Article: UMichigan and efforts to attract working class students

Parents Forum
21

I think each state needs to ask their residents how much they want the flagship to serve the state’s students. Are they ok with 50% or more students being from out of state and thus tougher for their own kids to attend? Do they like the out of state students, believing that they might stay and grow the educated labor force? Should the out of state students receive financial aid and merit scholarships?

In my town I never hear these issues discussed but my state does not have the overall sky high admissions test scores except in engineering and College of Biological Sciences. Which now that I write about it, is a discouragement for applications from solid students. I remember not being certain one of my kids would get into CBS despite a 31 ACT. She ended up applying to the College of Natural Resources and got a big scholarship.

Time for me to start asking around about this.

22

Fair enough, and there are a material portion of high potential academic students who come from lower income families…but a quick look at the graphs in the Hoxby study shows that many of those students are from families where at least one parent holds at least a bachelors degree. Only about 15% of the students qualifying as high achieving came from families with no bachelors degree, and an even smaller portion from parents with no college attendance.

This implies that many many of the “low income” high achievers are in families that are college educated. It’s a reasonable question to ask how much outreach makes sense to do here.

It becomes further complicated when you see that 90% of them are either white (75%) or Asian (15%), both groups of which are currently already underrepresented in the elite colleges admission rubric, generally speaking.

Finally, while we can debate what service to the state taxpayers should look like, its also true that the highest income people in the state pay the bulk of the taxes.

23

UofM doesn’t really “need” to do more outreach. They seem to get plenty of kids who want to travel to an out of state flagship and pay full boat and they are running a capital campaign that has some earmarked for tuition underwriting for those in need. They do a pretty good job in Michigan reaching into schools and districts to seek out the best and the brightest…I don’t really see any need to do a “national” search for the best and the brightest. At some point it’s a public university…if the privates want to search high and low to find a diversity of socio-economic kids, then they can if they wish. Any initiative instate to find these kids and help fund their ability to travel to AA and home to gain a great education - I’m all behind it. And all the chest pounding about the state not funding as much…well the University solved that by increasing freshmen enrollment slowly over the last decade and gaining wealthy out of staters who want to be part of the Ann Arbor tradition. I don’t see a problem in search of a solution.

24

The portion of UM’s current budget coming from Michigan taxpayers is minor. OOS tuition now carries much more of the load than instate tuition or the money from the state.

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To start, there is the problem of a declining product. Top private schools are outdistancing top publics by a large amount in their average endowments per student, ability to pay top professors, etc. The top publics are combatting this by admitting more and more full pay out of state students (otherwise know as wealthy students), there is only so much of this you can do and more importantly…who is getting left out?

26

That assumes there is a very limited supply of “top” professors. I think that is false. Very similar to the case of college football players–many potentially good ones are overlooked at 17/18. Just need some better coaching and development.

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@Snowball City I’ve worked with several OOS students from families with incomes below $65K. They all received financial aid packages that covered room and board. None had any “unmet need” and while they were expected to borrow, the university only required subsidized loans and they didn’t come to more than $6K a year.

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@romanigypsyeyes I’m curious. What else do you expect them to do? They offer increasingly generous financial aid and it’s better than FA at places like American University, NYU, Boston University and USC.

29

Having good financial aid means that many students from middle and lower income families who get admitted can attend without going into really heavy debt.

However, that does not help them if they cannot get admitted due to admission policies that tend to tilt the admissions class toward those from upper income families. Examples include use of legacy preference and recommendations. CSS Noncustodial Profile also blocks many needy students with uncooperative divorced parents.

30

Financial aid isn’t the barrier, and hasn’t been for quite some time, for low income students.

31

@Data10 , Another issue with the Brookings study is the subset of students that they consider ‘high achievers’, the exact students that the most elite institutions in the country are trying to attract. The study sites the top 4%, which is not representative of the current class of UM students. The median ACT at UM is the top 1% and in certain schools like engineering and Ross the median is above the top 1%. There is no guarantee that GPA matches the ACT either.

So what else can UM do without compromising on admission standards? That is the slippery slope of ‘holistic’ admissions. IDK.

32

Michigan’s CDS lists a 25th/75th percentile ACT composite score range of 29 to 33. 29 ACT is 92nd percentile, so this suggests a significantly lower median score for the full class. Even if it is top 5% in one case vs top 3% in the other or whatever, a similar principle applies.

There are numerous options, but they are all trade offs. Admitting fewer out of state and international students, increasing FA, better recruiting and letting students know about the FA, all would help, but they also may not be possible with a limited budget. And yes, a holistic approach that focuses less on scores and more on what students accomplished in the context of their unique background would also help, but such options are often limited for public colleges. Having the highest ACT scores doesn’t mean the students that are most likely to make UM a better place or most likely to be what UM considers successful. In the end, it’s a matter of what the university priorities. UM is a great school, and many including the university may be perfectly satisfied with the status quo.

33

An obvious one is to stop giving preference to legacies, which is basically adding unearned privilege to advantage.

But then maybe they do not want to increase the number of students from low income families, since it would cost more financial aid money.

