<p>Hmm I am far from suburban Detroit but a sizable portion of kids from my school attend Michigan. At least 20 from my class of 220 will attend this year. In most cases, the next smartest group of kids go to MSU–but a few that could’ve gone to Michigan pick State for fit or sports loyalty reasons. The bottom 50% goes to one of two local CC’s and the rest pick between Western, Central, GVSU, Ferris, etc. </p>
<p>Now I imagine Cassopolis, which is fairly close to me, is much different :)</p>
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<p>Thanks! I just had no sense of what the base was, but that absolutely confirms what you were saying.</p>
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<p>Well, I can think of a couple of possibilities. One, as I’ve mentioned before, is that UVA’s definition of “need” might be such that a lot of lower- and middle-income students just get better offers elsewhere. You hear this all the time about Michigan which doesn’t meet 100% of need for OOS students; and people just blithely keep repeating that UVA does meet 100% of need. But if UVA is so generous, and if coupled with that it’s truly need-blind, then you’d expect to see adverse selection; you’d expect high-need OOS kids to flock there. And may be they apply, and maybe ever are admitted in larger numbers. But possibly UVA’s definition of need is just so ungenerous that low- and middle-income students vote with their feet once they see the FA offer, and go elsewhere. In short “meets 100% of need” doesn’t actually tell you all that much about how much FA you can expect, especially at a school that uses Profile and can define need on its own terms.</p>
<p>One stat to support that hypothesis: there’s a huge gap between the percentage of UVA students who apply for need-based aid (72%) and those who the school determines have financial need (36%). That’s an unusually large difference. And that’s among students who elect to come, mind you; it doesn’t include the admitted sutdents who see the FA offer and say, “Forget i!”</p>
<p>Another possibility is that UVA’s admissions criteria strongly favor kids from affluent communities and affluent schools. It’s actually not so hard to work yourself into that box if you weigh standardized test scores and fancy ECs heavily. I’d imagine UVA’s in-state student population is drawn heavily from the DC suburbs. And I’m sure a lot of their OOS population comes from DC suburbs on the Maryland side—essentially the same kids from different sides of the same metro area. So it may be that kids from lower- and middle-income communities just don’t get admitted to UVA in anywhere near the numbers they do at other state schools.</p>
<p>Supporting this hypothesis: Only 39% of UVA’s total student body received any form of need-based aid. That’s extraordinarily low for a state school. At Michigan it’s 48%; at UC-Berkeley it’s well into the 60+%. So it’s not just the OOS students at UVA who are affluent, it’s also the in-state students, which suggests to me it has something to do with who UVA admits, i.e., that its admissions criteria favor the affluent, and perhaps that it does less than other schools to consciously counter that tendency by weighing things like socioeconomic diversity, perhaps geographic diversity within the state (something Michigan definitely considers), first-gen, crediting work experience (more common in families with less wealth) equally with fancy prep-school-type ECs, and so on.</p>
<p>Or it could be a combination. Or something else entirely. </p>
<p>But it does make you wonder what public mission UVA thinks it’s serving, if it’s mainly educating the affluent at taxpayer expense (only partially, I realize).</p>
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<p>So I’m guessing you’re from Grand Rapids or Holland or somewhere around there. The University of Michigan has always had a strong following in the GR-Holland area. A bit less so in Lansing, Flint, and the Saginaw Valley which are more MSU-oriented. I’d say the largest numbers of in-state Michigan students come from suburban Detroit, then from Grand Rapids-Holland. MSU gets lots from suburban Detroit, too, but also a lot more small-town kids. (Is that the Cassopolis reference? Am I missing some inside Cassopolis joke?)</p>
<p>I live like 2 hrs southwest of GR. It definitely makes sense that more rural, small-town kids go to MSU. They have really strong natural science/agriculture programs which I imagine quite a few kids from these areas want to study. Cassopolis is just a really small town that is pretty close to me. It’s not a very prosperous area.</p>
<p>It’s intereresting to see DC and its suburbs brought up because every year there are complaints exactly the opposite -complaints by people in that area that many of their kids are being shut out because the admissions committee is looking to diversify and don’t want the school to be made up of nothing but high stats affluent kids from the DC area. We’re not from the DC area and the common thing that the kids have that are admitted seem to be that they tended to have very good to excellent SAT’s,very high GPA’s and excellent EC’s. My kid was the only white kid on a very diverse city public school basketball team. I really don’t think that is an EC that most affluent kids would have but it did not shut him out of UVa. We are not at all poor but not affluent either. The school has been looking to increase diversity and if anything may be looking to add more and more less affluent and more diverse kids all the time. I really don’t have the sense that the admissions committee is admitting primarily affluent kids. UVa is very well regarded in Virginia as are other schools.It does tend to admit the top students from around the state but those that are not admitted have other very good instate options.</p>
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<p>No doubt, and all of those factors tend favor wealthier students. UVa has has a significantly wealthy student body for a very long time. Other top publics give a higher preference to low income kids. Of course for UVa to do the same, it would then have to reduce admissions for others, and that would be politically difficult (IMO).</p>
<p>Last 3 years senior scholars and where they matriculated. Probably all all applied to UofM just over 40% went to U of M which is darn close to yield. I still don’t think our school is an anomaly among highi performing high schools. </p>
