The China Adoption Forecast website is the work of two prospective adoptive parents. Like you, we were caught by the CCAA's sudden slowdown - we were expecting eight months when we started this process, and now it looks like eighteen months would be a better estimate.
It occurred to us that the math to make these predictions is not necessarily easy for everyone. If China keeps to the same schedule, it's easy for agencies to say "about six months" or "about a year". But if China's processing speeds up and slows down unpredictably, the agencies tend to keep telling their clients the same thing: "about six months" or "about a year", long past the time when that was actually true. This does a disservice to parents who are trying to make educated comparisons between various adoption paths.
We've hidden the math discussion here so the math-phobic need not pay attention. We weight the most recent months higher than the older months. This gives some weight to the long-term average speed of the CCAA, while strongly weighting towards the most recent performance. This prediction is significantly more pessimistic than many that have been floating around on other sites. However, we believe that this is the most realistic estimate. Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that the CCAA will suddenly return to the days when it processed 30 days of dossiers in 30 days of processing time. It is better, we think, for adoptive parents to be mentally prepared for the waiting period rather than to keep seeing the goal shift further away from them as they approach it.
We've gotten some flak from people for being too pessimistic. On 2006-07-17, someone with a 2005-09-09 LID complained that our prediction of 2006-11-21 was too pessimistic. Let's take a look at this, closely.
Getting his referral in November would be 5 sets of referrals from today (July, August, September, October, November.) His LID of 2005-09-09 is currently 73 days after what China has processed and sent out (2005-06-28). So he's 73 days deep in the queue, and however long it takes China to work through 73 days of LIDs, that's how long it will take for him to get his referral, right? Our site predicts it will take five months. That means we're predicting that China will process about 14.6 days of referrals each month (73 divided by 5).
Is this optimistic, realistic, or pessimistic? Well, let's take a look. In recent months, China has processed 13 days, 9 days, 7 days, 5 days, 12 days and 18 days of referrals respectively. Our prediction of a 14.6 day average in the future is not at all pessimistic compared to months when China has done just 5 or 7 or 9 days of referrals. Over the last six months, China has AVERAGED doing 10.7 days of LIDs per month. We are actually predicting that China will speed up from its recent performance of 10.7 to 14.6 days per month. This is quite a large speedup - we're predicting that China will go 36% faster, over the next few months, than they have over the last six months. We don't see any reason to consider our predictions overly pessimistic. We would be very surprised if the person with a 2005-09-09 LID got his referral before November.
UPDATE 2007-01-04: The complainer mentioned above is just receiving their referral now. Our prediction of 2006-11-21 was about six weeks too optimistic. Over the past six months, the CCAA operated somewhat slower than we predicted in July 2006.
If you look at people getting their referrals today, they have waited about a year between login and referral. The problem is, they got in the line a year ago. So what you're learning from this is, "One year ago, the waiting time was one year." This tells you very little about what the waiting time is if you send your dossier to China TODAY. Knowing what the waiting period was a year ago just doesn't translate to knowing what it is today. You have to know what happened to the line in the interim.
During that year, huge numbers of people have been sending their paperwork to China, lining up for a referral. China has continued processing them at exactly the same pace, 700-800 referrals/month. But people have been lining up at a rate of 2,000/month. Now the line is HUGE, much longer than it was a year ago. So people getting in line today aren't getting in a line that is one year long, they are getting in a line that is 2-2.5 years long. It is unfortunate but true that supply and demand don't track with each other. The number of people who work at the CCAA is determined by China's budgetary processes, like any other government agency. The number of Westerners who want to adopt is determined by public perceptions of how adoption from China compares to other adoption programs and to other methods of building a family. During the past two years, public visibility and acceptance of adoption from China has vastly increased and the number of people employed at the CCAA has not changed at all.
The line today is much, much longer than it was a year ago. The wait for people sending paperwork to China today is AT LEAST 2 years between login and referral, probably closer to 2.5 years. We understand the distress this causes, but it is a fact nonetheless. All of the best wishes in the world will not make the CCAA process dossiers faster. Parents considering adoption from China should be aware of the facts before they sign themselves up for a wait of this length. We, the creators of this website, are already locked-in - we've waited long enough that we might as well finish the wait. But you don't have to make that choice if you don't want to wait that long.
Sad to say, your agency may not understand the backlog situation. As described above, people who were logged-in a year ago are getting their referrals now. This means that the wait, one year ago, was a year. Well, one year ago, agencies were telling everyone that the wait was six months.
The agencies were wrong then. And they're wrong now to tell people just submitting their dossiers that the wait is a year. The current wait is 2 to 2.5 years. There may be additional factors at work, as well - agencies always have an incentive to downplay the waiting time to encourage you to do business with them.
If your agency tells you "one-year wait", please send them to this page. We know that some agencies are telling prospective adopters about an 18-month wait - that's still too low, but at least it's closer to the truth.
One woman writes:
"One thing to keep in mind is that CCAA can VERY quickly change ... way back in Dec00 when we started our homestudy for our first daughter, the DTC (no LID then) to proposal wait was 9mos ... by May01 when we were finally DTC, that wait was 12mos and quickly rose to 14mos. In June03 when were paperchasing for our second daughter, the LID to proposal wait was still around 14mos ... we ended up getting our proposal at the 7mos mark ... CCAA had started issuing two months worth of proposals at a time."
