Few Pell eligible students are admitted, despite good in state FA. Some blame goes to the K-12 system, but Michigan admission policies are likely a factor. For example, Michigan uses legacy preference in admission.
You get a very different picture if you look at Pell or race.
For example UVA is 13% Pell and 8% AA enrollment.
UT Austin is 25% Pell – much better than UVA. But 3.9% AA, much worse than UVA.
Cal Berkeley is 31% Pell. But 2.5% AA enrollment.
Most likely, UVA is able to use race more explicitly and (with its 1/3rd OOS enrollment) able to target more middle/upper class URMs. But at the price of doing a worse job with low SES students.
So it depends on what you are legally/politcally able to do, and also what target you are aiming at.
And what your state demographic are. CA is 6.4% AA, TX is 11.8%, VA is 18.8%.
Yikes at Berkeley with a 2.5% African-American enrollment…
I think there also develops a cycle where if the number of minorities is low, other minorities are less likely to apply out of feeling there isn’t a critical mass.
It looks to me like the numbers are pretty in-line also with state demographics…although I’m just glancing Which stands to reason - we have a very low Asian population in Michigan of adopted young adults and a small number of immigrant families percentage wise and I would expect that UofM would have a pretty low Asian population among it’s students since states with high concentrations of Asians have comparable public universities. Honestly I have no issue with colleges and universities desire to create a diversity of SES and ethnicity, but that seems like a luxury that belongs in a private college setting. A public university is first and foremost for that state and secondarily for people who want to come to the state to attend that university. The pell grant piece is interesting but perhaps a young in-state student at poverty level who has the stats and GPS to get into UofM has a myriad of choices of colleges where they will be low or no pay. If UofM hasn’t studied Pell grant acceptances who turn down Michigan you might not have an answer or if UofM hasn’t reconnect with high schools where they targeted low income/poverty level students who applied, didn’t accept and didn’t attend to find the answer and then again maybe there aren’t ENOUGH low SES, racial diversity students in the state with the grades and GPA to be accepted to change the numbers at UofM. I see no reason why a public university should pay to bring a bunch of kids from all over the country just to create a diversity bubble in the middle of a non-diverse state frankly. If the university wants to attempt to do that organically as it sounds like the article is tilting that’s another situation.
There’s a lot of factors that go into the level of AA enrollment.
As noted above, CA has a lower percentage of AA population than VA does.
Also, recall that voters in California (Michigan too) banned affirmative action in university admissions based on race, sex or ethnicity. But SES is OK. No such ban in VA.
UVA has been recruiting nationally for a very long time – one-third OOS enrollment for many decades. UCB is much more recent to that party and in a smaller way.
It all adds up. UCB seems to do a great job with lower income students, but not so much AA students. UVA seems to do a poor job on low SES but pretty good on AA.
However, the private schools with good financial aid for these students are not that numerous, and many of them are small and highly selective. Full ride merit scholarships at other schools do exist, but are not that common (full tuition may not be enough, since many such students would not be able to afford living and travel expenses for a distant school).
Michigan has a relatively high percentage of out-of-state students, who presumably skew from higher income families. The low Pell grant percentage indicates that either it is not serving its home state’s students from lower and middle income families well (e.g. with the legacy preference in admissions), or the state’s K-12 schools for those students are too low quality. Perhaps there is some of both.
Straight-up comparisons of Pell recipient percentages across universities can be very misleading. Michigan has a much higher percentage of OOS students than most other public universities (fully 40% of non-international students), along with a substantial contingent of international students (7.1% of the total undergrad student body). Internationals aren’t eligible for Pell grants, and because Michigan has a high OOS sticker price and doesn’t meet full need for OOS students, most OOS students are full-pays. My guess would be that relatively few OOS students, and no international students, receive Pell grants. If all the Pell grant recipients at Michigan (15% of the entire undergrad student body) are in-state students, they’d comprise 26.9% of the in-state undergrads. The actual figure is probably somewhat lower because a few OOS Pell grant recipients probably manage to attend despite limited institutional FA.
Comparing Michigan to a school like Georgia (1.5% internationals, 8% OOS) is highly misleading because it’s likely the percentage of in-state students receiving Pell grants is probably pretty similar at the two schools, despite Georgia’s nominally higher percentage (23% receiving Pell grants v. 15% at Michigan).
