Michigan now has close to 30,000 undergraduate students and 46,000 total students. While I appreciate the need for tuition revenues, Michigan’s size is out control. It really needs to get back to its optimal size if 20,000-24,000 undergraduate students and 35,000-40,000 total students.
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/10/university_of_michigan_sees_en.html
Wow. OOS acceptance rate is now less than half of in-states. I’d wager that the OOS applicant pool also has better stats.
OOS admission rate lower than half of instate is no news as it was the case for 2015 and almost the case in 2014 too, This year, the freshmen class size has a near 10% increase while there the senior class was 5% over enrolled 3 years ago. The 3% increase in total enrollment is also expected.
Did UMich expect these increases? As in, have they built more dorms to accommodate more students?
Moose, Michigan has the resources to accommodate those students, such improved dorms, additional dorm space, and increased faculty. Unfortunately, that does not mean that the University should be growing the size of its students body. If Michigan limited itself to just 20,000 undergrads, I think the undergraduate experience would be a lot better.
The kicker here is that while total enrollment at UMichigan reaches record highs, the enrollment of Michigan residents is well below peak levels. In other words, as UMichigan has gotten larger, the number of slots given to in-state students has gotten smaller – in absolute terms, not just as a percentage.
New Freshmen Enrollment, In-State:
3,924 Fall 2009
3,893 Fall 2010
3,713 Fall 2011
3,542 Fall 2012
3,661 Fall 2013
3,571 Fall 2014
3,472 Fall 2015
3,391 Fall 2016
3,553 Fall 2017
http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/factsfigures/freshprof_umaa_fall13.pdf
http://www.ro.umich.edu/report/17enrollmentsummary.pdf
Of course, the percentage of in-state freshmen has dropped as well. It was 64.6% in Fall 2009, but only 51.9% in Fall 2017. If this pattern continues, Michigan residents could be a minority at UMichigan in a few years.
I would expect the non-resident students to have better stats than the in-state students. So if Michigan enrolls more and more OOS students, while cutting back on the number in-staters, their selectivity and USN&WR ranking will benefit.
Of course, this strategy may not benefit Michigan residents, but then again USN&WR doesn’t consider that factor when ranking state universities.
The number of Michigan HS seniors has been steadily dropping too.
Well, that’s true. And in that situation, there are two possible responses:
(1) A school could keep its admissions standards unchanged, which means that in-state enrollment will fall. This is the approach that Michigan has chosen:
(2) Alternatively, a school could keep in-state enrollment unchanged, which means allowing in-state admissions standards to fall. For example, Franzblau could equally well have said something like: "Traditionally we've had somewhere in the range of 4.5 percent of high school graduates in Michigan enrolling in the University of Michigan, but now that pool is getting smaller -- so we can increase that number to around 6 percent."For comparison, the University of California system offers a place to any high school graduate in the top 12.5 percent.
True … but the UC system has 10 campuses. How many of the top 12.5% (or is it top 9% now) get to go to the Berkeley campus? Some of the top 12.5% not admitted to any of the campuses of their choices were invited to attend Merced.
Exactly GoBlue81.
The point is not that Michigan should try to match the UC system. It would be unreasonable to expect Michigan to provide the same degree of statewide access as the 9 undergraduate UC campuses combined (the 10th campus is graduate-only).
The point of bringing up the 12.5% number was simply to show that Michigan could target a number greater than 4.5%. And this is definitely reasonable. It’s true that if Michigan bumped that number up, to say 5 or 6%, their in-state enrollment would rise by hundreds of students. But that’s not exactly a science-fiction scenario – because Michigan was enrolling hundreds of additional in-state students just a few years ago.
Question: would that mean reducing the number of in-state slots even further?
The 4.5% in the quote above is the fraction of the Michigan HS population in any year who are admitted and choose to attend in a given year. That is not equivalent to the same as UC (or Texas} guarantee to the top 12% or 8% or whatever, because some fraction of the top say 10% in California will choose to go somewhere else besides their state flagship(s). You would have to add up the actual in state enrollment at the UCs and compare to the HS graduating numbers in a given year. My guess is you would get something around 1/2 that number, or something similar to UM’s fraction of graduating seniors.