In May 2001, the writer was experiencing the same thing that is happening now: a large backlog had accumulated, and so wait times were increasing steadily. In November 2001, China put in a quota system to cut down on the backlog, and people were turned away from adopting from China. In November 2002, they lifted the quota - having reduced the backlog greatly during that year. So people sending in dossiers in late 2002 or 2003 got the benefit of the previous year's quota - their lines were extremely short. In May 2003, China briefly cut off issuing referrals due to the SARS outbreak, but they kept processing dossiers, so when they resumed issuing referrals in July 2003, they issued multiple months at once. This wasn't a "real" increase in their speed, just a blip caused by holding the referrals for six weeks and then issuing them all at once. So the writer has noted a real phenomenon - changing backlog levels - and failed to note that it was due to a year-long quota which brought the backlog down. There has been no such quota recently, the backlog has not been reduced, so wait times are not going to suddenly decrease now. The writer has also noted another real phenomenon - multiple months of referrals issued at once - and failed to note that they were referrals held from the previous months due to SARS.
The decrease in waiting times in 2002-2003 can only be understood in light of the quota in place from November 2001-November 2002. The quota cut dossier submissions by more than half during that time. It wasn't that the CCAA "suddenly sped up", they kept the same processing rate but dossier submissions were cut way down. The only reason that waiting times decreased is that people who otherwise wanted to adopt from China were turned away entirely.
In 2001, China imposed quotas to reduce the backlog of unprocessed applications. We have no information that indicates China is or isn't going to do that again. However, assuming they did, would that reduce your wait time?
No. Quotas would reduce wait times for people who sent their dossiers to China after the quota was implemented. A quota would not reduce the wait times at all for people who were already waiting. There are only two things that can reduce wait times for people who are already waiting: either the CCAA must process dossiers faster, or some of the people in the queue must drop out. Think of it like a long line to buy movie tickets. If the theater opens another ticket window, the line will move faster. If some of the people in front of you say, "Forget this, I don't want to wait in line, let's go rent a movie from Blockbuster," then you'll move forward faster. Quotas are like a bouncer who stops more people from lining up. They only affect the line *after you*, so they won't affect how long it takes you to get to the front of the line and get your ticket.
We know, we said we wouldn't talk about rumors. But let's see how the rumorous information compares with our predictions. Rumorous information about the CCAA says that they're only able to do about 700-800 applications per month. They have been getting 2,000 applications per month for the past year or more. If you note, this is a velocity (days of LIDS processed per day of processing) of about 0.400, which is just about what they've been averaging recently. Wait times will go to infinity as long as that ratio (2000 applications come in, 800 applications get processed) continues. Eventually, one of three things will happen:
One of the above will happen, eventually. But for now, our predictions mesh extremely well with the rumorous information from the CCAA. If the CCAA has been getting 2,000 applications per month recently, and if the CCAA continues to be able to only process 700-800 applications per month, then they are going to continue to only do 10.6 days of LIDS per month, the exact same speed they have been doing recently. Our predictions are dead-on, or actually optimistic, compared to what we know of the CCAA's capabilities.
Let's look at the whole situation another way. We know that the CCAA currently (July 2006) has a 363 day backlog of unprocessed applications - just about exactly one year. Supposedly the CCAA received about 10,000 applications last year (I think they mean 2005), and is currently receiving 2,000 applications per month. That means the CCAA's unprocessed application backlog is somewhere between 10,000 applications (minimum) and 24,000 applications (maximum). Given that the 10,000/year number is a little stale and 2,000/month is apparently more correct, I'd guess they have around 20,000 unprocessed applications.
We also know the CCAA has repeatedly said they can only process 700-800 applications per month. This means it will take the CCAA somewhere around 26 months to work through the current backlog alone. If China stopped accepting any new applications today, it would take the CCAA 26 months to clear the current backlog and process everyone they've already logged-in. If you send your paperwork to China right now, and everything about China continues to be the same (processing 700-800 applications per month), you can expect a TWENTY-SIX month wait for your referral. Your only hope of getting a referral in a shorter time period would be if people dropped out of the wait, or if China hired more people in order to be able to process more than 700-800 applications per month.
It would be extremely interesting if the CCAA would publish figures about how many dossiers they have logged-in but not processed, and exactly how many dossiers they process each month. Those figures would resolve all of this speculation once and for all.
Waiting periods for China's Special Needs program will be significantly shorter. China also expedites referrals for parents of Chinese ancestry and older children. Contact your adoption agency for details, but the waiting period for any of these should be much shorter than this site shows. Your mileage may vary. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
Although the website will "remember" your LID from visit to visit, it isn't actually stored anywhere on the site. Rather, the information is stored in a "cookie", a small bit of information stored on your computer's hard drive. In the menus of your web browser, you can delete the cookie for chinaadoptionforecast.com if you don't want the site to remember you. We don't store anyone's LID on the site at all.
We read the Rumor Queen site and several adoption-related email lists.
Last modified: 2007-01-04 17:39:13