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<p>Were you in the top 10% of your class?
A& M is fairly competitive for an instate university, I understand.
But since you are full pay, its probable that was an attractive quality for your private school choices, wouldnt you agree?
It’s not rocket science.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>I agree with the sentiment, but more taxpayer money would have to be spent to hire employees whose job is to write an individualized letter explaining why little Bobby was not accepted. Some of these schools get tens of thousands of applicants in a year. It’s not feasible to do this for every applicant.</p>
<p>I think you should be able to ask the admission committee if they can give you any insight on what you could have done differently, or maybe ask them to reconsider.</p>
<p>So here’s this: I have family member who graduated Phi Beta Kappa, among the top in her class, from a top California public university. She had worked in that university’s hospital doing research, and, once she graduated, was hired by that university’s hospital full time to conduct other research.</p>
<p>Yet she did not get into that university’s med school. (She got into other good ones, but would have preferred to stay.) </p>
<p>My reaction is - what the heck? There wasn’t one thing this student could have done better, and she had the grades, experience and awards to show for it. </p>
<p>Yet she was turned down by this public school.</p>
<p>Just for curiosity’s sake - like I said she’s going to another, very good medical school out of state - I would have liked to know why this public school turned down this outstanding alumna from its own med school.</p>
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But most are smart enough to stop the courting when they get IMMEDIATE feedback on the futility of further pursuit. So, along those lines, a student should be able to submit a ‘request to date you’ note to the University. If the answer is …not if you were the last person on earth…then stop there. If the answer is…if your shower, shave and learn to chew with your mouth closed…maybe, if the answer is …looking good babe!..then continue the ‘courting’.</p>
<p>The problem with the Universities is THEY court YOU…pamphlets, glossy mailers, posters, letters…and then YOU pay lots of up front $$ to apply, visit, kiss their bumbusses, write a love letter telling them how absolutely wonderful they are and they are the only one for you because they are beautiful on the inside and the outside and have such wonderful qualities…only to have the response be…ahhhh never mind…got a better option…thanks for playing. In the dating world that is known as a ‘tease’…and no that is not a compliment.</p>
<p>So, yes, I think if a University has sent you love letters and options to apply for free, to check out their blogs, FB accounts etc only to say ‘no’…then an explanation is in order…it is called courtesy.</p>
<p>And the reason state schools accept more out of staters, to the expense of in staters is tuition money. In the state where I live the state legislature in the last 4 years has cut 40% of funding to public universities and has passed a bill to freeze tuition for in state students.</p>
<p>The operational costs of the university are the same, so an easy way to compensate for the 40% cut has been to recruit out of state students. The other is to require faculty to receive grants (universities keep 40% of all grant money for overhead. In my university that’s the largest source of funding, then state funding, then tuition).</p>
<p>So back to the original topic: if you want your state to accept more instate students, and less out of state ones, tell your legislators to stop cutting funding.</p>
<p>If it’s not a stat/formulatic type admission, it would often be very difficult to provide a specific reason, aside from giving a generic statement about there being a limited not of spots and a large number of qualified applicants, which is probably already in the rejection letter. For example, there are many borderline applications that could go either way. The ones that are chosen among the borderline cases might be related to a combination of personality traits displayed in essays and applications, minor difference in the LOR comments, slight differences in course rigor, and several other factors. They wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a specific flaw in many of the rejected applicants. Instead they could at best list a combination of several areas where they thought other candidates were better choices, which would be unlikely to satisfy the rejected applicant.</p>
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<p>From my observations, medical schools & residency programs like to have diversity of background in the students they admit, and the bar seems to be higher for those who are coming from their own undergraduate programs.
Nothing wrong with the applicant, and they may have no trouble being admitted to another school.
Was this student applying to a residency program, or to medical school?