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http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/06/legacy-preferences-make-a-lot-of-sense-up-to-a-point-becker.html

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@data10, the CDS does not reflect admitted stats - it is students who enrolled. Logically each student will take their best offer, which will often be below the median admitted rate. The bottom 25% includes a lot of athletes, currently about 1000, which is about 5% of the class. It also includes many where academics are not the sole criteria, such as many of the artists and musicians in the SMTD. We are talking about a lot of universities competing for a very small number of high stat kids in that 33-36 ACT range.

There are a lot of legacy kid who don’t get admitted. We know several. Some are even children of UM professors.From what we’ve seen legacy only gets you first shot at EA unless you have a special legacy - like football coaches or building names or regents.

36

That’s the standard way of listing score ranges – the scores of students who actually attend the college; not the scores of students who apply to the college, but attend elsewhere. UM has a low yield on OOS admits, with many likely using the non-binding EA as a backup/safety, so you’ll see notable differences between the two groups.

37

That is probably due to full pay OOS families not seeing the value in paying sticker price. That was definitely the case with many of our friends, some who did not qualify or in-state tuition because their parents lived OOS and they did not attend a Michigan HS long enough. In-state full pay families get a much better deal and have a much higher yield.

38

@ucbalumnus,

I think your harping on the legacy preference is a bit overdone. Michigan does consider legacy, but according to their CDS it’s only “considered.” First-gen is “important,” i.e., it weighs more heavily in the applicant’s favor than does legacy. So I doubt that legacy is actually excluding any qualified first-gens…

And note that Michigan’s chief instate rival, Michigan State, also considers legacy, and at MSU first-gen is only “considered,” yet their student body as whole is less affluent than Michigan’s. Of course, it could be that Michigan’s legacy families are more affluent on the whole than MSU’s—actually, I’d guess that’s likely. But my sense, as a Michigan native and University of Michigan alum who still maintains close ties to the state and to the school, is that Michigan really is the school of first choice for most of the state’s affluent families, regardless of their legacy ties to the school—except perhaps for those with legacy ties to Michigan State. (Note that relative to its population, the state of Michigan sends really quite small numbers of students to top privates; there are some, to be sure, but the limited data available suggest few Michiganders even apply to top privates, largely because they’re quite satisfied with their instate public options).

I think one of the main reasons Michigan considers legacy is to boost OOS yield. Their in-state yield is extremely high, OOS much lower, in large part because until very recently they didn’t provide much need-based FA to OOS students. That also skews the OOS student body much more affluent. But it just stands to reason that the Michigan brand has greater appeal to OOS legacies than to the general OOS applicant pool. So if legacy is excluding anyone, it’s probably non-legacy affluent OOS applicants—but yield among that group is quite low anyway.

Michigan does get some low- and moderate-income OOS students, more so recently since they’ve improved FA for OOS students, But on the whole, the OOS students are still overwhelmingly affluent to downright stinkin’ rich. That’s why the percentage of students on Pell grants is also a bit misleading. The student body is now roughly 60-40 instate-to-OOS. If the 15% of all students on Pell grants were all instate, they’d represent 25% of the instate students. We know it’s not quite that high because, as I said, they get some OOS students on Pell grants. But I’d guess the percentage of instate students on Pell grants is probably somewhere well north of 20%.

That’s not high enough, IMO. I do think the university is sincere in wanting to expand economic diversity. But I think over the years they’ve found it too easy to recruit top students from the top instate schools, which unsurprisingly are concentrated in the most affluent communities. Last time I checked something like 60% of their instate students came from the state’s 3 most affluent counties. And from those students’ perspective, why not? For affluent instate students—many of whom would be full-pay or somewhere close to it at private colleges and universities— the combination of price and quality is hard to beat. But it’s up to the university to avoid the path of least resistance, and redouble its efforts to recruit outside of Oakland and Washtenaw Counties.

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[quote=@Data10]

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In point of fact, Michigan does use a holistic admissions process. Standardized test scores are less important in their rating of applicants than at, e.g., Michigan State which rates test scores “very important” as opposed to merely “important” at Michigan. The problem, though, is that many of the factors they consider—academic rigor of HS curriculum, essays, LORs, extracurriculars, level of student’s interest—also tend to favor affluent applicants from affluent schools.

That said, I’ve seen the actual score sheet Michigan uses to rate each applicant, and they do try to contextualize all this to the opportunities available to each applicant and other factors unique to the student’s background and life experience. And they do weigh factors like first-gen and work experience (which often takes precedence over extracurriculars for students from low- and moderate-income households).

I think the problem isn’t so much with how they evaluate applicants, and more with where they concentrate their outreach and recruitment. They’re also fighting an uphill battle against perceptions at this point. Even back in my day—more years ago than I care to admit—Michigan was seen in many quarters as a “rich kids’ school.” My own mother had her doubts about my attending. She was afraid I’d fall in with a bunch of rich kids who I couldn’t keep up with financially, and I’d be miserable, or ostracized, or both. That can be a very powerful deterrent keeping low- and moderate-income students from even applying.