<p>More students, fewer spaces: At UW, in-state applicants are struggling for admission.</p>
<p>July 23, 2006
Source: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel </p>
<p>By Megan Twohey</p>
<p>Jul. 23, 2006 (Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News delivered by Newstex) -- </p>
<p>Flash back 25 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and you'd find admissions standards that are sure to shock aspiring Badgers of today.</p>
<p>The university guaranteed admission to all high school graduates in the top half of their class. It accepted more than 80% of applicants.</p>
<p>"I walked upright," Dan Conley, a 1981 graduate, said with a chuckle. "That's how I got in."</p>
<p>How times have changed.</p>
<p>Now students are discouraged from applying without a grade-point average from 3.5 to 3.9, an ACT score of at least 26 and a class rank in the 85th to 96th percentiles. The acceptance rate for Wisconsin residents is 65%. No student is guaranteed a spot in the freshman class, no matter how good his or her grades are.</p>
<p>"I had a student who was denied admission last year with a 3.7 GPA, six Advanced Placement courses and a 27 on the ACT," said Curt Cattanach, college adviser at Whitefish Bay High School. "We're frank with our students: UW-Madison has become very selective."</p>
<p>How did it become so hard to get into the state's flagship university? And what does it mean for Wisconsin?</p>
<p>-- UW-Madison reduced enrollment as demand went up. It wasn't just here -- a college feeding frenzy swept the country.</p>
<p>-- The university moved to accept more students from out of state. These students, who pay about triple the in-state tuition, are arriving with lower grade-point averages and high school rankings than those of their in-state counterparts.</p>
<p>-- The state Legislature scaled back taxpayer support for the University of Wisconsin System. With reduced state support, the collection of 13 universities, 13 colleges and a statewide extension was unable to meet growing demand.</p>
<p>-- Strapped for cash, the system watched a growing number of students leave the state. Since 1989, the number of Wisconsin students attending Minnesota's public universities has more than doubled.</p>
<p>The turning point came in the mid-1980s.</p>
<p>UW-Madison had swelled to more than 30,000 undergraduates. As Provost Patrick Farrell recalled, the university was "drowning in students."</p>
<p>Classrooms were overcrowded. Few students could graduate on time. Students, faculty, legislators -- everyone was upset.</p>
<p>It wasn't just UW-Madison. In 1986, the Legislative Audit Bureau slammed the entire UW System for haphazard enrollment. While some of the state's four-year universities were accepting more students than they could accommodate, others had too few undergraduates.</p>
<p>"System Administration has not managed enrollment effectively," the audit said.</p>
<p>The system's response was to slash nearly 7,000 seats from crowded campuses over the next decade, with UW-Madison absorbing most of the cuts.</p>
<p>The Legislature provided its blessing. The number of high school graduates was declining. Even with the enrollment cuts, the UW System continued to enroll 30% of the state's high school graduates.</p>
<p>"It seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time," said state Rep. Marlin Schneider (D-Wisconsin Rapids), who was then co-chairman of the Joint Finance Committee.</p>
<p>But with the reduction in enrollment, UW-Madison found itself facing more strong applicants than it had space for.</p>
<p>In 1990, the university began using standardized test scores to determine whether to admit up to one-fifth of its freshman class. It would be the first of many adjustments to its admissions policies. Within a decade, the entire practice would be reformed. Higher numbers of successful students would find themselves turned away.</p>
<p>The 'arms race'</p>
<p>By the mid-1990s, the college-age population was growing, and so was the demand for college degrees. With the manufacturing sector collapsing and blue-collar jobs disappearing, students came to view college as a ticket to the middle class.</p>
<p>Increasing numbers began throwing themselves into Advanced Placement classes, extracurricular activities or anything that could boost their chances of getting into the universities of their choice.</p>
<p>Between the mid-1980s and the mid-'90s, the percentage of U.S. high school students enrolling in colleges and universities increased from around 60% to nearly 75%, according to data compiled by Tom Mortenson, a researcher at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.</p>
<p>"Middle- and upper-income families became engaged in an arms race with their neighbors to prepare their children for college," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "You started to see crop after crop of amazing applicants."</p>
