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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.
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It’s not half-baked, it’s on target.
Alabama is a state school and knows that its mission is to educate its state’s students. It knew it had to grow the school so that the increased OOS student numbers would not occupy seats that would normally go to instate students.
Bama is also committed to educating its states African American students and other rural students who typically have lower test scores because often their K-12 schools have not been the best.
Therefore, the school will likely always have a lower 1/3 of students with very modest scores.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/auburn-university-1009
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-alabama-1051 I found the data that I was referring to in an earlier response in this thread to someone’s comment about class size. As you can see by looking for class size info at the two links, UA has a higher percentage of classes with under 20 students than Auburn, despite the fact that UA’s student/faculty ratio is higher than Auburn’s.
On a different matter, one thing puzzles me about the “new numbers.” UA says that the bottom 25% of freshman had an ACT of 21 or below. Yet, looking at the common data set for last Fall, we see that 31% of freshman had an ACT of 23 or lower. That means that the percentage of freshman with an ACT of 22 or 23 would have to be only about 6% of the freshman class, which seems very odd to me. Why would you have so many more (around 25%) students with an ACT of 21 or less than those with an ACT of 22 or 23?
This doesn’t strike me as unusual… quick math says that for every freshman admitted with a score of 22 or 23, 4 freshman with scores of 21 or below are admitted. A ratio of 1 to 4, in short.
Using ACT’s own percentile ranking of their scores, this is not far removed from standard distriution. A 23 composite equates to 68th percentile, and a 21 equates to a 56th… so the range 22-23 represents 12% of the students who took the test, compared to 56% for 21 and below. This is a ratio of 1 to 4.5.
For reasons that mom2collegekids cited, UA is likely accepting moderate and lower ACT scoring students at roughly the same distribution as the general student populace- accepting by looking ‘holistically’ at factors beyond ACT scores.
Except UA is rejecting almost half of all applications it receives. So your explanation would require that about half of applications to UA have very low ACT (lower than 22) or low GPA scores. So I find your explanation hard to to believe, but you could be right nonetheless. Maybe UA gets about half of its applications from low scoring students. But again, that doesn’t really make sense, as we know that UA receives about 20 to 25 thousand more applications each year than it used to get before the late 00s. Are we to believe that most of those come from low achieving students?
Keep in mind that UA is dealing with two pools of applicants, OOS and in-state. They’ve been keeping the in-state student enrollment number flat,while growing OOS enrollment. Most of the increase in applications has come from OOS students.
UA is rejecting higher state OOS students once it hits it’s projected OOS enrollment. On the other hand, UA will keep accepting lower stat in-state students till it hit’s it’s projected targeted for in-state enrollment.
If it didn’t do this, in-state enrollment would tank.
You might be correct, but so far, no one has shown that UA in state students have more low ACT scoring students than do out of state students. I would not be surprised to learn that there is a higher percentage of high scoring students among out of staters, but that doesn’t mean that most of the low scoring students are from Alabama. If out of state students were more exceptional than in state students, then why are the avg. SAT scores (out of state students take this exam far more than do instate students) lower than the avg. ACT scores?
More details on why it’s hard to recruit high stat (ACT) in-state students. There simply isn’t enough of them. Only about 38,000 students in Alabama tested via the ACT. Of these 31% met the ACT Math Benchmark (Score =22), 43% hit the reading (Score =22), 31% hit the Science (Score =23), and only 21% hit all 4 targets (including the English target of 18). Using the 21% number that comes out to 7,980 students.
UA now has to compete for these 8,000 students against Auburn, OOS schools, and other more affordable in-state options. It’s a challenge recruiting the 2,500 or so in-state (freshman) students that UA wants each year.
I didn’t take into account in-state SAT takers, but this gives you a sense of the challenged faced by UA.
http://www.act.org/newsroom/data/2014/pdf/profile/Alabama.pdf
“You might be correct, but so far, no one has shown that UA in state students have more low ACT scoring students than do out of state students.” I should have written, You might be correct, but so far, no one has shown that UA in state students have a higher percentage of low (22 and below) ACT scoring students than do out of state students.
