<p>Very interesting and current study. UW seems to hold its own pretty well but need for more merit and scholarship aid is also clear.</p>
<p>In state yield is very, very strong. Very impressive on minority recruiting as well. Out of state and high achieving students, not so much.</p>
<p>These are statistics in a vacuum if not compared to other similar institutions. Let me focus on “high achieving” students. With the exception of Berkeley, UCLA and perhaps Texas, I suspect most every other elite public institution has roughly similar experience. In other words, such students will disproportionately choose other institutions, for the simple reason that they can. They can be admitted to good private institutions that offer good financial aid, and they can be recruited to “lesser” public institutions with great financial aid. For example, looking at the Wisconsin figures, it appears that some slightly disproportionate (or at least slightly surprising) number of high achieving residents choose Eau Claire and Oshkosh over Madison. Both those schools actively recruit such students with scholarship offers that can make them substantially less expensive. (I note that Arizona State shows up in the data also; ASU throws money at NM honorees.)</p>
<p>Money is a powerful motivator, as we know from personal experience; my son ultimately chose Wisconsin over the “elite” private schools that accepted him because of the immense difference in cost (when it was apparent to us that the qualitative difference in the value of the education was not nearly so immense). Others will choose a “lesser” public school making the same calculation, and of course many will choose a private institution that offers financial aid if they believe the relative cost/educational quality ratio swings in their favor.</p>
<p>So to sum up, I don’t think the enrollment figures for high achievers are either surprising or concerning. Indeed, I would say that Wisconsin’s success at attracting and enrolling such students is fairly obvious. That glass is half (more like 65%) full.</p>
<p>“High achievers” are simply students who scored 30+ on ACT. I don’t know why those categorized as high achievers aren’t flocking to UW, but a 30+ ACT hardly guarantees admission to a need-blind private school.</p>
<p>It might say something about the SES of most high ACT scorers. </p>
<p>That’s not to say that relatively wealthy families wouldn’t consider the cost-benefits of paying for a private college, but money is probably less of an issue while the student’s individual desire is more of an issue.</p>
<p>A score of 30+ puts one in the 96th percentile of all test-takers in the US. 31 is the 98th percentile. Only in the goofy world of CC is this not an elite level score. Whether or not it gets you into HYPSM is not really the question as the admissions for those schools has become a mania. Any admissions person at Harvard would tell you a person with a 30+ ACT could do well there.</p>
<p>Interesting reading - I see that high-achieving Wisconsin resident applicants (30 ACT or above) have an admit rate of 92.4% (2006/2172 from page 5) based on 2008 and 2009 application data. The report also mentions on page 3 (item 12) that 56% of these admits enrolled, as compared to 63% overall, and that in order to be successful in enrolling more of these students, UW-Madison needs to be more competitive with scholarship and other financial incentives.</p>
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<p>The question is whether most 30+ ACT scorers won’t be admitted to full-need OOS colleges, considering most full need colleges are elite. If most 30+ ACT scorers aren’t admitted to full need schools, then what does this say about the SES of high scorers considering that a higher number nonetheless choose OOS schools? </p>
<p>Remember that most schools that would offer merit scholarships to a student simply because they scored a 30+ ACT are not competitive with UW Madison.</p>
<p>I think we can assume that most UW admits are also UW-Oshkosh/LaCrosse admits, so the high achievers shouldn’t have lower UW yield due to cheaper, in-state options that aren’t available to regular admits. (This is verified by your source–in fact way less WI resident high achievers choose a non-UW home state public than regular admits).</p>
<p>Which ultimately leads to the question of whether financial aid is really the issue that’s preventing a high yield for “high achievers.” It sounds like the criteria for identifying high achievers segregates high income students. These high income students wouldn’t receive financial aid anyways, and are potentially more swayed by “fit.” Merit aid might be a factor, though.</p>
<p>The other issue is that ACT might be a bad indicator of high achievement. You shouldn’t be trying to attract students with high ACT scores if ACT scores are heavily influenced by SES. It’s bad enough that such scores weigh heavily in admissions decisions, much less in merit aid choices.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that a top 5 choice for high achievers was Northwestern, which is full need…So, I certainly could be off. Just my biased hunch.</p>
<p>Justtotalk here’s some evidence that you might indeed be wrong. </p>
<p>You all may wish to kill me for pointing this out, but U-Va IS need blind and does guarantee full financial aid to all admits, whether in state or out, and it enrolls out of state high achievers at more than DOUBLE the rate of UW. The average admitted out of state student to U-Va has close to a 1400 on the SAT – the equivalent of nearly a 32 on the ACT – yet U-Va’s out of state yield is 33 percent. I’m not suggesting that this makes U-Va “elite” vis-a-vis UW, but I am agreeing with the other posters on this thread that it’s meeting the financial needs of the out of state high achieving students that gets them in the door. </p>
