A few takeaways:
Legacy doesn’t matter (damnit!)
Not easier to be accepted if you way you pick summer over fall
There are 10 total.
No. 1 was this:
“The number of people who apply to UF from your high school affects your chance of acceptance.”
False. UF does not have a quota or any special number of students required to be accepted from each high school. Team up with your pals; you’re not competing! Plus, if you are all accepted, you can go to college together.
My first inclination is to pick apart the words they used in #1 to make it align with my observations and experience. That would go like: pointing out that they used the words “quota” and “required to be accepted”, which I never thought was the case. They also say that the number that apply from a HS does not affect a student’s chance. That also is in line with what I have said, which is that students are compared to their peers in their HS and some % of the HS’s population typically gets accepted. To clarify, whether 50 or 75 students apply from a given HS does not matter because they are going to take ABOUT the same number of students regardless of how many apply. And those would be, MOSTLY, the top X% of the entire class, not X% of those that apply. So, whether they normally take the top 5-10% or 10-15% of the class, it wouldn’t matter if all of the top 15% or the top 50% apply. The same student profile would prevail in both cases.
Another way to look at it is: Since it is stated by UF that GPA and academic rigor are Very Important (Common Data Set’s highest level of importance, along with other factors indicated as Very Important), and those cannot be compared across schools due to different grading practices and opportunities for rigor, how do you compare those to other students? Unless I am missing something, you can only do that by comparing to students subject to the same grading practices and available rigor options. Which is to say, the students in their same high school.
Anyways, thanks for posting the link, I had not seen that blog before.
I’m not going to dissect the word choices because I think the spirit of the answer is that they judge all applicants, regardless of what high school they attended, against the same standards.
Quota can be a minimum or a maximum. They are saying there is none.
I’m with gator dad. A minimum of 20 for sure and more like 30 students from my daughter’s high school class of 175 students were accepted. No school specific quota. These kids were very much high achievers and were compared to the pool imho. This was 2018 class of 2022.
When thinking of admissions, especially at a public university like UF, it’s best to not project too much complexity into the process.
UF only has so many resources available to do the holistic reviews. They may compare a student to his peers, to help determine the “rigor” of courses taken, but they then simplify the process and compare students to the whole pool of candidates. That’s why some magnet schools get hundreds of students accepted, while other, academically weaker schools may only get a handful of students accepted.
One thing UF doesn’t discuss, is “Geographical residence” (within the state). UF does consider it, but it has much less weight that other factors. I’m assuming UF wants to ensure it’s accepting students from across the state, including the lower population counties. I have no idea how the do it, but it isn’t something anyone should worry about (which is likely why UF doesn’t discuss it).
We’ve seen the in-state vs OOS student acceptance numbers, and they are about the same. However, if the number of OOS applications start increasing (as a % of the overall number of applicants), it will start having an effect (like it does at GT, UNC, UVa, U-Michigan, etc.).
My friend’s daughter was at a high school in Gainesville. Her stats were way above the averages at UF and she and many of her friends did not get in. A good many from her top ranked school did, but she didn’t. They couldn’t all be in the top 10% of their class, but they can all have gpa/scores above the average for UF. UF can then say “Well, we use class rank in our holistic review.” So they are comparing you to the others at your school.
@privatebanker Do you think that about the same number of students are accepted from your school each year?
Nobody addressed how they compare GPA and Rigor across the schools. How do they do that when they compare the 40,000 applications against each other? Can’t say recalculated GPA because UF says that they do not hold against a student the lack of rigorous course availability, which drives that number. They compare to what is offered by each school.
How do you reconcile @twoinanddone’s anecdote?
It seems that they have a general idea of how many students they want to accept from each HS. As @Gator88NE said, that could be dramatically different from HS to HS based on a number of factors.
@GatorDad305 - It would also explain why kids at school A, with lower weighted GPA (therefore less rigor) and lower SAT/ACT scores, get accepted over students from school B with higher weighted GPA’s and higher SAT/ACT scores. The UF admissions office is no different than any other school in trying to create the most diversified campus culture possible. If diversity is the prime driver then, your decisions won’t always be based on merit.
Equal opportunity is commendable but trying to deliver equal outcome is problematic; unless, of course, you begin using terms like “holistic” to cover what it is you’re really doing. There is no way UF can prove they treat the students from each school equally in their evaluations when the goal is to produce a “diverse” student body. It’s not that I don’t see benefits from this approach. I just think they should be honest about it.
Word choices are very important and UF and other colleges don’t use the holistic because they believe that the word best summarizes the admissions process. Instead the word is based on Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) which specifically uses the word holistic.
UF is a state school and has rough quotas for who gets into the school. How for example would the rest of the stare reAct if 50% of the students at UF came from let’s say a region with 10% of the population? They would push back and say that they need their students to be “better represented“.
This same think is played out in race, gender, and other factors. Since quotas are illegal, UF and all schools muddy the water and use the fog of admissions to rig admissions to get the results that they desire.
This victim in this equality of outcome (not opportunity) is that students are not admitted using a full merit based system. The dream where kids are judged on the content of their accomplishments and not which intersectional boxes and regions that they come from will have to wait.
I do think state schools have an obligation to accept students from around the state, from every county. Texas does it at UT by the guaranteed admission of the top 6%. Other states do it by county. Florida is going to have more applicants from Miami than from the Panhandle, so has to find a way to balance the acceptances.
The precursor to this thread is a kind of ongoing discussion/argument/contest of wills regarding how UF judges kids from the same school. (I don’t want to go down the road that analyzes UF’s holistic system, and I really don’t want to go into the diversity/equality argument – also because the moderators will slap down discussions of diversity, race, etc.)
UF says that they don’t have a quota for kids from the same school. It has yet to be proven to me that this is untrue.
Hi all. I don’t know how it goes year to year. My perspective was anecdotal only.
It’s a top 3 school of choice and 100 percent of the kids go to college each year. And that’s been consistent for the time she was there.
My only point is that it’s hard to say there’s a hard stop type quota for a school if they take that many from such a small school.
But it’s one school and just an observation. My gut tells me if you have the upper 75 percent type of profile you’ll get in no matter the numbers form your school, if you have the whole package.
I think the Home Town (or home county) always has a lot more students at the school. I bet if you checked a map for FSU there would be more from that county too.
@fl1234 so what you are saying is UF does compare kids from same school so in fact they are competing. Am I reading that correctly ? Example. If they always take around 15. You are competing with everyone to get into that top 15. Or which ever 15 they choose ?
@jhmoney Yes, that is what I believe. But I want to be clear that I think that the number is not exactly 15 every year, in your scenario. It may vary a bit each year, and that is why UF can say that there is no quota. So, I don’t think that it is a hard and fast number for each school, but is generally similar year over year.