@gretchen101 What happened to your child’s UMA application? Did s/he eventually got accepted from waitlist?
@swampyankee I am not sure your information is correct about the other state universities. My older child was accepted to both the Wisconsin School of Business and The University of Florida School of Business with much lower SAT scores then the in-state students. My child had great essays and speaks multiple foreign languages. She definitely took away spots from worthy in-state students. There are thousands of other examples of students who were accepted to those state universities from out-of-state who had lower scores. We live in NJ and there are schools at Rutgers that are very difficult to get into and plenty of NJ students get accepted to out-of-state schools (some ranked higher then Rutgers), but do not get accepted to schools at Rutgers. NJ has arguably one of the highest SAT averages and it is very competitive. It is unfortunate about your child but denigrating UMASS is unfair.
@iParentMass
She was denied at UMass. Accepted at UConn with significant scholarship.
@gretchen101 Nice! My son also got accepted to UConn + Honors college with enough scholarship to offset the extra OOS tuition. I guess thats how the admission game works!
Let me reply with two points. First, my statements are regarding in-state applicant populations compared to non-resident applicant populations. I do not rely upon references to individuals (although seeing an emerging pattern in individual cases for 2024 EA CICS on another UMassA admissions thread is what originally piqued my interest in the topic). Second, to cite facts is not denigrating, it’s called providing transparency. I am sorry if that makes you uncomfortable and feel it “unfair”.
If you have evidence that proves anything I have said to be untruthful, I shall stand corrected and apologize, but I have tried not to have opinions which are not based on logic of facts.
If you have read the thread, you would understand that my intent is to get UMassA to change its approach to better support MA residents moving forward, full stop. Do you support UMass, having 40, 50, 60, 99% of its seats in its top program to out of state and out of country residents. What’s reasonable, based on being publicly funded. Why is CS 40-50% and nursing closer to 10%; both are world-class programs.
It’s admissions approach does place MA-residents, as a population, at a disadvantage in the admissions process.
Truth is not denigration, libel, slander.
The truth is UMass is a wonderful institution, and has provided hundreds of thousands of students with great educations and at great value. I hope they can realign to their core mission, providing high-quality, high-value to highly qualified MA residents, first and foremost.
By the way, do you think UNC (18%), UT (10%) or UF (10%) self-imposed non-resident admission caps (%s above), or do you think the concerns expressed by affected citizens drove those changes? On this, I have not done much research, but I do have a presumption.
I can honestly see how disappointing it is to either be denied or waitlisted at a school. Having said that, some of you are coming across as if you are entitled to admittance. Ridiculous! An applicant with close perfect stats should not be valued more than an applicant with a 32 ACT/1400 and a 4.0 GPA (or whatever stats). Any idea of how many In_state kids get denied from GTech and UGA? It happens every year. The whole idea of a holistic application is to look at each applicant individually. Maybe the applicant with a 32 ACT is able to play the violin with the Boston Pops and speak 7 languages. Maybe the one the want more URM students. Maybe the essay was missing a period. Lots maybes and we will never get to the bottom of it. But this happens in every State. This is why none of these top flagships are considered safeties, especially in the most competitive majors. More of a reason to apply to a lot of schools. Again, it is disappointing but none of these schools owe anybody anything.
@swampyankee
Can you please provide a source that supports your statement that…
I’ve seen the Pioneer report, and do not see support for this statement, outside of UNC and the UCs. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t consider Niche to be a reliable source.
Can you comment on @swampyankee
point that CS is admitting a much higher percentage of OOS than instate? It is not consistent with other competitive schools at UMA or other state Universities.
Why does it sound “entitled” to question that?
I must say, I was a little upset about how I did not get into Isenberg and was placed in my second choice major. I told them UMass was my top choice, toured the school twice and I am in-state.
1390 SAT
3.5 GPA (trending towards 3.7-3.8 junior year and this year)
And people with much lower stats OOS have gotten into Isenberg. It’s frustrating that I won’t be able to receive such a great education for a great price locally, and now I am looking at faraway places, much more expensive too.
@gretchen101 @swampyankee @collegeisago
As it stands now, my son was able to get into WPI CS, RPI CS, UConn CS with Honor College, all with meaningful merit awards.
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Like I said, that is a valid concern, and that isn’t what people are objecting to. The reason people are coming across as entitled is because they are treating the UMass admissions committee as a rubber stamp for their child, and referring to the State Flagship as a “safety” school.
I don’t know why UMass does not accept as many instate students for the CS program. It is not unusual though for State Universities to do this for their graduate/professional programs. For example, UVA stopped accepting state funding for its law school, so that they would not be bound to accept so many in-state applicants. This allowed them to be more selective, attract out of state students and build the school up into a top 10 law school.
@NYCDadof2
I think your statement about safety school and rubber stamp is false. I never felt that way or projected that.
My objection has been to the OOS Percentage which is the subject of this thread.