<p>The numbers for U-Va also suggest that Milwdad is wrong that: “With the exception of Berkeley, UCLA and perhaps Texas, I suspect most every other elite public institution has roughly similar experience.” In fact, I’d bet the numbers for these schools are not appreciably higher than for UW because they don’t offer good financial aid to out of state students either.</p>
<p>In other words, I’m agreeing with barrons.</p>
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<p>I was referring specifically to WI residents in prior posts; I’d be far more interested in the in state high achievers yield in UVA before and after full need began being met.</p>
<p>The problem is that instate talent is supposedly leaving WI. I’m not sure 30+ ACT scores are good identifiers of this talent, but there’s little doubt that students who get accepted into elite, need blind colleges often have an economic and academic incentive to leave the state.</p>
<p>My question is what is the best method of changing this, and how do you objectively measure the success in attracting top talent? I’m not sure financial aid will necessarily attract top talent because we haven’t identified the type of talent that typically leaves the state. Are they usually low income students who got full need met by elite colleges? Or are they wealthy students who aren’t as concerned with cost? Certainly there’s a mix, but we can’t offer it all. The question is: What type of aid should UW be focusing on?</p>
<p>I argue that looking at top ACT scorers is not identifying this instate talent. It (may) simply identify the relatively rich students who are choosing UW pier schools that are private because they are better “fits,” etc., This gives us no information on what type of top talent choosing the truly elite schools over UW. Are they typically the ones getting full need, partial need, or the ones with no need? This answer affects how you attract such talent.</p>
<p>I think looking at UVA’s OOS talent yield isn’t really relevant. It’d be ideal if the best talent instate stayed in state. That way the OOS pool could diversify the student body, increasing funding, or whatever else the University needed–rather than exclusively focusing on talent from OOS when there’s talent slipping through our fingers.</p>
<p>Can’t help UVa students were duped by a pretty campus and the allure of “exclusivity”.
A 1400 is much closer to a 30 than to a 32 ACT. </p>
<p>[SAT</a> and ACT Test](<a href=“http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/sat-act-test.html]SAT”>SAT and ACT Test)</p>
<p>Point taken. As I said in my prior post UW does seem to retain a lot of in state talent as measured by the ACT. As for whether the ACT is the appropriate measure of achievement, there’s really nothing else that comes as close to being an objective yardstick.</p>
<p>As for barrons’ point, all I can say is that both the College Board (which administers the SAT) and the ACT folks have agreed on the conversion table that I used. But we’re splitting hairs: either way the average OOS student admitted to U-Va has over a 30 on the ACT, and the yield has averaged at least 33 percent (and most years more).</p>
<p><a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/act-sat-concordance-tables.pdf[/url]”>http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/act-sat-concordance-tables.pdf</a> </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.act.org/aap/concordance/pdf/reference.pdf[/url]”>http://www.act.org/aap/concordance/pdf/reference.pdf</a></p>
<p>justtotalk, I regret I cannot deduce from your context what the acronym “SES” stands for. Could you please define that for me?</p>
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<p>I don’t think a white, upper middle class student with academic parents who scored a 30 on the ACT has the same potential as a low-income minority student who works 20 hours a week on the side and got the same score.</p>
<p>The yardstick should simply be admittance into top-20 schools as ranked by USNWR or a combination of other rankings. There are prestigious schools that already do the work by identifying the top students. Lets use their admissions work in identifying and assessing our ability to retain such students. No need to go around making our own assumptions on who is a top student.</p>
<p>This would consider all the important subjective factors in a simple objective test.</p>
<p>EDIT: SES = socioeconomic status.</p>
<p>Justotalk, you’re acting like you’re proposing some kind of radical yardstick that no one’s ever heard of and that would result in dramatically different findings from relying solely on the ACT or SAT. In fact, every one of the top 20 schools has average ACT/SAT scores that are substantially higher than UW’s, and it’s counter-intuitive that the average student admitted to the top 20 who did not actually enroll had lower scores than those who did enroll. So I’d be very surprised if the average student admitted to the top twenty had lower than a 30 on the SAT. If anything it’s much higher. </p>
<p>Plus no one’s talking about “potential.” They’re talking about “achievement.” </p>
<p>It’s also worth noting that the UW study did separate out minority and rural students in an effort to measure what you now reference.</p>
<p>Make it one of those check marks on the common app–“Will you allow colleges to release scores exclusively amongst each other?” You know, the kind of questions where you can maintain your right to privacy but the subtle implication is that you will be “frowned upon.” </p>
<p>I’m sure we could get a lot of data with a little bit of intercollegiate cooperation. The data would probably be very interesting to Ivies as well–esp. in regards to competition within their own peer group.</p>
