Bama’s new numbers!
Upper Quartile is now an ACT 32+
and look how many applied last year! 33,700!
I remember when the app numbers were less than 10k!!!
from Collegeboard
Only 51% of Bama’s applicants are accepted! Getting quite selective!
Auburn, on the other hand, does not have numbers like Bama’s
17000 applicants
83% admitted
upper quartile ACT 31+
This is great news as maybe we will have to stop explaining why our son chose Alabama… I was having lunch yesterday and discussing our sons choice to select Alabama over Chapel Hill. A waitress shopped dead In her tracks and questioned, “Your son chose Alabama over Chapel Hill?” She couldn’t believe it until I explained the scholarships and honors program. She finally congratulated me. Roll Tide!
Someday, hopefully, we won’t have to explain why they chose Alabama.
I just hope that the new numbers doesn’t cause a policy shift at 'Bama. At least, not yet… let my DS’s application go through this fall, and then let the Alabama secret out!
Or is that too selfish… 
Just an observation: if 51% of 33,700 get accepted, that’s 17,000+ acceptances…but only a third of those enroll? The ultimate enrollment figure seems low (the ‘yield’, or whatever the term is)? I know it is a safety application for a lot of smart students. Or ??? Once that ultimate enrollment % figure goes up, then you will see the accepted figure decline, and know the secret is truly out! 
Also, I’m assuming that the quartile figure given is for actual enrolled students, not just those who applied? (There is a huge diff, if not.)
@aeromom
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Just an observation: if 51% of 33,700 get accepted, that's 17,000+ acceptances...but only a third of those enroll? The ultimate enrollment figure seems low (the 'yield', or whatever the term is)?
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this is not bad at all for a public. Publics typically have to accept 2-4 times as many students to get what they need. Yes, one issue is that students often use state schools as safeties, but also there are some who apply and get accepted, but don’t realize that the aid that they want won’t be received.
I remember an OOS modest-income mom on this forum whose child was very excited to go to Bama, but they didn’t realize that merit was based on test scores. The student had a high GPA, but test scores that were below the merit thresholds. They wrongly assumed that his high GPA would mean a huge award (many often make this mistake). Although he was accepted, once they found out that no merit would be forthcoming, he had to stay in state.
The interplay of the three stats (# applied, # accepted, # ultimately enrolled) is what needs to be watched, because they affect each other in opposite directions. Any one of those stats alone, or even two, only tells a part of the improvement story which is UA. It ultimately starts with bums on seats and how many a university can seat.
of admits (or, rather, % of admits) is directly related to how many spots a university can ultimately offer. A university that has 6000 or even 7000 spots for incoming freshman will have completely different ratios to a school that only has 3000 or 4000 spots.
In order for a university like UA to become more selective it either has to have more applications each year (as it has done most dramatically!)…or more of those who are accepted to actually enroll (not sure how this has changed over time at UA, but it remains on the low side at present), or a combination of those two. The % acccepted (often used as a bragging term for ‘selectivity’) is a pretty bogus stat when taken alone. You have to look at how many spots are truly available at a university to understand any ‘improvements’. That’s all I’m saying.
Those stats are available at UAs OIRA page. If you look, http://oira.ua.edu/factwork/e_factbook/admissions-and-new-students/first-time-undergraduate-students/first-time-undergraduate-admissions, you can see that UAs yield rate was in between 43% - almost 60% from 2002 through 2012. I don’t see more recent trend data, though you can calculate the more recent yields by looking at the common data sets for those years. With continued dramatic increases in number of applications, yes, yield has declined a bit. And to a different matter, yes, the figures in the OP are only for those who enrolled.
The Curious Case of UA
The large amount of funding that goes into merit scholarships at UA, is impacting enrollment in rather strange ways. I really can’t find another universality that matches these dynamics.
UA ACT Scores:
30 - 36: 36%
24 - 29: 33%
18 - 23: 31%
I would expect the largest cohort will be the middle range (24-29 for UA), yet the top range is slightly higher. Of equal interest is the bottom range, which is about the same as the other two cohorts.