<p>UofM - 22
Northwestern - 2
Purdue - 4
Penn - 1
MIT - 1
Harvard - 2
Chicago - 1
Naval Academy - 1
Notre Dame - 2
Colorado College 1
Wash U - 1
GVSU - 7
Marquette - 1
Kalamzoo - 2
Hope - 3
Wheaton - 1
Michigan State - 1
Ripon - 1
Ferris Pharmacy - 1</p>
<p>(In what mathematical system is 22 “just over 40%” of 55?)</p>
<p>I was a political science undergrad.</p>
<p>It appears that students at the very best boarding and private schools in New York City treat Michigan and UVA as safety schools.</p>
<p>Here’s the matriculation history from Saint Ann’s School in NYC to these 2 schools over the past 10 years.</p>
<p>[Honors</a>, Awards & Admissions](<a href=“http://www.saintannsny.org/info/honorframe.html]Honors”>http://www.saintannsny.org/info/honorframe.html)</p>
<p>Year: Michigan, UVA
2011: 2/16, 0/1
2010: 3/17, 0/2
2009: 0/11, 0/4
2008: 0/7, 0/0
2007: 0/3, 1/1
2006: 0/4, 0/1
2005: 1/6, 0/0
2004: 2/10, 0/0
2003: 7/15, 1/3
2002: 2/12, 1/1</p>
<p>TOTAL: 16.8%, 23.0%</p>
<p>At least in UVA’s case there aren’t a lot of applications from Saint Ann’s in the first place, but Michigan seems to be quite the popular option for the Saint Ann’s girls in the application stage…but yet no one seems to want to enroll. What the heck? It’s tough to figure out why this disparity exists. U of M had an anomaly in 2003 when 7 students from Saint Ann’s accepted the offer of admission but without that year, it’s yield would be no higher than 10% which is ridiculously low.</p>
<p>Look at Yale’s staggering popularity at this school in question (north of a 90% yield). The difference is astounding.</p>
<p>Who really gives a crap what some snotty rich NY kids ever do? They are playing a role their parents wrote for them.</p>
<p>goldenboy, UVa should not be considered a safety school for any out of state student. Very high stat OOS kids get denied by UVa every year. We have very good NY friends whose son was denied by UVa but accepted to Cornell.That kind of scenario is not as uncommon as you may think. He is now at graduate school at UVa.As many have noted to you already, neither UVa nor Michigan have problems with yield. UVa’s yield is higher than many top privates. I really don’t understand why you would be astounded that a private boarding school kid from NY would pick Yale over another school if they got in. That same kid would probably pick Yale over Georgetown too.</p>
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Uh, you meant the St. Ann’s girls and boys.</p>
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<p>Well, if they do, shrug; why is that of any relevance to anyone else? Who cares? Is that supposed to “mean” something? Oooooh, look what the best boarding and private schools in NYC are doing?</p>
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<p>Exactly. Which is why Georgetown’s yield is 43%—right in the same range as Michigan’s and UVA’s. The whole point of this thread seems to have been for Goldenboy to trash two of the top publics for a “problem” that is completely non-existent, namely their supposed “low” yield. In comparison to other top publics, these two schools have a relatively strong yield. In comparison to some very strong privates–pretty much all but those at the HYPS level, once you discount for the artificial boost to yield some schools get from ED—they’re actually at the high end of the range.</p>
<p>Maybe we should start a new thread:</p>
<p>Why is Duke’s RD yield so low (35.0%)?</p>
<p>or perhaps</p>
<p>Why is Swarthmore’s RD yield so low (27.5%)?</p>
<p>Doh . . . could it be that a lot of their accepted students are going to HYPS? And yet Goldenboy wants to trash Michigan for the same phenomenon occurring there? Such nonsense!</p>
<p>I think the OP is trying to support that he/she thinks 40% yield is “low” and that if colleges were “good” they would have high yields. So now he’s found a private school where 5 kids were admitted to Yale and 4 attended (high yield). 16 applied to UofM but only 2 attended. 1 was accepted but none attended UVA. It looks like a smallish day school in NYC. The fact that 16 kids from this sday school in NY wanted to go to UofM enough to send applications is astounding and somewhat supports a previous poster who said there was a historical trend dating back for NY and NJ students. My father told me last night his first roommate at UofM was from NY and dad graduated from UofM engineering in the 40s.</p>
<p>ED does give a boost to yield as bclintonk notes. The class entering UVa in 2007 was the last class admitted before they did away with ED. The yield then was 52.3% as opposed to being in the 40’s as it has been more recently.</p>
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Oh bclintonk, don’t be ridiculous. People choose HYPS over Swat/Duke for sure but nobody even considers Michigan if they get into a top 15 USNWR school out of state.</p>
<p>Nobody who’s admitted to Dartmouth and Duke and whatever would even consider Michigan or UVA. You’re being very disingenuous when you compare the yields of a state school like Michigan to a private school like Duke since the former should have a much higher yield because it offers discounted tuition to all applicants from the state of Michigan. The majority of its applicants receive subsidized in-state tuition prices so there’s an obvious financial incentive to attend over a highly ranked private school. The same applied to UVA. I would bet the OOS yield of these public schools which is a more fair comparison would be no higher than 15% which is nowhere near the level of a Swat or a Wash U let alone a Dartmouth or Duke. The effect of using ED at private schools doesn’t even come close to overcoming the in-state tuition break advantage that public schools get to boost their yield.</p>
<p>Duke’s yield of 45%, which is still 4-5% higher than Michigan or UVA, is excellent when you consider the fact that in addition to competing with all of the Ivies, the school has a world-class public university right in its midst in UNC-Chapel Hill. There is a small but non-trivial number of North Carolinians who refuse to go the better school academically and don the royal shade of blue since they’ve grown up die-hard Tarheels and fate has already chosen which side of the fiercest rivalry in college sports they will end up on.;)</p>