Interesting. Last year we had 11 accepted and 8 went.
@NYMomof2, if anything, it’s probably harder to get in to UMich OOS than 7 years ago. Without knowing how many that HS was sending to UMich 7 years ago and how many it’s sending to Ivies/equivalents then and now, that number doesn’t say much.
My family is from Michigan. They mostly went to MSU, EMU, Ferris, etc. I was raised in Ohio, so maybe it is like going to Kent State instead of Ohio State? Still a great experience though. All of them loved their schools.
UM-college is a life long connection and UM will give him that “family” for the rest of his life. You have the money saved and he is obviously a good student. Let him decide, but I would not sway him away from your flagship university.
@HRSMom , @NYMomof2 Michigan admits the top 6.5% of Michigan high school students. 80% of the in-state students who are accepted attend. The 6.5% figure has not changed in 30 years, there are just fewer in-state HS students now, and along with a small capacity increase, the OOS percentage is much higher. There are a certain number of ‘diversity’ admissions, but a lot of those go to rural in-state residents.
@TooOld4School, the UMich OOS admit rate is now far below the in-state admit rate.
@PurpleTitan , I was referring to the in-state yield. If the OOS yield was the same as the in-state yield, Michigan’s OOS admit rate would be under 10%.
You sure can tell the Mi folk from the out if state folk. Bottom line is there are pros and cons to u of m just like any school and it is, as the statistics point out, not for everyone … even instate kids. My sib’s kid who turned down u of m chose JMU at MSU for IR.
Thank you, @TooOld4School.
This is my opinion and experience. I went to emu for the first two years to save some money and then transferred to umich for the last two years to get a degree from Michigan. So not only did I take advantage of a scholarship available to me at emu, I will be able to graduate with a degree from Michigan. I hope this helps.
For the sake of discussion, let’s assume a scenario where MI universities are squeezed further in budget. Let’s say the state cuts more funds from the University System. Which school is likely to be hurt more by this? Hopefully this doesn’t happen but the seeds of this have been planted in several states. It may get worse before it gets better. And some school are better positioned to withstand damage from this than others.
Ditto for Eastern. It’s a great school with small classes and attention from faculty who actually teach. Get your son involved in the Undergraduate Symposium and he will not regret it.
Typically, when states cut higher education budgets, directionals are the first affected and the flagship, while impacted and hurting, is often able to keep things going. If you need examples, look at Illinois, PASSHE schools, Arizona directionals, Wisconsin directionals… UMichigan has an endowment worthy of a private elite university and is, as such, relatively independent if the state’s budget choices or constraints. It’s not competing with other Michigan schools, but rather its peers are UC Berkeley, UCLA, UVA, Unc Chapel Hill plus national private universities.
A budget punch that’d knock a normal public university out would be like The Rock punching a tank when hitting UMichigan.
Michigan is blessed with numerous good universities within the public system. 6 of them that have medical schools and 3 that have excellent engineering schools that are generally recruited similarly. I think it is very difficult for an in-state student to make a “bad choice.” For certain majors it is even not a bad idea to move away from the two flagships. Many a PA I know went to Central. Many a pharmacist to Ferris…and that is just the beginning. Historical per student state funding as been slowly adjusted to be more equally distributed across the system and there is pressure to allocate by pupil but currently funding is comes through what is known as the “base,” money coming to the universities the same way it has been coming for decades. Then, additional money slated for the universities is divided up based on a formula that looks at performance measures like graduation rates, percentage of students getting Pell Grants and percent of budget spent on instruction, along with several other items. In order to qualify for that pot of money, universities have to stay under a tuition cap, set this year at 3.2%. This year, $20 million — or a 1.5% increase in total higher education funding — was divided up using the performance funding and a few unis have eschewed the state funding and raised tuition. Michigan does have a huge endowment, but it also has many obligations and for the most part operates very similarly to MSU although U of M has been far more vocal about wanting the pumped up OSS tuition dollars and is several years into a fund raising campaign for greater financial support for deserving OSS students.
Central Michigan University (Mount Pleasant, MI)
Eastern Michigan University (Ypsilanti, MI)
Ferris State University (Big Rapids, MI)
Grand Valley State University (Allendale, MI)
Lake Superior State University (Sault Ste Marie, MI)
Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI)
Michigan Technological University (Houghton, MI)
Northern Michigan University (Marquette, MI)
Oakland University (Rochester Hills, MI)
Saginaw Valley State University (University Center, MI)
University of Michigan- Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI)
University of Michigan- Dearborn (Dearborn, MI)
University of Michigan- Flint (Flint, MI)
Wayne State University (Detroit, MI)*
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI)
I went to EMU and I would absolutely, without question, choose UofM full pay over a full ride at EMU except for maybe a teaching degree. As others have said: you don’t get a do over. You will forever be proud of be a UMich alumni. I am always very reluctant to say where I went to college although I’ve done fine in life. Well enough to pay to send two of mine to UMich.
Looking at the listing of public universities in Michigan, there are ENORMOUS meaningful differences across those schools. For EMU, the 4-year graduation rate is 13% while it is 75% at U of MI. The 25-75 ACT percentile range at EMU is 19-25, while it is 29-33 at U of MI. Without over-interpreting those statistics, still you can see that the type of student and the average experience of the students are both quite different between the two schools. This doesn’t mean that the choice is clear as it depends on lots of factors.
I think that there is little doubt that UM provides more opportunities for a student in both the near and the long term than EMU. If he wants to keep open the maximum options going forward–and since you have saved the money and can afford it–it seems to me that there is no comparison.
Since you live in Ann Arbor, if he needs to save money, could he live at home part of the time if necessary? What kind of debt are you anticipating that he would need to take out in order to graduate from U of M?
The OP hasn’t been back in a while. UM was the “dream school” and the money was there to pay for it, at instate rates. Whose idea was it to go down the road with EMU- the OP, the son, a guidance counselor? Is there something beyond the money that is appealing about EMU? (someone asked this before). Were other schools considered? These schools seem very different. I am in Virginia. A kid who had the ability to get into UVa would seldom be interested in schools like ODU or Radford. Unless money were a big issue. Or a student needed to live at home and commute. Nothing wrong with these schools (or EMU) , but it seems like most top students would not be interested. The picture here is just not clear as we have limited information.
@sevmom It is next to impossible to know, in advance, that any given high school senior will get admitted to U of MI. So having a backup or two is advisable, and EMU is known for giving a handful of top students full rides.
But you may be right…we seem to be talking amongst ourselves without the original poster participating…but maybe just reading without posting, taking in all of our great advice!
My impression is that there are no points for what school you go to on the foreign service written exam, or in the oral assessment.
That said, I think UMich would set the student up much better for this type of career. There are also good chances that the student would go to graduate school before making it into the foreign service (but not required!)