Lets use Auburn as a comparison:
AU ACT Scores:
30 - 36: 31%
24 - 29: 49%
18 - 23: 20%
AU ACT scores are more of a diamond shape, with the bulk being in the middle range. You’ll find a similar shape at UGA or UF. Another way to look at it, UA has 69% of it’s students with ACT scores of 24+, while AU has 80%. In fact the average ACT score at AU (27) is still slightly higher than UA (26.1), even though UA has a much larger % of students that score in the 30-36 range.
UA is turning into a tale of two student bodies, those in the honor college (almost a 1/3) and those that need to take remedial classes.
Finding a balance between these two extremes will be a challenge (more honor sections for Calc 1 and more College Algebra classes…) but the more immediate challenge is this number:
Freshmen Enrolled: 6,824
That’s an awful lot of freshman to support. There is a reason colleges cap the number of incoming freshman. You can build housing and facilities, but someone still has to teach and advise these students. At some point it will impact the freshman experience. As parents we don’t see the impact, but students stuck in overcrowded chem 1 labs do.
However, no one ever listens to freshman (at least that’s the way it felt when I was one…!), but they do listen to faculty.
Let’s take a look at Faculty and I’ll use AU again for comparison. All of the following data is from CDS.
Total # of Instructional Faculty
UA: Full Time 1,244: Part Time 532: Total: 1776
% Full Time Faculty: 70%
Student to Faculty ratio: 21 to 1
AU: Full Time 1,209: Part Time 175: Total: 1,384
% Full Time Faculty: 87%
Student to Faculty ratio: 18 to 1
While UA has been adding faculty to support the increase in enrollment, it’s having to do it by adding adjunct and assistant (tenure tracked) professors. At some point, UA will have to stop adding (undergraduate) students and focus on building up it’s faculty. That’s one reason for the new focus on building it’s grad programs: to increase research and add more tenured professors.
Lets look at the College of Engineering, the data’s available from ASEE and this is a great example of where UA is significantly growing it’s faculty.
Teaching Tenure-Track
UA
Full Professors: 41 (35%)
Assoc Professors: 48 (41%)
Assistant Professors: 29 (24%)
Total: 118
AU
Full Professors: 88 (63%)
Assoc Professors: 40 (29%)
Assistant Professors: 12 (8%)
Total: 140
Can UA handle 6,824 freshmen? Sure, but how much higher is it willing to drive enrollment? At some point it will have to freeze enrollment. We’ll see next year.
When comparing UA and UGA it is often overlooked that UGA allows superscoring.
OMG Gator88NE…that was a most delicious breakfast of stats for me this morning!!! :bz
Gator88NE,
Thanks for the breakdown. Two things though, first, I think you incorrectly assume that students in the bottom range need remedial classes. I am sure many of them do, but many have high GPAs, and simply don’t do well on standardized entrance exams. Second, while its true that UA’s student/teacher ratio is relatively high, its a little misleading, as UA has a higher percentage of its students in small sized classes (especially with the popularity of the Honors College) than most other schools, including Auburn. So how can we explain the higher student/teacher ratio? Simple, UA has larger auditorium sized classes as well. So it balances out, and if you are going to be in a large class, does it really matter if there are 150 vs. 100?
What puzzles me is that despite its huge enrollment growth, UA hasn’t raised the minimum requirement just a tad bit higher. Even if it raised its recommended minimum ACT from 21 to only 22, it would still likely have a powerful effect on the average score, and the bottom and middle percentile. Maybe it would mean a smaller freshman class, but would it be that much smaller? Isn’t is likely that as word got out about UA’s increased stringency in admissions requirements, that even more of the middle and top range high school students would apply to UA, thus making up the difference? And wouldn’t it help give UA some breathing space to adjust to the tremendous growth, and the resulting need for new faculty? I bet that many of the students just barely getting admitted into UA would work harder to raise their test scores if they knew that UA’s minimum expectations were higher. On a recent FB post, someone said that they had read that UA would have a much smaller class this coming Fall, so maybe the entrance bar has been raised, even if just a bit.
Finally, I think its interesting that so many who clamor for increased diversity look down on schools like UA that have large percentages in the ACT of 23 and below category. Wouldn’t they want their children to go to school with people of diverse backgrounds, diverse skill sets? I guess not when it comes to entrance exam scores. I don’t know, seems kinda hypocritical to me.
