What is the difference between:
Geographic Residency
State Residency
in the college data set info for any given private college? This is found in a table under the admissions section where each criteria is rated by importance.
Both obviously refer to where the applicant lives but I’m guessing the differences are:
—Geographic residency refers to whether or not the state of residence is considered in terms of creating a geographically diverse student body.
—State residency refers to quotas per state and mainly applies to public universities.
Can someone clarify this for me and what it means for private college admissions?
Thanks!
Geographic residency can be either smaller (e.g. Northern California) or larger (e.g. New England) than state residency.
For private colleges that consider geographic diversity, my guess is that it can go 2 ways. e.g. colleges that limit international to a percentage of the total or, as an example from the flip side, Penn that gives some preference to Philadelphia-area applicants.
@skieurope
I thought geographic/state residency might be considered in terms of creating a geographically diverse class. For example, a small East coast LAC might be more likely to accept a student from Alabama than Massachusetts, all other stats being equal of course. I neglected to consider this from an international perspective.
So, to clarify, your thought is that “state residency” refers to the state the applicant is from and “geographic residency” refers to a larger geographic area, either foreign or domestic.
I still don’t quite understand how this applies to admissions. For example, the majority of colleges indicate they do NOT consider state residency but they DO consider geographic residency. What do you think this means? Sorry to sound like a dummy. ?
Another example of the difference: the CSUs in California use state residency (the minimum threshold for admission is higher for non-California residents), but many also have a local area residency preference, related to their historical mission of offering accessible college education to students in their local areas.