<p>As expected there has already been a significant increase of applications this year over last with approximately 22,000 students applying EA over 19,000 last year, a 16% increase. If the yield remains relatively constant, and the regular admissions pool sees the same increase, we can expect a total of about 49,000 applicants and a total admission rate of of 31-33%. This begs the question, when will the amount of applications level out? Should we keep expecting this increase for the near future, or is it nearing an end?</p>
<p>I have been saying it all along KronOmega, Michigan is going to experience a similar trend to Chicago. Although Michigan was always considered a top 10 or top 15 university in academe, corporate America, anf the intellectual elite, among high school students, it was considered a borderline top 25 university, primarily because of its acceptance rate. The recent surge, and this year’s 15%-18% increase will ensure that the University will experience a 15% increase in applicant pool for the next 3-4 years. Come 2017, Michigan will receive over 70,000 applications for 16,000 spots. The only thing that kept top applicants from applying to Michigan in the past was its 50%-60% acceptance rate. With the acceptance rate dropping to 30% this year, it’s going to be a feeding frenzy for the next few years. </p>
<p>How long with the applicant pool grow at this pace? It really depends on when the perceived admissions selectivity no longer seems worth the hassle. This could happen at 25%, 20%, 15% or 10%. Given the strength of Michigan’s academic programs, size of its endowment, location in one of the great college towns, strong school spirit and athletic excellence, I think top students will consider worth applying to Michigan even if its acceptance rate drops well below 25%. the next 3-4 years will be very interesting.</p>
<p>I mostly agree with Alexandre. Michigan’s undergrad reputation is a bit understated. High school students worship US News’s biased rankings far too much. I did as well. </p>
<p>One note: I don’t think Michigan’s admission rates will sink as fast as Chicago’s because our yields/matric. rates are not too good (correct me if I’m wrong). </p>
<p>What will be more interesting to me is that as each admission cycle becomes more competitive, classes at Michigan will become more competitive/challenging as well.</p>
<p>ThisIsMichigan, the University no longer has a 2:1 IS:OOS ratio. The IS percentage has dropped to 60% and is likely to drop more in the coming years. </p>
<p>ab2013, Chicago’s yield (37%) is slightly lower than Michigan’s (40%). However, Michigan’s OOS yield (32%) rate is slightly lower than Chicago’s.</p>
<p>Thanks for the stats Alexandre! I certainly helped Michigan’s yield / reduced Chicago’s yield by a very small decimal percentage 4 years ago… haha</p>
<p>The only reason I thought that Chicago’s yield rate is higher is that when I declined Chicago’s offer, my admissions counselor seemed a bit surprised.</p>
<p>That information is out of date as Chicago’s yield is now a whopping 47% and is set to grow more in the years to come now that its being thought of a possible top 5 undergrad instead of a top 10-15 undergraduate institution (a reputation UChicago had well into the early 2000s). Michigan’s will most likely dip a few percentage points on the other hand since its lowered acceptance rate isn’t translating to a higher USNWR ranking.</p>
<p>
So, in your estimation, Michigan will shrink its class size by 25% and receive almost 33% more applications than it does now in 5 years? I guess anything can happen but its more likely that UMich will plateau out at 50,000 applications or so and keep their total undergraduate population at 22,000-23,000</p>
<p>Chicago’s rise to stardom is tough for any school to emulate since it already had a high reputation among university presidents and high school counselors as well as boasted small class sizes and high graduation rates. Getting the word out there about its academic programs and joining the Common App was just the crank that set the wheels in motion for UChicago.</p>
<p>Actually i think the # of apps could go up even more than expected, if the fundraiser makes it more realistic for OOS middle class to attend. Then again, maybe not, cause you see on these boards many don’t seem to contemplate the cost until well after they’re accepted.</p>
<p>Goldenboy, I think Alexandre was saying that there would be 70,000 applicants for 16,000 spots… of which about 5500-6000 would matriculate. So the undergraduate student body would stay approximately the same. </p>
<p>Steellord, the CC community has a very unique demographic of students. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the CC community to all UM applicants.</p>