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<p>This is obvious. Many/most top students (though certainly not all) scored a 30+ on the ACT (or SAT equivalent). The question is what other type of students are being included when calling all 30+ ACT scorers “high achievers.” We should simply be focusing on high achievers, not the all inclusive and biased measurement of 30+ on the ACT. </p>
<p>You don’t identify what the top 1% is doing by looking at the statistics of the top 5% and inferring.</p>
<p>Top students and top ACT scorers are distinct groups. Top ACT scorers are a larger group (when top students are considered relative to the UW Madison population), and not all top students are top ACT scorers. So why use ACT?</p>
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<p>I’m pretty sure colleges want to attract students with the most graspable potential, not those who have peaked at age 18 with great achievements.</p>
<p>College Board always boasts and studies whether the SAT predicts college GPA, not whether SAT and other high school achievements are highly correlated. Why do you think this is?</p>
<p>You’re fighting wind mills, justotalk. No one – least of all me – is arguing that colleges shouldn’t target students with “potential.” But that’s not what this thread is about. The thread is about targeting high achievers. They’re not mutually exclusive; a school should target both.</p>
<p>Well, if only the top 1% is high achieving we have a differnce of opinion on what that means. I think if you are in the top 5% of college bound HS graduates you are high achieving. Mensa only required a 29 on the ACT for membership.</p>
<p>It might be intereting how HS achievements translate into later success. I doubt it is any better at predicting later success than test scores. All are fairly weak predictors. But it’s the best we have. High school grades are now so inflated they are meaningless in many cases.</p>
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<p>Well, there’s a lower limit on what we can call “top students” here. The average student at UW is not a top student at UW right? I’m saying that the “top students” UW wants are the students that typically attend schools that are generally accepted as more prestigious yet need blind (Ivies, etc.,). Just because someone scored a 30 on an ACT test doesn’t mean UW Madison should be targeting them. </p>
<p>If all you want is a student body with high ACT scores, then you should look at a group of applicants that scored above a 30 ACT, call them “high achievers,” and then figure out how to increase their yield. </p>
<p>If, instead, you want to pass initiatives that will retain the instate students that often choose the Ivies over Madison, then you should identify those students. </p>
<p>The qualities that Harvard looks for in an applicant shouldn’t be much different than the qualities UW looks for, except that UW has an obligation to the state and thus values WI students even more. So, with this in mind, shouldn’t we be trying to get WI residents who are Ivy admits to join UW instead?</p>
<p>Then why are we calling high ACT scorers high achievers? They’re not our target. You’re using the stats about population X to drive an agenda that will hopefully capture students from population Y.</p>
<p>Thus, the question remains: what type of students are the Ivies taking from WI? Should we be focusing on merit aid (to capture a wide range of SES), financial aid (to entice the middle class), or improving the college itself (to entice the very poor or wealthy)</p>
<p>Who the hell cares if the 3.4 GPA, 31 ACT, mediocre EC student chose Case Western over UW? He/she was barely an admit at either college. Until there comes a day when UW can offer full aid and full merit to everyone that deserves it and still adhere to its mission, then these applicants must be currently neglected. Will you model your aid packages to benefit these students instead of the real top students?</p>
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<p>That’s exactly what it is. I trust an admissions team at an elite college to make better decisions than an ACT score–especially considering they’re given the ACT score as part of their information available.</p>
<p>Realtically I don’t ever expect UW to approach Ivy. MIT averages. Not going to happen, not the UW mission, etc etc. First UW needs to take about 5500-6000 students per year about 65% of which must come from Wisconsin. You could enroll every high achiever in the state each year and you would still need a good number of just “good” students to fill the class. The average student at UW has a 28.2 ACT which translates into about the Top 8% of test-takers. By most measures I think that is a top student which I would consider anyone in the Top 10%. BTW using ACT is just shorthand for saying high achievers overall. I presume they will have the grades etc to go with the scores. It just takes too long tolist every consideration. This is big picture stuff here.</p>
<p>The UW is certainly trying to get all the top students it can from the state. I don’t think they did a great job of commmunicating that in the past (or even really caring) but the new AD has that right in their new plan. There is a reason there is a new AD BTW. And that she came from a place that greatly increased its competitiveness for admissions–Chicago. The admissions office now has a written goal of attracting high achiever Wisconsin students as well as out of state. There are on-going efforts to bring departmental scholarships into the student recruitment process as well as increasing both need and merit based aid. Dr. Martin has mentioned these things several times so I think she is very serious about it. They are going to more OOS college fairs and high schools than in the recent past.</p>