<p>That sounds about right to me. Acceptance rate was about 33% this year, down from just under 40% last year. So I think it’s likely to be at 30% or a bit under next year.</p>
<p>We don’t have test scores for 2013 enrolled freshmen yet, but in 2012, nearly 60% (58.4%) of enrolled freshmen had an ACT composite of 30 or higher. I would expect by next year that figure might be a bit over 60%. And those are probably mostly in-state students; most Michigan applicants submit only the ACT, while many OOS applicants from SAT-dominant states in the northeast and California–some of the biggest sources of OOS students at Michigan–submit only the SAT. And 71.9% of enrolled freshmen in 2012 had an unweighted GPA of 3.75 or higher.</p>
<p>I’d say by next year an in-state applicant with an ACT of 28 and an unweighted GPA of 3.7 will be something of a longshot candidate for admission–it could happen, but I wouldn’t place heavy money on it.</p>
<p>^You think saying a 3.7 and a 28 is gonna be a long shot next year is ambitious? That’s conservative if anything. OOS there’s almost no shot with those stats. Mostly he just cites facts from this year and Michigan apps have skyrocketed every year since they’ve moved to the common app. It’s getting so increasingly competitive because of the recent strong spike in applications.</p>
<p>Applekid, Michigan is not experiencing normal increase in selectivity, it is experiencing the sort of selectivity boost that universities experience when they join the common app. Most of its peers have seen a small drop in acceptance rates in the last 4 years. Michigan’s acceptance rate dropped from 51% to 33% in three years. How much further will it drop? Nobody knows. There are two possibilities, each as likely as the other. One would lead to the acceptance rate settling at around 25%, the other to it settling at around 15%. Only time will tell. Next year, the acceptance rate will likely drop to 30%.</p>
<p>^^Alot will depend on what IS high school you got that 3.7uw/28. It’s only a long shot if you are in a large pool of UofM applicants from the same high school where those kids have 3.9uws/>30. It is all relative for IS. The price isn’t going to go down, so perhaps they receive more out of state applicants due to the common app who simply aren’t going to attend, again acceptance rate percentages are relative albeit fun discussion. Historically Michigan has done a pretty good and conservative job of judging yield. Michigan rarely “guesses” low.</p>
<p>More likely to hover somewhere between 25 and 30%. UCLA and Berkeley are in the low twenties with similar student size, yet Michigan will admit% will not dip below either.</p>
<p>You could well be correct ForeverAlone. Like I said, it could settle at 25%. But at the same time it could drop below 20%. We’ll have to wait and see. Speculating now is foolish.</p>
<p>Just heard today that the yield this year is higher than expected, so there will be more new students than expected. I guess that is bad news for those on the waiting list. Also the acceptance rate will likely go down further next year.</p>
<p>You can’t directly compare them. The higher education markets are just very different in the two states. Yes, California has roughly 4 times the population of Michigan, but there are 9 universities in the University of California system, 6 of them ranking in the top 50, 2 in the top 25. On top of that, California’s got private universities like Stanford of HYPS fame, #10 Caltech and #24 USC, as well as leading LACs like #4 Pomona, #10 Claremont McKenna, #12 Harvey Mudd, #24 Scripps, #39 Occidental, and #43 Pitzer, all outranking Michigan’s top-ranked LAC, #68 Kalamazoo College. In short, it’s much lonelier at the top for the University of Michigan, whose toughest in-state competitors are #68 LAC Kalamazoo College and #72 national university Michigan State.</p>
<p>California also exports large numbers of its top students; Michigan doesn’t. In the fall of 2010, some 1,634 Californians enrolled as freshmen at Ivy League universities. That’s an order of magnitude more than the 159 Michiganders who enrolled as Ivy freshmen. And those lopsided ratios hold up at many other top schools as well: MIT (CA 146, MI 24), Duke (CA 148, MI 16), Johns Hopkins (CA 114, MI 24), Rice (CA 71, Michigan 2), Georgetown (CA 162, MI 18), Emory (CA 98, MI 8), Carnegie Mellon (CA 152, MI 10). California holds a strong advantage even at Midwestern schools like Chicago (CA 141, MI 31) and WUSTL (CA 149, MI 27), though less so at Northwestern (CA 170, MI 81) and Notre Dame (CA 174, MI 92). Same at top LACs: in 2010, 165 Californians enrolled at the top 3 LACs (Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore); only 17 Michiganders did. Bottom line, California is an enormous exporter of top students. Michiganders, for the most part, stay at home. </p>