I just want to clarify this point. We do not know that UMassA is admitting higher percentage of OS than IS in CS.
We do not know the IS vs OOS admission rate for CS. The only data we have is IS vs OOS freshman enrollment for CS. Enrollment is a function of both admission rate and yield. We do not know the yield for CS. It is quite possible that the yield rate for OOS is higher in CS than other majors, more similar to IS yield. We just don’t know.
We also do not know the stats (GPA/SAT/ACT) for IS vs OOS CS students. We have stats (GPA/SAT/ACT) by school. And we have (2016) stats for IS vs OOS for the whole university. But we do not have stats for IS vs OOS broken down by school or major.
It seems people are conflating the data that we do have:
From UMass published fall of 2019 stats
(https://www.umass.edu/oir/home)
- IS accept rate 64% vs OOS accept rate 64% (whole university)
- IS/OOS accepted 51%/49% (whole university)
- IS yield 31% vs OOS yield 11% (whole university), resulting in…
- IS/OOS enrollment 75%/25% (whole university)
- IS/OOS CICS enrollment 56%/44%
- Mean GPA 3.9, Mean SAT 1292, Mean ACT 29 (whole university)
- CICS Mean GPA 4.1, Mean SAT 1480, Mean ACT 32
From the Pioneer report, 2016 stats
(https://pioneerinstitute.org/featured/study-umass-amherst-admissions-standards-now-higher-for-ma-students-than-non-residents/)
- “For the fall of 2016, in-state accepted student GPA and SAT averages were 3.97 and 1265, respectively, compared to 3.78 and 1242 for those from outside Massachusetts.” (whole university)
note that we do not have similar breakdown for 2019
Please correct me if I’m wrong, and link your source.
It may be false if applied you, but there have certainly been many posts on this thread for which it is not false. I do not believe that I ever accused you personally of that behavior, so I am not sure why you feel the need to be defensive. Again, I agree with your concern about OOS vs In State, I just am turned off by the tone of entitlement displayed by some of the other posters.
I think there are 2 separate issues. Is the number of accepted in state students low compared to other states? I’d be concerned if OOS/international acceptance rates are higher.
The other issue is whether or not an individual student has a right to expect an acceptance. I don’t think so. Once your stats meet the bar to be competitive for admission you have to show your fit in other ways. But how do you judge who’s a better fit?
I don’t believe state residents are in the same pool as OOS students, so the stats of OOS students aren’t relevant when you’re calculating the chances for your in state kid. Knowing the stats of an accepted state resident doesn’t tell you much either. Did they apply for CS? What was in the rest of their app? And accepted and enrolled are different. Unless you know how many students were accepted to the CS program vs how many actually enrolled, you can’t say with certainty that they accept more OOS students.
In total it looks like (per the Pioneer report and other sources) that UMA wants to keep OOS student proportion to around 25%. Class of 2023 is 24.8% OOS.
The OOS proportion varies by school/major…we know the OOS proportion of CICS is 44% (for class of 2023) from the CICS departmental profile reports found here. https://www.umass.edu/oir/department-profile/school-college-detail?shs_term_node_tid_depth=33
We do not know IS vs OOS acceptance rate (or enrollment/yield) for CICS as a school, or by major. If someone has this data, please share with us.
We do know UMA overall acceptance rate is the virtually the same for IS/OOS, but nearly as many OOS students must be accepted (13128 OOS vs. 13704 IS) to reach the 25% overall target because the OOS yield was only 11%. IS yield was 31.4%.
Again, we don’t know the yield for CICS school, or majors…but in total, nearly 70% of IS students accepted to UMA are choosing to matriculate somewhere else (and nearly 90% of admitted OOS students matriculate elsewhere).
Those yield numbers suggest that some are thinking that UMA is a safety…and it probably is, at least for some majors that aren’t engineering, CICS and business. Obviously the admissions teams do know the yield numbers by school/major and make decisions accordingly…with seemingly an overall OOS proportion of 25% as a primary goal.
I understand the concerns of some posters wrt CS acceptance…but your issue is with the UMass system administrators. If you want each major held to the 25% OOS number, that is something that you have to advocate for. It might be possible to change it, it might not be. Perhaps some waitlist spots will open up in CICS over the next few months as students make their matriculation decisions.
My kid came off the waitlist today for fall admission. In-state.
And is UMass now a serious consideration @2024Mama? My wholly non-scientific observations are that the most competitive majors at UMass have lower yield rates than other majors from in-state students. In other words, in-state kids who get into UMass CS, Engineering, etc…often receive merit or competitive offers from other schools and don’t attend UMass. Perhaps UMass has figured that out. I am certainly sympathetic to those whom had UMass as their first choice.
Yes, he wasn’t a CS or Isenberg applicant. He didn’t think it was one of his top choices until he got waitlisted, lol. He got a lot of merit and need-based aid from other schools, though, so he’s not sure.
Same