<p>Goldenboy, I was referring to the drop of the Chicago acceptance rate from 40% 6 years ago to 15% today. During that time, Chicago’s typical yield rate was 37%. Only last year has it leapt to 47%. From 2000 until 2011, its yield averaged 35% and never exceeded 39%. Michigan will also experience a similar yield rate as its appeal to high schoolers rises, and this will happen naturally as the admissions rates drop. 50% four years ago to 30% this year. </p>
<p>As for my numbers, I was referring to 70,000 applicants (it will plateau at that number if not more by 2017) and 16,000 acceptances (which is the number of students Michigan usually admits in order to get a freshman class of 6,000. This will change as Michigan becomes better at meeting financial need (and it will) and becomes perceived as being more exclusive (this is important to high schoolers). I expect Michigan’s yield to rise from its historic 40% to a more robust 45%+ in the coming years. The yield would rise significantly higher than 45% if Michigan maintained its 65% instate percentage, but it won’t. In the next 3-4 years, 50% of incoming freshmen will likely be OOS. </p>
<p>I am not sure why you assume that Michigan’s applicant pool will plateau at 50,000. We should hit this mark (48,000+ applicants) this year. Do you honestly think Michigan’s applicant pool will stop growing after this year? You predicted that Michigan’s applicant pool would only grow by 5% this year. I was expecting 15%. Guess we were both wrong. Michigan’s applicant pool will likely grow by even more than 15%. Michigan does not even send out “reminders” to applicants to complete their application, or to prospective applicants to apply. It has to be the most hands-off university among elite institutions where marketing to high schoolers is concerned. </p>
<p>Admittedly, Michigan will not rise in the USNWR rankings (because it will not game the rankings as do top private universities), nor does it have to. For one, the USNWR is losing its appeal. More and more universities are being exposed for the liars they have been. CMC, Emory and GWU are not outliers, they are the norm among private universities. Once enough universities are exposed, the USNWR will not longer be trusted because its entire ranking is based on garbage data, especially the faculty resources and financial resources data. Public universities have the decency to include graduate students in their faculty ratios, while private universities only include undergraduate students. And private universities refuse to admit that they have graduate students instructing undergrads. As for the financial resources ranking, it is laughable to compare public universities (which already subsidise in-staters big time and efficiently cut costs of operation) to private universities (which have to provide much more financial aid to undergrads to be affordable and actually report as much spending as possible to the USNWR to look good in the rankings). Secondly, Michigan’s reputation is national and international thanks to its top 5 Business and Engineering programs, its rich athletic tradition and its famous college town atmosphere. Now that Michigan is likely to hit the 30% admit mark this year, expect the applicant pool to explode for the next 3-4 years. I have predicted this scenario years ago. It is going to happen. Come 2017 (Michigan’s bicentennial), Michigan’s applicant pool will likely hit 70,000. Whether it plateaus there or continues to grow depends on the University’s appeal.</p>
<p>That is correct ThisIsMichigan, there is a slightly drop in the number of IS applicants that are accepted and a slightly increase in the number of IS applicants. As a result, the percentage of IS applicants that are admitted has dropped, but not nearly by as much as the percentage of OOS students that are being admitted.</p>
<p>No doubt. It is going to get harder and harder, not just to get into Michigan, but to get into any top university. In 5 years, not a single top university will have an acceptance rate over 25% while back in my days, virtually all of them had acceptance rates in the 35%-50% range. I was admitted in Chicago (50%), Columbia (38%), Cornell (35%), Duke (35%), Northwestern (40%), Michigan (60%) and Penn (40%) to name a few. The only schools that admitted me that had acceptance rates below 30% were Brown and Georgetown. Today, all of those universities, except for Michigan, admit fewer than 20%, some admit fewer than 10%!!! In 5 years, Michigan will could potentially admit fewer than 20% as well.</p>
<p>Wow, I wish I was born much earlier… Now the admission competition for top 10 universities are just crazy, especially for internationals. I wonder what things would be like in the next 10 years.</p>
