option, so this isn’t the end of the world. It is much easier to transfer than to try to reapply as a first-year in the next admissions cycle.
Step Three: Update Pomona
Last year, waitlisted applicants were invited to share basically anything they wanted. “The Admissions Committee welcomes any new information that you would like to share,” the waitlist email read, “and invites you to submit updates through your applicant portal.” We expect the waitlist notification this year to be about the same, and the approach will be also.
This invitation should not be treated as a free-for-all, though. Some students see “any new information,” and jump at the opportunity to send pdfs of projects, new essays, additional recommendations, and even things like presentations on how awesome they are. While it may feel good to throw every chip you have down on the table, it doesn’t amount to strong strategy.
We work with our students to write one compact and precisely structured one-page letter to Pomona admissions, the Letter of Continued Interest (LOCI), which offers targeted updates and makes revisiting your application a joy not a chore. This is how the LOCI should be structured:
Opening: The LOCI is called a letter because it is one. Start with “Dear Pomona Admissions,” and include the name of your regional rep if you have previously communicated with them. Then you need a short, three-sentence intro. Sentence one should introduce you by name, status as a waitlisted student for the Class of 2030, and your prospective major. The second sentence should reinforce that Pomona is your first choice and you will attend if accepted. The last sentence of this paragraph should set the intention for this letter: to update and to reinforce.
Update: This is the most important part. The update is your opportunity to present new information about yourself to admissions. This section should include between two and four substantive updates that can range from new awards to updates on projects you are super excited about. If you just got a job for summer, that could go here. If you had a strong result in a Model UN conference, that could go here, too. Once thing that you should certainly put here, if applicable to you, is a focused academic interest.
Only 9% of the incoming Class of 2029 had specified in their application that they were undecided. If you noted “undecided” as your prospective major in your application, the LOCI is a great place to identify a potential area of study that illustrates increased focus and a strong direction. You shouldn’t say something like how you messed up by marking your initial intention as undecided, but you should present an area of interest that is a potential major.
You can even write one of your updates about a project in a class that you have succeeded in at a high level, and then transition to how you would pursue this same subject at a potential major at Pomona.
Reinforce: Once you’ve updated Pomona, you need to remind them why they are your first choice. This section will be one paragraph, and you want to be super specific. Mention two or three super specific aspects of the Pomona program: one academic, one community, and maybe one tradition. For the academic item, this should be a specific learning opportunity or professor. For the community item, it should be a club or student group that connects directly to a passion you highlighted in your initial application.
Close: End the letter by thanking the readers for their time and consideration and a hopeful sentence imagining yourself engaging on campus in some way this fall.
Submit the LOCI through the “Submit a Waitlist Update” button on your applicant portal, which appears only after you’ve submitted the Waitlist Offer Response Form.
Once you’ve submitted your LOCI, we encourage our students to ask a mentor, coach, supervisor, teacher, or other adult in your life who is not a family member and can speak to your character and strength to write a supplemental recommendation. The recommender will submit this themselves by emailing it to Pomona admissions with your name in the subject line, and the recommendation should be no more than one page.
Finally, it’s worth asking your college counselor at school to speak up on your behalf. An Advocacy Call to Pomona Admissions, when paired with a strong LOCI, can tip the scales in your direction.
Step Four: Wait it out.
After getting on the waitlist, you are very unlikely to hear from Pomona until after May 8th. However, you may hear from Pomona again before they make a final decision on your application. Last year, some students on the waitlist were notified towards the end of June that they hadn’t been accepted off the waitlist yet, but that they could reaffirm their interest in Pomona to be on a shorter “summer waitlist.” Decisions for this narrowed down waitlist would be made, Pomona said, by July 15.
Whether or not Pomona employs a summer waitlist again this year, the waitlist is quite literally a waiting game.
It is possible to get into a dream school off of the waitlist. Email us to learn more.