The dreaded waitlist. You weren’t rejected, but you weren’t accepted either.

The waitlist means colleges like you well enough, they just don’t love you enough to accept you. They want to keep you hanging on until they find out if they’re loved back by the students they did accept.

You have options.

Hopefully you received an acceptance from another college that you like even better. Easy decision. Inform the college that waitlisted you that you’re no longer interested.

If you were waitlisted by your first-choice school, and you’d sell your youngest sibling to go there. Easy decision. You make a deposit at one of the colleges where you were accepted and let the college know that you’d very much love to remain on their waitlist.

What if you can’t decide? Tough decision. You want to be done with this “college stuff” and know where you’re going next fall. But you’d really love to go to one or more of the colleges where you were waitlisted. You still need to make a deposit at a college where you were already accepted before May 1. You can choose to remain on one or more colleges’ waitlists.

Choosing to remove yourself or stay on a waitlist seems to be more of a psychological decision than a statistical decision. The waitlist conversion to acceptance numbers, particularly at the most selective colleges and universities, aren’t very encouraging.

Some colleges share their waitlist history on the College Board website, www.collegeboard.com. After you type in the name of the school, click on “Applying.”

One word of caution I always share with families: Waitlists are notoriously nonpredictive.

Being accepted from a waitlist is tied entirely to the yield — the number of students who choose to attend. As an example, if a college had a yield rate of 50 percent last year and it increased to 65 percent this year, I assure you they won’t be taking anyone off the waitlist.

Students and families need to evaluate the impact of the stress on the student at this point in the process. For many students, closure is a good thing. Let’s try to encourage them to make their best decision about the colleges that really want them and then to get excited about their new adventures ahead.