Interesting discussion. Just a bit of observation regarding the full professor, assistant professor etc. stats. I work at a university (not in the SEC) and it seems to me that having a good percentage of associate and assistant professors is not such a bad thing. Full professors tend to be older and more experienced, yes. However, other categories tend to be younger and more energetic and accessible. Adjuncts also often bring excellent “on-the-job” experience that shouldn’t be discounted.
Indeed! So true. When I was at a PhD program earlier this decade, it was the younger, “less tenured,” profs who were working hardest to get published, establish reputations! Many of the older, well tenured profs drew huge salaries, despite not having that many classes to teach, and despite they fact that they weren’t pumping out publications to the same degree as the younger ones.
DS had a newly arrived professor for Calculus last semester. He came from Caltech and was very good by all accounts.
Alabama is going to have unique stats because of its high number of recruited high stats students and its high number of AA students who nationally have low scores (ACT national avg 17). Even Auburn doesn’t have the AA numbers that Bama has.
I agree that it’s wrong to assume that those with lowish scores are in remedial classes.
I knew as soon as I typed “remedial” I would get some (likely well deserved) push back, but I loved the dichotomy between honor sections and remedial classes….
I have a (half-baked) theory on why UA hasn’t increased its admission requirements. It’s trying to keep the number of in-state students steady. If the number of in-state students decrease, it will open UA to charges of favoring OOS students over in-state students. So, it has a core group of in-state students that fit an academic profile, while it continues to build its OOS student population who have a different academic profile.
And to M2CK’s point, UA is also likely trying to keep it’s % of AA students high. It’s was as high as 14.2% in 2002 and 2003, but dipped down to the 7% to 8% range from 2005 to 2007, and since then has been around 11-12%.
I agree that many of the best instructors don’t have tenure or even the title of professor. However, I think the numbers help illustrate the increased pressure put on the faculty due to increases in enrollment.
Looking at 2000-2001
Total # of Instructional Faculty
UA: Full Time 859 (vs. 1,244 today): Part Time 177 (vs. 532 today): Total: 1,036 (vs.1776 today)
**% Full Time Faculty: 83%/b
Student to Faculty ratio: 18 to 1 (vs. 21 to 1)
The recession may also have played a role in that it caused an industry wide move (cost cutting) from full time tenured faculty to part time non-tenured staff.
I don’t know if its due to in state students. After all, if you look at the SAT scores, which come more often from students in other states (ACT is the dominant test by far in Alabama), the avg. SAT scores are somewhat lower than the avg. ACT scores, if you convert one to the other to compare.
I think UA has a great business model right now, especially given the low levels of state support it receives, and is afraid to jinx it. Give merit aid to as many top students as possible, and let the lower scoring students help to pay for it. If UA said no more students would be admitted with ACTs of 21 or lower, that would cut out 25 per cent of the incoming class, or at least that percent of last year’s freshman class. Of course, it could play with making minimal ACT and GPA dependent on each other, such as requiring anyone with an ACT of 21 or less to have a minimum GPA of 3.5, thus allowing at least some of those lower scoring, but higher GPA high school students to still be admitted, thus keeping the class size from falling too fast.
It’s becoming fairly common for in-state universities to have lower admissions standards for OOS students than in-state students because OOS students pay higher tuition rates. This has not been the case at UA At the same time, most OOS students at UA are not getting large merit scholarships. What UA is doing is using high stats OOS students to boost its academic profile while using more moderate scoring OOS students to bring in the higher tuition rates. Many OOS students will pay OOS tuition at UA because it allows them to get a flagship college experience not as available to them in their home states for a cost which is often lower then OOS tuition in other states. This began in earnest with the Texas Top 10% rule shutting out good students from UT-Austin and Texas A&M and has since become popular with students from California due to school overcrowding and the high stats required for admission into certain UC campuses.
This funding format is used in other parts of Alabama to help fund state programs. Alabama helps fund state employee pensions with the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail and funds almost all of its state park system through deluxe lodges, golfing, and fishing/hunting permits on land owned by the state park system. The state is currently developing a lodge on the Gulf Coast to help fund more improvements to the state park system.
There are a number of situations where having adjunct instructors are preferable. One example is undergraduate law courses where having a local lawyer or judge teach the course can provide valuable insight into the legal system. I remember an exercise in my business law course where the instructor, a local judge, had students look up lawyers in the phone book. Students would read a name and the judge would recite from memory which types of cases each lawyer would take.