how hard is it to get into uva/unc from OOS?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>im from MA and am interested in UVA and UNC.. but i heard its pretty hard for out of staters to get into it.. is this true?</p>

2

<p>UVA is pretty tough, but they take ~30% out-of-state, so while it will be a bigger challenge, it won't be insane.</p>

<p>As for Chapel Hill, on the other hand, they cap off out-of-state students at 18%, most of which are filled by top athletes. Next to impossible.</p>

3

<p>HeavenWood is right - Carolina reserves about 80% of its spots for in-staters, and athletics are big. So very hard for OOS.</p>

4

<p>Someone from my out of state school just got admitted with a 2300 SAT and 4.31 GPA. Competition is tough.</p>

5

<p>UVA .. i mite give a try.. i guess i'll havta kiss UNC good bye unless i move to n caorlina haha</p>

6

<p>Maybe you can apply early. Can you apply early at Chapil Hill?</p>

7

<p>possibly.. but im not sure if it will be my top choice, i was just considering it because i thought i'd probably go for priv. universities but unc/uva i heard were excellent public institutes so i thought i mite give it a stab that's all =)</p>

8

<p>Yes. Figure that UVa or UNC from out-of-state would be something like Wesleyan, Williams, Brown, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Haverford, Cornell, Vassar, Emory, etc. in terms of admissions. You would want 2100+ SATs and top 10% of your high school class to have any kind of realistic shot from Massachusetts.</p>

9

<p>yup i hav 2200 and im in the top 5% in my class.. 4.0 UW gpa.. i am polylingual and i hav a passion for community service and my ec's are pretty good although i havta say my main passion is learning languages.. not playing on v. soccer or band or math contests (all of which i do anyways) i plan on to study abroad this summer as well as do an intern at a university lab.. probably harvard cuz i kno 2 ppl who work there and can help me land one.. i come from a small priv. school so UNC or UVA mite not b the best for me.. williams and amherst are actually my top choices</p>

10

<p>most of the 20% out of state at UNC is not athletes...</p>

11

<p>Just to bring in some numbers...the average SAT score for UNC Chapel Hill OOS applicants was a 1420 (go to their website and search for "institutional research" if you want to verify). 6740 applicants were admitted at UNC. Of these, 1160 were OOS. Considering UNC's applicant pool, that's an admit rate of 18%. I strongly suspect that a good portion of those 18% are athletes and/or legacies, which makes it that much harder for the average OOS applicant.</p>

12

<p>i was looking at my school profile thru my guidance counselor and i saw that 1 senior this year got admitted thru ED.. which i thought was surprising cuz he didn't get a sports scholarship</p>

13

<p>Here's the thing about Virginia. Out of state legacys make up a significant portion of out of state applicants. These applicants are considered in-staters in terms of selectivity but out of staters when filling the quota. Thus, they fill up many out of state slots even if they are not as qualified as the rest of the applicant pool from out of state. As easy as UVA is to fall in love with, I want you to know just how hard it is to get into from out of state. I wish I had never seen it.</p>

14

<p>From my competitive public high school in MD, which is around 2 hours from UVA, it is easier to get into UNC than UVA. I don't know why that is. They both have average accepted SAT scores from my school of 1416. UNC's avg GPA is 3.75 and UVA's is 3.81. UVA let in 14% from my school and UNC let in 19%. So, it's close, but at my school UVA is harder.</p>

15

<p>D’s private school in Md, 10 years of data.</p>

<p>UNC
Avg accepted GPA (weighted)= 91.3 (out of 100)
Avg accepted SAT = 1336
Accept rate = 31%</p>

<p>UVA
Avg accepted GPA (weighted)= 90.7 (out of 100)
Avg accepted SAT = 1300
Accept rate = 39%</p>

<p>Undoubtedly, there were some legacies in both the UNC & UVA groups.</p>

<p>Fair amount of athletic recruits for both by the scattergram patterns, perhaps a few more for UVA. Another note about UVA: acceptance rate has been declining over the 2 or 3 years.</p>