<p>But you also can’t look only at the market for in-state students. Michigan’s enormous growth in applications since it joined the Common App has come almost entirely from OOS applicants, who now outnumber in-state applicants at least 3-to-1. In part, that’s because Michigan has a reputation as a very good school that admits large numbers of OOS applicants, with OOS students representing 35% of the undergrad student body, and more like 40% of recent classes. UC Berkeley and UCLA have strictly limited OOS students until recently; but while they’re now admitting more OOS students, it’s hard to imagine them ever going to 40% OOS as Michigan has. That probably cuts both ways: keeping a lid on OOS admissions probably deflates the OOS admit rate, but it probably also deters some OOS students from even applying.</p>
<p>Here’s what will make the biggest difference: if Michigan raises enough money in its next capital campaign to be able to adopt a policy of meeting full need for OOS students, its OOS yield will soar, OOS applications will take another big leap, and its OOS admit rate–together with the overall admit rate, of which OOS is already by far the most important component–will plummet. Under that scenario, it’s not implausible that Michigan’s admit rate could go lower than Berkeley’s and UCLA’s, and eventually settle somewhere around 15-20%. If Michigan doesn’t improve FA for OOS students, it’s hard to see the admit rate going much below 25%, and even that may be optimistic.</p>
<p>While California does have 9 UC schools, it also has a common application to apply to all them. It’s a simple check mark for any student interested in doing this. While I suppose it is plausible for Michigan to get thousands more applications in the upcoming years, I hardly expect the school to approach numbers like these:</p>
<p>“Yes, California has roughly 4 times the population of Michigan,…”</p>
<p>California also has a huge Asian population, by far the largest in the US with over 5,500,000 residents in that state. Michigan has a small Asian population in comparison, less than 300,000. That is the main reason for the disparity of students in the Ivy League, etc.</p>
<p>From Wikipedia:</p>
<p>Asian Americans have the highest educational attainment of any racial group in the country; about 49.8% of them have at least a bachelor’s degree.[32] Since the 1990s, Asian American students often have the highest math averages in standardized tests such as the SAT[33][34] and GRE.[35] Their verbal scores generally lag, but their combined scores are usually higher than those of white Americans.[33] The proportion of Asian Americans at many selective educational institutions far exceeds the national population rate. Asians constitute around 10-20 percent of those attending Ivy League[36][37] and other elite universities. Asian Americans are the largest racial group on seven of the nine University of California campuses,[38] are the largest racial group of undergraduates in the system,[39] and make up more than a quarter of graduate and professional students.[40] Asian Americans are more likely to attend college,[41] are more likely to apply to competitive colleges,[42] and have significantly higher college completion level than other races.[32] According to a poll targeting Asian Americans in 14 states and the District of Columbia conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in 2013, 40 percent of Asian Americans have a college degree, with almost a quarter of them having achieved an education attainment greater than a bachelor’s degree.[43]</p>
<p>^wait… that’s racist even though it’s true. You can’t make any true statements involving a race!! That’s not politically correct. What are you saying? All asians are ALIKE?</p>
<p>“Under that scenario, it’s not implausible that Michigan’s admit rate could go lower than Berkeley’s and UCLA’s, and eventually settle somewhere around 15-20%. If Michigan doesn’t improve FA for OOS students, it’s hard to see the admit rate going much below 25%, and even that may be optimistic.”</p>
<p>Bingo! That’s exactly correct bclintonk. Much of Michigan drop in acceptance rate will have to do with how generous its OOS FA packages become. If the University starts meeting 100% of demonstrated need, I expect Michigan’s acceptance rate to drop to 15%. If FA remains as it is now, only meeting 80% of need for OOS students, I think Michigan’s admit rate will level off at 25%. </p>
<p>Another factor to consider is perceived desirability. Probably the only reason many high school kids are turned off by Michigan is its acceptance rate. At 50% or higher, it simply did not appeal to many top students. With an acceptance rate dropping below 30% next year, Michigan will all of a sudden become a lot more appealing.</p>
