Unlike some graduate programs which admit a small number of students and wait-list the rest until the first have responded, we feel the students we want to enroll should know of their acceptance as soon as possible after the January deadline. For that reason, we admit twenty students in prose and twenty in poetry out of the several hundred applications we receive each year. If the pool is particularly strong, we will sometimes create a short waiting list and inform those on it. Students generally know if they have been accepted here by the end of February. We expect about half the people we admit to choose our program, and it has tended to work out that way.