<p>…is no one gonna answer my question??</p>
<p>Yes, Michigan now includes freshman grades in it’s evaluation process.</p>
<p>Why???</p>
<p>Michigan has changed all of it’s admission standards. Yes they consider and include freshman year in their GPA calculations. Whoever said Michigan is not seen as prestigious is ignorant. It’s not a “decent” school. Its an “elite” university and has large representation at the nations best firms, companies, and professional schools.</p>
<p>Selectivity has nothing to do with prestige. The University of Chicago’s acceptance rate topped 40% just a few years ago before it switched the the common application. Michigan will also see a significant drop in its acceptance rate.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.michigandaily.com/news/u-among-six-universities-obamas-advanced-manufacturing-partnership[/url]”>http://www.michigandaily.com/news/u-among-six-universities-obamas-advanced-manufacturing-partnership</a></p>
<p>^ Entertainer, do you know when they started counting freshman year?</p>
<p>
Michigan has a fantastic reputation and is the 2nd best public school in the country IMHO but its not an elite school. Elite schools don’t have a 50%overall acceptance rate, an acceptance rate to medical school that is slightly higher than the national average, give out terrible financial aid, produce one Rhodes Scholar a decade and have student bodies whose bottom feeders go on to John Marshall or Cooley Law schools.</p>
<p>Elite schools have very high selectivity, uniformly excellent student bodies that are geographically diverse, excellent advising, high financial resources that allow them to make an undergraduate education affordable to prospective students and very strong law/med/business/PhD program placement.</p>
<p>UofM has a very strong faculty with academic departments at the top 10 in every area along with very high research expenditures but this correlates more with graduate level excellence than undergraduate excellence. Michigan needs to ramp up its selectivity, advising, financial generosity and control its class size if it wants to join the elite circle.</p>
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Despite its very high acceptance rate until very recently, the University of Chicago has always had a very self-selecting student body that has desired a college experience that embraces the “life of the mind” rather than general American university trappings like athletics and social clubs. UofC never advertised its offerings widely until very recently so it was a “hidden gem” for the intellectual elite and has only now in the last 5 years become fully commercialized.</p>
<p>However, Chicago has always been selective in the sense that it has always enrolled a very strong student body with regards to SAT/ACT scores. Its ranges on these tests even 5 years ago are significantly higher than Michigan’s test scores ranges now.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your POV, Chicago’s popularity among the general American population and the USNWR annual rankings has been rising steadily over this past decade while its institutional quirkiness and oddities are fading as the school more steadily embraces the “normal elite” atmosphere that schools like Dartmouth and Penn have.</p>
<p>Long story short, don’t let whoever’s advising you about Michigan fool you: Chicago has always been much more selective than Michigan and the difference in the schools’ acceptance rate is just starting to reflect that.</p>
<p>Even if Michigan’s acceptance rate drops to 25-30%, that’s still not low enough to garner it elite status IMHO. Schools with the faculty of its caliber should have a 20% acceptance rate or lower at the very least. If it switches the IS/OOS ratio, Michigan residents will be extremely unhappy and will be up in arms that their flagship state school is abandoning its ilk and changing its institutional priorities. Whatever happens, Mary Sue Coleman and company will have to tread carefully in order to keep Michigan relevant as an academic institution in the modern world but at the same time not disenfranchise the residents of the state of Michigan.</p>
<p>Lets see what happens.</p>
<p>^ Disagree. There’s no need for UofM to feel the need to compete in terms of selectivity with schools that simply don’t have as vast of a capacity. Its “elite” status comes from its renowned academics.</p>
<p>^ They started considering freshman year starting with the class of 2014. They didn’t consider it when I applied. Thank God, because if they did, I wouldn’t have gotten accepted.</p>
<p>I remember, when I was a freshman (would’ve been the year when they were admitting class of 2013), being told UofM doesn’t consider freshman grades! I probably would’ve tried harder if I knew they were going to. I feel like they should cut my class some slack then haha.</p>
<p>Yea I feel like the class of 2015 and the class of 2016 are so much smarter than the class of 2013 and 2014. It’s going to be interesting to see how competitive classes are this year and beyond.</p>
<p>vengasso nailed it…Umich is a good school, but no one should consider it a top or elite school. avg ACT score at UM 28-30.
random Elite and prestigious schools:
U-Chicago 31-33.