<p>The state's flagship university became especially attractive as the cost of private universities rose higher and higher.</p>
<p>Between 1985 and 2005, annual in-state tuition at UW-Madison jumped from $1,391 to $6,284. The cost of a four-year degree at a typical private university climbed to more than $100,000. Top students in Wisconsin who once would have set their sights on elite private universities began opting for the bargain instead.</p>
<p>"I've had students who have gotten into Brown University, Boston College and New York University who choose to go to UW-Madison because it's more affordable," said Cattanach, of Whitefish Bay High School. "That's being given more and more consideration."</p>
<p>UW-Madison, for its part, ramped up recruitment, with admissions officers reaching out to high school guidance counselors and pursuing top students across the country.</p>
<p>The result: Freshman applications rose more than 40% from 1989 to 2005.</p>
<p>Undergraduate enrollment, meanwhile, grew less than 10%.</p>
<p>Focus on low-cost enrollment</p>
<p>Faced with a rising demand for college degrees, the UW System moved to expand access to UW-Milwaukee and the state's two-year colleges rather than make major adjustments at UW-Madison and the other universities.</p>
<p>The state Legislature had begun reducing its financial support for the system as it confronted mandates to fund health care and a greater portion of K-12 education. Boosting enrollments at the two-year colleges was the least-expensive option for expanding access to higher education, said Kathleen Sell, the system's associate vice president for budget and planning from 1987 to 2002. The system worked to ease the way for graduates of the two-year colleges to transfer to four-year universities.</p>
<p>"It was a deliberate effort to grow enrollment where cost of growth was cheapest," Sell said. "UW-Madison is already a very large institution. Unless we build a bunch of new lecture halls and hire additional faculty, it's really wise to grow enrollment at campuses where it costs the least."</p>
<p>With cuts to enrollment, UW-Madison had increased its retention and graduation rates while reducing its faculty-to-student ratio. The university's leadership was adamant: It did not want to become as big as Ohio State University or the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. "We were convinced there was a level beyond which the quality dropped, that we simply couldn't do a good job," said David Ward, who was UW-Madison's chancellor from 1993 to 2000.</p>
<p>"We recognized there was a need to develop a safety valve, that the answer to the Madison admissions problem was UW-Milwaukee," said David Olien, former senior vice president of administration for the UW System.</p>
<p>From 1996 to 2005, undergraduate enrollment grew 40% at the UW Colleges, 30% at UW-Milwaukee, 3.5% at UW-Madison and 6% at the state's other four-year universities.</p>
<p>No guarantees</p>
<p>With greater numbers of top-notch applicants vying for limited spots, UW-Madison shifted to a less formulaic approach to admissions that guaranteed no one a spot in its freshman class.</p>
<p>Instead of looking merely at test scores, grade-point average and class rank, the university paid more attention to students' extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation and other non-academic factors.</p>
<p>The academic profile of incoming freshmen got better and better. From 1985 to 2005, the average ACT score of those students rose from 24 to 28, while the average high school rank jumped from the 79th to the 89th percentile.</p>
<p>From 1989 to 2005, the acceptance rate for Wisconsin residents dropped from 84% to 65%. The acceptance rate for Minnesota residents, who have a reciprocal agreement to pay tuition that is comparable to in-state students', dropped from 75% to 60%.</p>
<p>"We didn't want to become elite," said Rob Seltzer, UW-Madison's director of admissions. "We were forced to become more selective."</p>
<p>But not all students faced tougher odds. The acceptance rate for students from outside of Wisconsin and Minnesota increased from 61% to 76%.</p>
<p>Seltzer said that was because only a quarter of out-of-state students who are accepted decide to enroll, compared with 63% of in-state students and 45% of Minnesota students.</p>
<p>But there is another reason why students from out of state have had an easier time getting in: The university has been working to enroll more of them.</p>
<p>Non-residents pay about three times the tuition that students from Wisconsin and Minnesota pay. UW System policy allows up to 25% of UW-Madison undergraduates to be from outside of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The university has yet to reach that limit.</p>
<p>With state support becoming a shrinking percentage of its budget, the university needs non-resident tuition to help pay the bills.</p>
<p>"If we're far below 25 percent," Seltzer said, "there are income issues that come into play."</p>