OK, forget the comparison to California or Texas. Let’s compare what Michigan is doing to another state university faced with a decreasing number of high school graduates. How about Michigan State?
For Fall 2009, MSU enrolled 7,416 new freshmen. Of those, 12.5% were out-of-state. So this implies that MSU enrolled 6,489 Michigan residents as freshmen.
https://opb.msu.edu/functions/institution/documents/CDS2009_2010_v2.pdf
For Fall 2016, MSU enrolled 8,190 new freshmen. Of those, 16.6% were out-of-state. So this implies that MSU enrolled 6,830 Michigan residents as freshmen.
https://opb.msu.edu/functions/institution/documents/cds-2016_2017.pdf
Both UM and MSU are faced with the same declining high school population statewide. But they are reacting in two completely different ways. UM has decreased its in-state enrollment by hundreds of students since 2009. At the same time, MSU has expanded its in-state enrollment by hundreds of students.
Which strategy is better? If the goal is to provide access to higher education for state residents – which seems like a reasonable goal for a state university – then I would have to pick MSU.
I think it may be slightly more complicated for MSU because the 16.6% number excludes international students from both the numerator and denominator, while I think the 8190 # of new freshman includes international students. They definitely upped the number of international students in some recent time frame, which could account for a lot of the increase in # of freshman from 2009 to 2016.
I think the question for UM is whether the decline in # of in state freshman is the same as the decline of the number of high school students, or steeper.
OK, it appears that you are correct. So I recalculated MSU’s numbers from the 2009 and 2016 CDS as follows:
(1) Get total number of new freshmen (full and part time) from C1.
(2) Get “non-resident alien” freshmen from B2 and subtract from the total. And it’s true that this number has been rising at MSU, from 682 in Fall 2009 to 1,081 for Fall 2016.
(3) Get out-of-state freshmen percentage from F1 and apply to corrected total (after subtracting the non-resident aliens).
In this case, MSU goes from 5,892 in-state freshmen in Fall 2009 to 5,928 in-state students in Fall 2016. So in reality, there has been little change in the number of in-state students at MSU. But if the number of high school grads is falling, then this still means that access to MSU is improving.
UM and MSU can still be used as examples of the two different strategies described in Post #7 above:
UM: Let in-state enrollment fall, as statewide high school population falls.
MSU: Keep in-state enrollment the same, as statewide high school population falls.
Again, which strategy is better? And again, if the goal of a state university is to provide access to higher education for state residents, then MSU’s strategy is preferable.
^Michigan is not going to lower its admission standards, which it would need to in order to enroll a larger % of Michigan students.
OTOH MSU would need to lower its admission standards to enroll more out-of-state students.
@Alexandre
While I agree that UM’s growth seems unsustainable, UM would literally need to not admit new students for a year or two to even come close the the numbers you suggest would be ideal. Bigger than ever before appears to be the new norm. The only question is whether there is a limit to the growth.
You may be right. But in that case, UM will likely become a state university that mostly serves out-of-state students.
For Fall 2017, UM enrolled 3,553 in-state freshmen and 3,294 out-of-state freshmen. The number of Michigan high school graduates is projected to drop by 10% over the next decade. If the number of Michigan high school grads in the UM freshman class drops by a corresponding 10%, then they will become a minority relative to the out-of-staters, even assuming zero growth in out-of-state enrollment.
Would the citizens of Michigan would be better served by a UM that did enroll more Michigan students, even if this meant lowering admissions standards? I am not a Michigan resident myself, so I am not in a position to make that call. But it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if some people in Michigan felt that way.
If you look at the almanac data, the number of instate students has been around 16,500 between 2006 and 2016. It reached a peak around 17,000 in 2010-2011 but then it decline gradually to 16,323 in 2016. So it dropped ~4% from the peak. In contrary, the number of OOS as well as international students increased over 35%. Note that the yield rate of OOS students has increased from ~25% to 30%. It is expected to go even higher as they provide better financial aid to low income OOS students now. Unless they admit even less OOS students, the number of enrolled OOS students will certainly increase. As the number of Michigan HS graduate will continue to drop to ~94,000 in 2020, it is not surprising to have more OOS and international students combined than instate students within the next 2-3 years, and perhaps even in this admission cycle.