<p>A better measure may be that there were no UVA rejections above the ~92 GPA/~1425 SAT area; almost the same for UNC…no rejections above ~92 GPA/~1440 SAT.</p>

16

<p>thanks for all the info :D</p>

17

<p>UVa has been waitlisting strong candidates from our (out of state) area for several years (the usual: good ECs, 3.7/3.8 GPA, 1450-1500 SAT on the old test). It has been harder to get into than Emory, Georgetown, and Rice for the sample I'm familiar with. I don't think that relates to its quality but to its need to maintain in-state vesus out of state enrollment.</p>

18

<p>Papa Chicken- my data is the past 3 years so if it is true that UVA has become more competitive recently, that would explain why UVA is harder than UNC from my school. Also, my school does not have a lot of good athletes, so most of the people who applied probably were just normal students trying to get in off of academics.</p>

19

<p>Choc—since I don’t have year-by-tear GPA & SAT info for my D’s school, but do have acceptance history by year, all I can say regarding temporal trends is that acceptance rate appears to have gone down in the last couple of years at UVA, but not UNC. Of course, more sub-par applications could have been submitted recently, but the general trend makes sense as virtually every other college is raising the bar as competition has increased over the last few years.</p>

<p>Also, although I haven’t done a point-by-point calculation on this, I’d say that the non-recruit acceptance SAT averages for the 10 years of data are probably in the mid-high 1300’s for both UNC & UVA, & I’d guess the more recent year’s non-recruit accepted SATs have risen as well, perhaps into the low 1400’s, similar to your school. Bottom line....low 1400’s still seems to be a break point for OOS to either, assuming all other application elements are strong, especially GPA & course rigor.</p>

<p>Here’s The TCCI Naviance site for another Md public school (Wooton) which has acceptance history & scattergrams for both institutions (enter via “guest”):
<a href="https://connection.naviance.com/fc/signin.php?hsid=wootton%5B/url%5D"&gt;https://connection.naviance.com/fc/signin.php?hsid=wootton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The data only go back to 2003, so they are more representative of current conditions. Have a look in particular at the scattergrams. Shows roughly the same thing we have said....accept zone starts getting strong in the low to mid 1400’s. However, accept rate to UNC stands at 14% vs UVA’s 27%....opposite of your school. There are of course many other factors which may be influencing this, notably historic connection between HS gc’s and college adcom’s, and perhaps prevalence of legacies in the applying populations. I wouldn’t read too much into this other than both have tough standards for OOS.</p>

<p>Lifeisgood....by your profile, it does appear that life is in fact good. I wouldn’t get cocky, but I’d bet you have a decent shot at either. If you are serious about UNC & if your OOS private school is on their list, you might want to explore being nominated by your school as a Morehead scholar, an in to UNC. Don’t know much else about the program, but here’s the link:
<a href="http://www.moreheadfoundation.org/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.moreheadfoundation.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

20

<p>Let me give you my personal experience with UNC. Back in the fall of 1991, I applied to 11 American universities, 5 British universities and 2 Canadian universities. In all, I applied to 18 universities, got 16 acceptances and just 2 denials. Here were the universities and the results:</p>

<p>1) Brown University = admitted
2) Columbia University = admitted
3) Cornell University = admitted
4) Duke University = admitted
5) Georgetown University = admitted
6) London School of Economics (UK) = conditional acceptance (ABB)
7) McGill University (Montreal, Canada)
8) Northwestern University = admitted
9) University of Bath (UK) = unconditional offer
10) University of Bristol (UK) = conditional acceptance (BBC)
11) University of California-Berkeley = admitted
12) University of Chicago = admitted
13) University College of London = conditional acceptance (CCC)
14) University of Michigan-Ann Arbor = admitted
15) University of Pennsylvania = admitted
16) University of Toronto (Canada) = admitted</p>

<p>1) University of Cambridge = denied, without even interviewing me! hehe
2) University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill = denied</p>

<p>I'd say UNC is extremely selective for OOS applicants.</p>