One of the easiest ways for Michigan to increase SES diversity is to meet full need for OOS students—something they have never done, but a goal they are now committed to, although it’s very rare for a public university. Their current $4.5 billion capital campaign, now nearing completion, should make a big difference in their ability to meet that goal. And in fact, I understand this year they’re promising to meet full need for entering freshmen with family incomes up to $70,000. That’s a start. It will take several admissions cycles to start to move the needle on overall student body SES stats. But they’re definitely moving in that direction.
^you are overstating the legacy impact. It won’t help with subpar scores. The high OOS % is bc Michigan voters don’t sufficiently fund the school to take more in state kids at in state rates.
As for URMs with scores high enough for UM, unfortunately for UM, they also get into many other elite schools that lure them away…
Re: #21
Specifically with black enrollment:
% School % State School
2.3 6.6 Wisconsin - Madison
2.5 6.4 California - Berkeley
3.0 4.1 Washington - Seattle
3.9 11.8 Texas - Austin
4.6 14.2 Michigan - Ann Arbor
4.7 11.7 Penn State - Main
6.1 12.7 Ohio State - Main
6.4 14.7 Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
6.5 16.8 Florida
6.5 18.8 Virginia
8.0 22.1 North Carolina - Chapel Hill
% School from http://www.collegedata.com
% State from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts
Due to changing demographics, % State may be different from % HS graduates.
If we are going to talk about ‘diversity’ … can somebody explain to me why nobody is talking about the fact that colleges like Berkeley only have 24% White population?!
Only about 28% of California high school graduates in recent years are white, so the white underrepresentation at Berkeley is not all that great.
@ucbalumnus Bingo…and Michigan’s demographics look very White, as shown in this district by district data.
https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/RacialCensus0506_204440_7.pdf
University of Michigan’s bigger issue is SES diversity, or accessibility to Michigan residents from lower and middle income families.
^That is what the HAIL scholarship is for…and there are many state colleges in Michigan if kids don’t score high enough.
UCB’s stats in post #14 are also misleading in another way, by focusing on the percentage of the student body comprising the “largest racial/ethnic group” without considering the racial/ethnic composition of the state as a whole.
The state of California is only 39% non-Hispanic white, according to the latest Census estimates–that’s the largest racial/ethnic group in the state, though not by much. So UC Berkeley’s figure of 35% white closely matches the state’s overall white population.
In contrast, the state of Michigan is 76% white, but only 61% of the University of Michigan’s undergrads are white. So the undergraduate student body at Michigan is substantially more diverse that the state as a whole. (Or, to put it more tendentiously, white students are substantially underrepresented at Michigan, but only marginally so at UC Berkeley).
Meanwhile, the state of California is 38% Hispanic/Latino, but only 14.1% of US Berkeley’s undergrads fall under that designation. And only 2.1% of UC Berkeley’s undergrads ar Black/African-American, compared to 6% of the state’s overall population. So blacks and Hispanics are substantially underrepresented at UC Berkeley—something you wouldn’t guess just by looking at the percentage of white students out of context.
@ucbalumnus There is a high correlation between parent’s income and child’s IQ. There is also a high correlation between child’s IQ and how well he does in school. There are of course always exceptions to those statistical observations. And Brilliant Michigan students from lower income families do have a shot at Yale, Princeton and Harvard 
That’s the other side of the coin==the relatively few highly qualified US black students have many great schools to choose from.
“UCB’s stats in post #14 are also misleading in another way, by focusing on the percentage of the student body comprising the “largest racial/ethnic group” without considering the racial/ethnic composition of the state as a whole.”
Many (probably most) of the top ranked universities in the US have a lot of out-of-state students. Thus just comparing in-state population demographics with student demographics is not really a fair comparison. Of course for a state university such as U.Michigan this is likely not the case – economic issues will encourage in-state students to attend. For U.Michigan, just “being willing to deal with Michigan winters” might discourage a few out-of-state students.
I think that there is a very real risk that if top universities try too hard to squeeze out white students, then there could be an unfortunate backlash. To some extent our last presidential election might be one hint of this. Some diversity is clearly advantageous. However, the primary goal of universities needs to be to educate academically qualified American students, and an 18 year old American student does not have any control over which racial or ethnic group they were born into.
^50% of the student body crosses state lines despite those winters!