<p>It depends on your background. US applicants, as well as international applicants from Europe, Australia and Japan will probably face slightly steeper odds. However, it is going to become very difficult for international applicants from South and East Asia because the applicant pool from that areas is exploding as a result of the exponential growth of their middle and upper income groups. China and India in particular, where the ceiling for the number of applicants is frightening. US universities will usually maintain an international student population no greater than 10% of the total undergraduate body. CMU and Purdue hover around 15%, but those are the exception. Most top US university’s undergraduate student bodies are in the 5%-11% range. If you look at the numbers for international students, they are discouraging. I estimate that the top universities (top 20 private, top 5 public and the 3 tech elites) combined enrol a total of 5,000 international freshmen students annually.That may seem like a lot, but the number of highly qualified applicants from South and East Asia easily exceeds 20,000, (based on my observations), and of those, only 2,500 (12.5%) or so will get in one or more of those universities. Those are only estimates of course, by my estimates tend to be pretty accurate! And like I said, it will only get worse with time. Naturally, in the years to come, China and India will be able to retain many of their top students as their economies will be able to sustain their expected career aspirations, but I do not see this happening of a mass scale for another 10-15 years. Until then, students from Asia can expect exponential increase in selectivity. Students from the US and from Europe and other developing countries will also see increasing selectivity, but it will be more manageable.</p>
<p>I still think that unless:
a. the number of int’l admits are allowed to rise and/or
b. that top applicants tilt their applications even more to the very top schools,
that the rate of admission rate declines will slow down as the yields would have to fall (and therefore, UMich will have to accept more to offset).</p>
<p>I say this because if the main driver of increased applications at top universities is that the average applicant is applying to more universities, they still can only go to one at a time. </p>
<p>I realize for Michigan, the appeal factor is coming more and more into play; and that will push the admission rate down. But, the applicants that are successful will still have to make a choice and it won’t always be Michigan. Yield, of course, will also come down more, the more UMich enrollment is OOS.</p>
<p>Agree, the predictions must presume that UofM will admit more non-residents. While that is creeping upward there would need to be a statistically large increase to fundamentally change the numbers. Because Michigan does not meet need for out of state students and internationals it does not take a statistical genius to do an on-going rough sort based on data on who might accept an offer and who might not.</p>
<p>I disagree, the yield will not deteriorate. The last two years have shows no appreciable drop in the yield (40% in 2010 and 39% last year). In 2010, in-staters made up 65% of the freshman class, in 2012, they made up 58% of the freshman class. Also, the average HS GPA/SAT/ACT improved from 3.76/1335/29 in 2010 to 3.80/1360/30 in 2012. The increase in OOS students (Michigan will not increase the international student percentage beyond its usual 6-7%) from 35% to ±45% in the foreseeable future and slight increase in selectivity have not and will not affect yield negatively. In my opinion, they will be offset by the significant decrease in acceptance rate (50% in 2010 to 30% in 2013), giving Michigan an artificial boost in its appeal to high school students. The same has happened to Chicago. Its yield rate used to be around 35% in 2005, when its acceptance rate stood at 40%. As its acceptance rate dipped and it became more selective, its yield actually rose gradually from 35% to 40%. As long as a university has the academic prestige to justify a steep decrease in acceptance rate, I believe that an increase in selectivity actually improves yield. I guess only time will tell.</p>
And like I said, it will only get worse with time. Naturally, in the years to come, China and India will be able to retain many of their top students as their economies will be able to sustain their expected career aspirations, but I do not see this happening of a mass scale for another 10-15 years. Until then, students from Asia can expect exponential increase in selectivity. Students from the US and from Europe and other developing countries will also see increasing selectivity, but it will be more manageable.</p>