With admissions numbers up two years in a row, University Park will be instituting a waitlist for select students next year, according to admissions officials.

This will be the first time Penn State has used a waitlist. It normally operates on a rolling admissions process.

Director of communications and customer services Pat Smith said the waitlist is intended for a small set of "high-achieving students" who applied to University Park after Nov. 30 and did not list a secondary campus choice. "Basically, they have a choice," Smith said. "They can elect to stay on the waitlist, or we can work with them to get them into another campus immediately."

Randy Deike, associate vice president for enrollment management, said Penn State is unique among universities of its size for its admission practices. "We're the only school in the Big Ten that I know of that doesn't have a waitlist," he said. "In the past, we would either offer [applicants] an alternate campus, or have them come back to us with a second campus choice. This just provides one additional option to those students."

Under the terms of the waitlist, several hundred students would be in line to fill spaces vacated by accepted students who decided to attend college elsewhere, Smith said. Deike said there is no numeric ranking among applicants on the waitlist.

"We would make decisions in the same way we have for admissions," he said. "We would look at credentials and make the decisions from there."

Smith said there were no plans to expand the waitlist to other campuses.

"We're doing this on a limited basis," he said. "I don't know if we have any plans to expand it."

Deike agreed. He added that University Park's large applicant pool is prohibitive of a campus-wide waitlist. "We could never offer entry to everyone," he said. "We don't want to put people on the list that we don't think have any chance at a later date."

News of the waitlist was accidentally released through the Penn State Newswire. The article was quickly removed from live.psu.edu. "There are 40 newswires that we put out, some are more specialized than others," spokeswoman Annemarie Mountz said. "That was more of an administrative announcement to high school guidance counselors and was not intended for the newswire that goes out to 50 countries on seven continents."