One thing that concerns me is that the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering doesn’t participate in the FSU Admitted Students’ Preview. That speaks volumes. I have a lot of questions about the CoE with respect to research opportunities, co-op opportunities, study abroad, and job placement after graduation. The fact that they won’t be there during the Preveiw, and that we will need to schedule a separate tour (that they only offer of Fridays) really bothers me.
FSU if you studying aboard the first year FSU then gives you instate tuition rate, just something to think about, my girls go to FSU and love it, they can’t understand why their brother would want to go to UF but he will be an engineering major
@Katvis That’s because your son has excellent insight and judgement! :-bd
My daughter, who is in engineering and graduated from a Florida high school, has no idea FAMU even exists. She had no idea that if she applied to FSU for engineering it would be a shared program. No one ever told her at her high school and FAMU never send her any literature.
If FAMU wants the best and the brightest, they need to do a better job of recruiting instate. I do not think one person from her high school went to FAMU but quite a few are at FSU, UF, and UCF (and USF and FAU and UNF).
FAMU is a fairly small school. FAMU only has 7,800 undergraduates (FSU has 33,000+). They only admit 31% of their applicants and they enroll a higher percentage (20%) of OOS undergraduates than UF or FSU.
Each of these schools have AO’s that do reach out and visit HS’s, but they don’t visit them all. FAMU likely targets urban areas (including OOS), and the others spend most of their effort visiting local HS in their region. UF and FSU are better and hitting all of the state but have only started to actively recruit out of state.
Interesting Stat time! In a way this speaks to school popularity and Alumni engagement…
Based on 2017 Florida Specialty License Plate rankings…
#1:UF 94,685
2 Helping Sea Turtles Survive 77,861
#3: FSU 71,549 (Ha! Turtles are more popular…)
…
15 University of Miami 25,285
26 UCF 18,445
#30 FAMU 16,071
35 USF 14,747
68 Bethune-Cookman University 4,955
85 FIU 2,950
87 FAU 2,397
Why doesn’t UF publish their average GPA in the Common Data Set?
I know FSU does. See item C12.
FSU:http://www.ir.fsu.edu/commondataset.aspx
UF: https://ir.aa.ufl.edu/media/iraaufledu/common-data-set/CDS_2017-2018_UFMain_7_20_18.pdf
@parent2noles I’ve seen several schools not fill out that field. It’s not a data element that’s used by US News in it’s rankings (US news is the driver behind the CDS).US News uses test scores, class rank and acceptance rate in it’s “Student selectivity” category.
UT-Austin, for example, also doesn’t include GPA data in the CDS:
https://utexas.app.box.com/v/CDS2017
https://utexas.app.box.com/v/CDS2016
If I had to guess, it’s not a number UF uses, so it doesn’t want to go through the trouble of figuring it out. In UF’s 2016-2017 CDS they included the middle 50% range (4.2 to 4.5) but still left the average GPA field blank. The middle 50% number is something they calculate and have to share with the State University System of Florida Board of Governors.
UF uses average freshman grade data. They just don’t want to publish it. It’s not because it’s too difficult for them. 
The CDS is an effort to standardize such information to allow non-technical consumers (prospective students and their parents) to better compare apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges with respect to a university education. It helps these persons cut through sales job hype and see actual value, or as close as can be determined.
Here are a few public universities which publish this data:
Georgia Tech: https://www.irp.gatech.edu/common-data-set
U North Carolina: https://oira.unc.edu/files/2018/06/CDS_2017-2018_20180605.pdf
UC Berkeley: https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/common-data-set
Michigan State: https://opb.msu.edu/functions/institution/cds-2017-20181.pdf
U Michigan: http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/cds_2017-2018_umaa.pdf
U Georgia: https://oir.uga.edu/_resources/files/cds/UGA_CDS_2017-2018.pdf
U Alabama: http://oira.ua.edu/new/reports/5a6645abd7005c7c3be281b6?Report%20Type[0][0]=Common%20Data%20Set
Were I a UF grad, I’d urge the school to publish a full set of data.
@parent2noles no one likes data more than me. 
However, the middle 50% for GPA is a far more useful metric than the average GPA.
Even then, it’s never an apples to apples comparison, as most schools use a weighted GPA and have different criteria in deciding which classes should be used to calculate GPA. We could compare UF to FSU, or compare UC-Berkeley to UCLA but we really couldn’t compare UF or FSU to any University of California school.
Example: FSU GPA=4.02, while UCLA GPA = 3.87 (based on the CDS). The difference isn’t because FSU is more selective (UCLA is FAR more selective), it’s because each school calculates GPA differently.
Why does UF not include it? Who knows. It’s not something it has a reason to hide. Looking at past CDS info, UF has been putting the middle 50% range into that field as far back as 1997-1998 (the oldest CDS info on UF’s website).