stillalive

It is 100% worth attending. You should treat the visitation day as a sort of implicit interview. You'll want to be very polished in description of your research interests. When they have you fill out the form for who to meet with, try to choose faculty who have departmental influence, share your interests, and might push for you. If faculty like you, you'll have a good shot of being moved up in priority on the waitlist. (Addendum: you should be direct about the fact you're waitlisted, and that you would absolutely attend if admitted.)

Institution: University of Chicago Program: PhD Economics Decision: Accepted Funding: Full tuition waiver + stipend ($$$) guaranteed for 5 years. 5 quarters of TA-ing required. Date: 2/10/2020 Notified through: Received call around 11 AM from professor. Then got a follow-up email around 4:30 PM from department with visit day information and nod to funding package.

I am towards the end of the alphabet, so don't believe it's that. However, someone on GC in 2018 mentioned emailing the admissions office and them replying they had accidentally sent some decisions early, due to the new application portal. Maybe it could be something similar this year?

Institution: Stanford University Program: PhD Economics Decision: Accepted Funding: Full tuition waiver + stipend ($$$) guaranteed for 5 years. No RA/TA responsibilities in the first year. Date: 12/19/2019 Notified through: Email from department, then follow-up from members of admissions committee. Institution: University of California, Berkeley Program: PhD Economics Decision: Accepted Funding: No word yet. Date: 02/03/2020 Notified through: Email to check application portal.

I was one of the Berkeley posters on GC. I received an email notice there was an update to my application, clicked the link, and had a letter of admission from the Vice Provost of Graduate Studies. It seemed to be a school-wide form letter, and said the department would follow up later with details on funding. The acceptance appeared to me a little unusual, as the update came around 7-ish PST, well after business hours, with no separate acknowledgment from the department or faculty (which to my knowledge is standard). You guys are correct that last year, most UCs released decisions uniformly around March 8th. Given the low number of posts on GC, (especially relative to the number who posted their acceptances to Stanford, of which I would assume there would be overlap) my intuition is that either this is a mistake, or they might be admitting in batches. At any rate, I would definitely not take the lack of an update to be an implicit rejection.