<p>“It’s not racist in the slightest bearcats of course. Just look at the numbers. That’s the main conclusion that could be drawn from those stats.”</p>
<p>I was being sarcastic of course
But if I see a black person on the street, and say, black people are more likely to commit a crime, and then follow up with, “Just look at the numbers. That’s the main conclusion that could be drawn from those stats.”, a lot of PC police would accuse me of being racist.</p>
<p>Of course you were. That’s what the “;-)” was meant to indicate. </p>
<p>“But if I see a black person on the street, and say, black people are more likely to commit a crime, and then follow up with, “Just look at the numbers. That’s the main conclusion that could be drawn from those stats.”, a lot of PC police would accuse me of being racist.”</p>
<p>You wouldn’t get too many, if any, arguments if the comments were complimentary.</p>
<p>“Probably the only reason many high school kids are turned off by Michigan is its acceptance rate.”</p>
<p>Being in a cold weather state, in the heart of the rust belt, and with a large nearly bankrupt city located nearby is not exactly the best inducement to encourage additional coasties to apply to a school in this part of the country. Michigan does exceptionally well attracting OOS students regardless of course. However, I cannot see the day when the school will have 100,000 applicants trying to gain admittance. That is what UCLA is already experiencing and why Michigan’s admit rate will never be as low as theirs. Of course I could be wrong, but I don’t see it. Not with entering freshman classes of over 6,000 students every year.</p>
<p>Whoa, not so fast! UCLA got 80,000 freshman apps this year. The rest were transfer applications, which of course don’t count for its acceptance rate which measures only freshman apps. Comparing apples to apples, Michigan got 47,000 freshman apps this year. So, yes, UCLA has a big lead, but so what? </p>
<p>It’s not always the school with the most applications that has the lowest acceptance rate. Yale’s acceptance rate was only 7% last year, based on “only” 29,000 applications. Why? Well, it has a much smaller class to fill, for one. Plus its yield was a sky-high 66%.</p>
<p>UCLA actually has a slightly smaller freshman class than Michigan even though the total undergrad student bodies are similar in size; that’s because UCLA admits a lot more transfer students, especially out of the California community college system. But UCLA’s freshman yield (about 35% in 2012) is also lower than Michigan’s (about 39% in 2012, around 42% this year), probably because many are cross-admits with Berkeley which many prefer, and because so many Californians apply and are accepted to elite private colleges and universities and use Berkeley and UCLA (along with other UC schools) as back-ups.</p>
<p>My point is, Michigan’s OOS applications will continue on their current growth trajectory because it is perceived very positively around the country. The biggest negative you hear on CC is that its FA for OOS students is poor, which is true. If it can fix that problem, it will generate another big boom in OOS applications; but it doesn’t need to hit 80,000 or 100,000 applications to rocket past UCLA in admit rate, because its OOS yield would also soar. And along with a soaring yield and a shrinking admit rate, freshman class stats would bump upward. And with good OOS FA, higher entering class stats, and a lower admit rate, Michigan would enter another magic circle and be seen as even more desirable by OOS students. drawing even more applications and becoming even more desirable at each admissions cycle. </p>
<p>“Full-need” FA policies and the Common App were the best thing that ever happened to the Ivy League and other highly selective Northeastern colleges. Three or four decades ago, most of them were sleepy little places that didn’t attract much national attention, and while selective, they were not nearly as difficult to get into as they are now. Same is true of Chicago until much more recently. “Full need” and the Common App made these schools more popular and more selective, which in turn made them even more popular, and so on in an upward ratcheting cycle. With the Common App, Michigan’s gotten halfway there. Fill in the OOS FA gap, and the same thing could happen here. That’s a tall order, of course; it would take a tremendous commitment of new resources. But hey, that’s what capital campaigns are for.</p>
Just look at the numbers. That’s the main conclusion that could be drawn from those stats.</p>