I read that CALS, like other public universities, are required to have over 70% of their students in-state. Would this make CALS harder to get into than Arts and Science if I’m applying out of state?
Where did you read that? Honestly the only place I’ve ever heard people say that getting into the land grant schools is easier as a NY resident is on this website, and I’ve never been able to find anything to back that up. Anecdotally, I’m pretty positive that >70% of CALS students aren’t from New York, although I haven’t asked all of them. Overall, New York is the most represented state at Cornell, but I’d have to guess that Cornell receives more applications from New York than anywhere else, and it isn’t based on state favoritism.
If you lived in-state, you’d now be seeing how many people from your school were applying to Cornell’s contract colleges, and then you might be less willing to accept that it is necessarily harder to get into from out of state.
The contract colleges offer NYS residents discounted tuition. This, together with their relative proximity and strong local reputation,. creates substantial demand from in-state applicants.
It may actually be true that it is harder to get in from out of state. But as far as I’m aware, no data that would shed light on this subject has ever been released.
[QUOTE=""]
...like other public universities, are required to have over 70% of their students in-state. not true, for example, U mich is close to 50% out of state: http://www.ro.umich.edu/report/16enrollmentsummary.pdf
[/QUOTE]
you’ve already applied ED, I suggest you try to focus on what you can control: make all your other apps the best they can be.
luck!
FWIW:
http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000415.pdf#zoom=100
As of Fall 2011, of the 5,620 undergrads enrolled in the contract colleges, 2,761 ( 49.13%) were from New York State.
@monydad well that’s the statistic for all of Cornell. I’m asking about Cornell Ag School which is a public school. The data will be skewed wouldn’t it?
@AspiringScho1ar “Contract College” is Cornell’s name for the four SUNY affiliated schools at Cornell.
So while the 49% isn’t specifically CALS by itself, it’s inclusive of College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM), College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), College of Human Ecology (CHE), and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (SILR) — but not the majority of Cornell schools.
My DD visited CALS this fall, and received a CALS-specific fact sheet with some interesting info about the new incoming Fall 2016 CALS class:
Freshman class size (all CALS programs): 675
Admit Rate: 13%
Middle 50% SAT: 1260-1460
Middle 50% ACT: 29-33
36 Valedictorians
14 Salutatorians
31 Class or Student Council Presidents
My favorite was a section titled “Among the Incoming Students Are:” with a list that included the following (not the full list) -
The youngest licensed falconer in California, a pilot, a volunteer firefighter, a volunteer EMT, a contributor to the Huffington Post, a five-time roller-derby MVP, a top Canadian squash player, an extra on the set of the Hunger Games…
So, if you are a squash-playing Canadian roller-derby champ who also volunteers as a firefighter/EMT, and class president and valedictorian with a 35 ACT, you’ve improved your odds from that 13%!
Just to finish the arithmetic from the same data sheet, 20.1% of the undergrads attending the endowed colleges- the ones that do not get state funding and do not provide discounted tuition for in-state residents- were from New York State.
For the aggregate university as a whole, 32.1% of undergrads were from New York…
re#6, while the vet school is indeed one of the state-affiliated colleges, it has no undergraduates so does not figure into the 49%.
It should be noted that the Ag school alone constitutes about 2/3 of the total undergrads attending all the contract colleges.
But I actually just found data for 2016 for the individual colleges. For this most recent datapoint, the % for the Ag school alone was 48%. But it was a bit under that at the other two contract colleges, so their aggregate was now just under 45%…
http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/tableau_visual/factbook-enrollment
To sum up:
– Only about 50% of CALS students are from NYS, so there is no “70% from NY” requirement
– There’s a 13% overall admit rate for CALS, so it’s highly selective whether you’re from NY or not
My own guess is that there is a targeted in-state %, and it tracks the relative funding received from the state. This funding has declining over the years. When I attended it probably was 70%; maybe more. But in recent times it has been around 50%. When you see a percentage stay very nearly the same for a good number of years it can be speculated that this is not a complete coincidence.
And furthermore my guess is NYS residents do have a bit of an admissions advantage in applying to the contract colleges.
There are a number of reasons that NYS residents should prefer the contract colleges at a greater rate than applicants to the endowed colleges do: discounted tuition, unique programs that are not available at many other proximate colleges & universities. But I’m not sure these features completely bridge the gap from 48% in-state vs 20% in-state at the endowed colleges.
It’s possible that they do. My guess is not quite though.
But I may well be mistaken. Discounted tuition, for one thing, is a powerful feature. The “real” SUNY universities, with much lower tuition, have yet higher in-state enrollment percentages than Cornell’s contract colleges do.
However there is no completely on-point available data, so this is all just speculation.