It is unclear from your post.</p>
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<p>Better for who? It only benefits the state if it draws commerce and people to live and work in the state and students to stay in the state to ultimately contribute and start businesses after they graduate in my opinion. We don’t have a “national universities” system we have state universities. The research $$ continues on, but the students come and go.</p>
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I don’t see a system like this being about the individual student per se, but about being alittle more transparent with people from the state. If that’s asking too much then the state uni SHOULD privitize then they don’t need to give anyone explanations for their decision.</p>
<p>I’ll throw another complication into this. What do you do about rolling admissions? A score of X might get you admitted early on but that same score might not be enough later on in the cycle. Oy, I can see the temper tantrums already.</p>
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<p>And every year aggregate information is available on average stats of the admitted class. Why is this not enough?</p>
<p>University of Iowa has a process by which students can apply online, entering their own grades and stats, and receive their decision within a couple of days (it then has to be verified by official transcripts and test scores, and it doesn’t work for students from high schools that don’t rank). But University of Iowa is not anywhere near the same level of competitiveness as Michigan or Wisconsin or UC-Berkeley.</p>
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<p>I don’t get this cynical attitude, (“entitled, whiny,” etc.). Do you not think that the admissions process for public universities should be rational and explainable? Do you not think that applicants should be able to have an opinion about whether their application was handled properly? Why the scorn for people who want more information? Why do people want to protect the secrecy of government operations?</p>
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Not at the schools I’m familiar with.</p>
<p>Way back when I was a student member of the admissions committee at Columbia. We read the whole application and then gave it a number from 1-6. One student and two professors read the applications. Scores of 15-18 got in. Scores under 6 didn’t. What the cut-off was in any particular year varied. But we were never asked to weight each aspect of the application in any particular way.</p>
<p>Bay, I don’t know where you live but in my state we cannot adequately educate our children, keep families out of poverty, provide essential services for those who are poor, ensure healthcare for all, maintain our infrastructure, or do many other things the taxpayers want and need. This is not a problem that warrants use of scarce resources. It does come across as whiny. And even though it would be impossible to demonstrate harm done to an individual student by a rejection from the state flagship, I have no doubt that we would see a wave of litigation (however frivolous) clogging our already overburdened court system.</p>
<p>There have been cases already litigated over admissions decisions. But the bottom line is that there does need to be some degree of accountability if public state universities are accepting state dollars. I feel the same way about public K-12, state welfare, state taxing authorities, etc.</p>
<p>sally,</p>
<p>I live in CA. Our kids pay $70 application fee per UC campus. They are <em>paying</em> to have their applications reviewed. I assume a reviewer must have a reason to reject an application. Don’t they have to justify their decision somehow now? Why not disclose it to the student at the same time they are disclosing it to the administration? If they don’t have to justify it, do you think they should have to? Or is it all right for the decision to be arbitrary?</p>
<p>There won’t be more litigation unless the universities are doing something unlawful. It is not easy and certainly not cheap to file a lawsuit over nothing.</p>
<p>@emeraldkity4</p>
<p>Not from Texas, so not A&M.</p>
<p>I was top 10%, and I’m from Maryland, so it would be UMD-CP. Our sal got spring semestered at UMD (denied for the fall) but is currently at brown.</p>
<p>Look at Mathmom’s scoring and ask what you’d do when there are far, far more applicants than seats. -keep raising the bar (regardless that we’re talking state schools.) And, when the bar isn’t stats based only, the reviewers’ accumulated reactions (yes, each converted to ratings- and often prose) matter even more. At the top, they can find shades of difference among applicants. Further down, shades of inadequacy (in the generic sense of inadequate.) </p>
<p>The fact that a rating is assigned to a reaction to the components doesn’t magically switch this into stats based reviews. So, Johnny doesn’t get in, gets his “score” and- as we darned well know they do- starts the “but my stats were higher” outrage. Or, “but I was this or that title in my hs.”</p>
<p>You want standardization. You want stratification. And transparency. Accountability from the reviewers. To what end? You really think they can adequately convey to the outside world why, in that U’s eyes, with it’s particular needs and expectations- and with what * the competition* produced- Johnny didn’t shine in his app? After the party is over and the doors are closed? And without devastating him in a situation where this is not a practice round or one of multiple rounds in a tournament? No chance to redo.</p>
<p>Think about how this info would really work, who would provide oversight, what the heck they know. We often can’t even agree here on CC, what constitutes a good topic, leadership, climbing out of the same limited hs mold.</p>
<p>lookingforward,</p>
<p>mathmom’s example was for Columbia, not a state university. How do state universities evaluate their applications? Do you know? If you don’t, do you think that citizens of a state should be able to know how their state universities evaluate applications? Should there be a formula? If there is, should the formula be disclosed? If not, why not? If a reviewer has a reason to reject an applicant and it is righteous, why <em>shouldn’t</em> it be disclosed?</p>
<p>When you ask “to what end?” It is not about Johnny, per se. The <em>end</em> is that government entities must be held accountable for how they are spending our tax dollars. If they are spending it unlawfully, or arbitrarily, or unfairly, we ought to be able to look at that. Or do you disagree?</p>
<p>I know. She described her experience with holistic. Since we are not talking about stats based reviews or a mandated top x% admit scheme, what do you want?</p>
<p>You know I’m involved. You know you disagree with me. As does OP. even when I do reveal bit of the process, ime.</p>
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<p>but that implies some mystical quality that magically appears in an application. It can work for a small private school that is assembling 500 kids who have to live, work and play together, but perhaps should not be the mission of state uni with 40,000 kids or even 15,000 kids or at the very least should have some transparency in who they accept and reject. I’ve got no beef with private colleges but I think when large public unis start picking and choosing which Don, Jon or Sally they want and decide they can pick from a national scope or even international scope, I think there needs to be some accountability when they bypass state kids that are fully qualified. Play or get out of the sandbox. I’m not sure I don’t believe a stats based rule isn’t fair for in-state students, it would be pretty easy for a mathematician to figure out an equitable formula that encompasses unweighted GPA + # rigor classes + standardized test scores, then rank 'em and admit them, as many as you need, all at one time, heck that’s how our senior scholars are selected and people think it’s a pretty fair way to decide… not quite as sure of a top x% as clearly that has led to gaming on the part of parents or students.</p>