Johns Hopkins 30-32
Princeton 30-32
Notre Dame 31-33
Northwestern 31-33</p>
<p>^ that’s really not that far below at all. if you wanna see how elite Michigan is, go to the class of 2015 decisions thread. i’ve heard of people getting into Northwestern and rejected at Michigan.</p>
<p>Nova your post is full of garbage. Everyone knows that the above schools listed superscore SAT and ACT scores, while Michigan doesn’t.</p>
<p>Middle 50% ACT at Michigan is 27-31. That’s for the entire university. In the LS&A Honors Program, the MINIMUM ACT is 32. The Engineering School and Ross School of Business also have higher median ACT scores than the campus-wide average, but I don’t have those figures right at hand. The Honors Program ACT scores compare favorably to any “elite” private university:</p>
<p>Harvard 31-34
Yale 30-34
Princeton 31-35
Stanford 30-34
Columbia 31-34
U Chicago 28-34
Northwestern 31-33
Brown: 29-34
Cornell: 29-33
Johns Hopkins: 29-33</p>
<p>If you’re in Engineering, Ross, or LS&A Honors at Michigan, you’re in as elite company as there is in American higher education. I would agree, though, that the regular (non-Honors) LS&A program, or some of the other undergrad programs like Nursing, are not at that same elite level. But that’s just the nature of a large public university, whose job it is to serve multiple constituencies. You’ll find as many (or more) super-smart people in the most selective programs at Michigan as you will at any elite private university with a smaller student body. But you will also have parts of the university serving a broader student body. So is that “elite” or not? I say it is, insofar as the people in the elite programs are as academically gifted, and the quality of the educational experience as high, as at any elite private. The naysayers will constantly point to university-wide averages and try to get you to think of the entire university as one homogeneous entity. People who are taken in by that misleading portrayal may miss some extraordinary educational opportunities.</p>
<p>Yup,in a desperate move to pass UW, UM combined all their campuses into one number and reclassified some work as research to eek out the narrow win. But UW still smashed UM in patents (119 to 72) and related income ($56.7 Million to $18.3 Million).</p>
<p>That said you can’t go wrong with sciences at UM.</p>
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<p>Michigan’s admit rate is high in part because as a public university it’s got to take a lot of in-state applicants. I don’t have the figures, but everyone I’ve ever talked to believes the OOS admit rate is well below 50%. And its admit rate is expected to come down pretty dramatically now that it’s switched to the Common App which it used this year for the first time, boosting applications substantially.</p>
<p>But acceptance rates don’t really tell us anything about how many accepted students decline to attend for financial or other reasons. We can calculate that directly: it’s called “yield,” defined as the percentage of accepted students who enroll. Michigan’s yield is about 41%, certainly not HYPS territory, but comparable to schools like Georgetown (42.2%), Vanderbilt (41.0%), and Duke (40.8%), and ahead of schools like Chicago (36.0%), Rice (35.8%), Johns Hopkins (31.3%), Northwestern (30.9%), WUSTL (29.4%), Emory (28.4%), and Carnegie Mellon (27.7%).</p>
<p>As for its financial aid, sure, it would be nice if they met 100% of need for everyone, but I’d point out that among top-50 ranked public universities, Michigan meets meets full need for a higher percentage of its students (90%) and meets a higher average percentage of need (90%) than all except UVA (100% / 100%) and UNC Chapel Hill (97% / 100%). But both of those schools have far more full-pays. At Michigan 46% of entering freshmen get need-based FA; at UVA only 32% get need-based aid, and at UNC 39%. Makes it easier to meet 100% of need if only 1/3 of the class is getting FA, I imagine. I don’t know if that’s because UVA and UNC serve a wealthier clientele, or because their nominally generous FA policies are not so generous after all and that drives away a lot of high-need accepted students who decline to enroll, or if they simply set the bar higher for who qualifies for FA and thus create more full-pays by cutting off aid at a lower income level, or some combination of those reasons.</p>
<p>Top publics / % getting need-based FA / % with full need met / ave % of need met:</p>
<p>UC Berkeley / 49% / 50% / 90%
UCLA / 54% / 23% / 81%
UVA / 32% / 100% / 100%
Michigan / 46% / 90% / 90%
UNC Chapel Hill / 39% / 97% / 100%
William & Mary / 32% / 16% / 76%
Georgia Tech / 34% / 35% / 74%
UCSD / 64% / 37% / 89%
UC Davis / 61% / 15% / 82%
UCSB / 56% / 33% / 84%
U Washington / 37% / 36% / 80%
U Texas / 48% / 34% / 85%
Wisconsin / 36% / 21% / 75%
Penn State / 48% / 7% / 53%
Illinois / 46% / 36% / 71%</p>
<p>So however ungenerous Michigan’s FA policies are reputed to be, they’re stellar by public university standards.</p>
<p>Nor is it only public universities that fall short of meeting 100% of need. Here are some leading privates that don’t:</p>
<p>Top-50 privates / % getting need-based FA / % with full need met / ave % of need met</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon / 56% / 30% / 82%
Wake Forest / 29% / 92% / 100%
NYU / 51% / N/A [= must be pretty bad if they don’t report it] / 71%
Brandeis / 58% / 13% / 82%
Lehigh / 46% / 56% / 97%
Case Western / 64% / 89% / 90%
RPI / 66% / 44% / 88%
U Miami / 49% / 35% / 83%
Yeshiva / 55% / 26% / 89%</p>
<p>“Yup,in a desperate move to pass UW, UM combined all their campuses into one number and reclassified some work as research to eek out the narrow win. But UW still smashed UM in patents (119 to 72) and related income ($56.7 Million to $18.3 Million).”</p>
<p>Michigan doesn’t have an agricultural college where a large amount of the patents/related income come from each year at Wisky.</p>
<p>Michigan’s yield of 41% is very, very poor for a state school. Most state schools have very high yields because they are the best option for most students who simply don’t look elsewhere. Its hard to understand why its yield is the same as private schools like Duke or Georgetown who compete on a more national level with the Ivies for the top students and in the case of Duke, have a world-class public university like UNC-Chapel Hill instate to compete with.</p>
<p>^^^^Most state schools don’t have around 40% of their undergraduates coming from OOS.</p>
<p>Berkeley’s freshman yield for 2011-2 is 41.8%. Slightly higher than last year. Not bad for a school with lots of in-state competition.</p>