" If out of state students were more exceptional than in state students, then why are the avg. SAT scores (out of state students take this exam far more than do instate students) lower than the avg. ACT scores? "
DS took the SAT and was just shy of the Presidential Scholarship. He could have taken it a second time, but we chose the ACT.
He did some prep for the ACT, that he didn’t do for the SAT.
He ended up w/ 33 ACT, and that is what we sent to UA. We are VERY grateful that UA has provided DS with such a great opportunity. He was given next to nothing from Penn State and Pitt, in state options for us.
That may explain why the top SAT scores are lower than the top ACT scores, but not why the bottom percentile SAT scores are lower than the bottom ACT scores. Or do people generally do better on the ACT?
“no one has shown that UA in state students have a higher percentage of low (22 and below) ACT scoring students than do out of state students.”
You’re right, and I doubt those numbers would be made publicly available anyway…
About the only thing I think can be said is that students who enroll out-of-state (at least at public 4 year universities) have higher ACT scores, on average, than those who enroll in-state. But whether that applies to UA, or with specific regards to scores below 23, is beyond my idle afternoon’s worth of investigating to uncover.
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Except UA is rejecting almost half of all applications it receives.
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But, likely many of those are OOS low scores. Bama is accepting the instate low scores
What happens if Alabama at some point discontinues the scholarship program for OOS? Are they going to become dependent on the scholarships to keep the ACT/SAT averages and the enrollment numbers up after all the growth at Alabama?
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no one has shown that UA in state students have a higher percentage of low (22 and below) ACT scoring students than do out of state students.
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Well, any state that has high AA numbers, like Alabama does, is going to have a higher percentage of low ACT scoring students since the average ACT score for AA students is 17
There could be any number of reasons why students with higher test scores might be rejected. The likely explanations are that they were OOS students or had a low GPA. UA doesn’t admit purely based on test scores and GPA, so the students with lower test scores may have benefited from a holistic application review.
Question, does UA have open admissions for those who apply early? Because I’ve haven’t seen anyone, on this site or elsewhere, get rejected by Alabama…
This is a sample of one but when we did the honors tour last month, we were in an exceptionally large tour group. In the entire gathering, there was exactly 1 student from the state of Alabama. And she was a sophomore who was there just for information.
@CaliCash UA is “Somewhat selective” with 51% of applicants being admitted.
Regular Applicants Fall 2014
Total applicants: 33,736
Admitted: 17,221
Enrolled: 6,824
Keep in mind that most students posting on CC tend to have fairly competitive stats.All those talking about UA on CC, likely talk about it because they qualify for a merit scholarships. A student with poor stats in California would likely choose one of the excellent local community colleges or state colleges, instead of paying full OOS cost ($24K/year in tuition) at UA.
Another way to look at it, what’s the chances that you would know one of the few hundred students (in a state with 38 million people) in California that do end up enrolling at UA?
^^
You’d be surprised. Well, I don’t “know” them, but I’ve met Calif people here on CC who:
One family lives in the same subdivision as my brother.
One family’s kids to to the same high school as my cousin’s kids
One girl went to my high school (a small all girls high school).
…and many others with “common ties”.
But to answer Cali’s question…Bama seems to have very liberal admissions policies early in the app season. As the season goes on, things tighten up a lot.
Florida gator may not realize this, but many OOS students are paying full freight.
I think @Gator88NE’s point was that there aren’t a ton of full-pay OOS kids and families active here in the UA forums on CC. There are a few (and a ton more on the FB groups), but at least as long as I’ve been coming here (about two years), the vast majority of activity seems to be from OOS families attracted to the incredible merit awards.
@SouthernHope when my son and I toured this month last year we ended up in a general bus tour group, all of whom were from OOS. They weren’t all Honors College students, but every single one was a HS senior who’d already received their acceptances and had come to campus to help them make a final decision.