PopolVuh

This is deeply unprofessional and discourteous. When you commit to a program, you do so with the understanding that you'll decline all other offers and remove yourself from any wait-lists. If it's April 8, and you have yet to hear from the department that's wait-listed you, you should e-mail the DGS at your second-choice school--the place that has in fact said yes--explain your situation and ask for an extension. If you commit to one school, are--having dealt in bad faith--admitted to another from the wait-list, and accept that second offer, you've put that first (and the students who genuinely want to enroll there) in a terrible position. That department may already have released the those on its wait-list (your peers and future colleagues). The student who would have had your spot may have accepted an offer from a school she was less eager to attend, etc.

It depends greatly on the kinds of departments you've applied to. At the very tip-top places--Penn, Harvard, Princeton, etc--just one (or perhaps no) wait-listed candidates will, in the end, be admitted. At the great majority of schools, though, this isn't at all the case. At most schools, it's usual to over-admit at the outset. So, if the department wants an incoming cohort of five, they'll probably take, oh, seven, assuming that two of the admitted candidates will decline. How deep the wait-list goes is more difficult to say. A department may wait-list twice the number of students it admits. It may wait-list three times as many. A number of those on the wait list, after all, will take other offers. When you hear will probably also depend on the putative quality/actual prestige of the departments. Wait-list admissions work--God, forgive me--by trickle down. So. The young woman who's got offers from Michigan, NYU, Cornell, Hopkins, and Brown will have, of course, to say no to four of those schools. When she e-mails the Cornell DGS to say she's going elsewhere, the young man who was admitted to Madison, Ohio State, and Emory, but was wait-listed at Cornell, gets the good news from Ithaca, and on it goes. The "select" language in the correspondence you've received is reassuring. I would guess--and that's all this is--it means you're in the upper half of the wait-list.