I promise this isn’t a ■■■■■■■■ post. I don’t get it. I mean, Auburn? Really? It’s a fine school for sure but I’ve never known or considered it to be different from any other second tier SEC school like Tennessee, Arkansas, Ole Miss, Mizzou, or South Carolina. Certainly lower tiered than UGA, UF, and Vandy. Can someone explain its sudden popularity? Only two years ago it accepted 71% of applicants and has historically has a 75-80% acceptance rate. What gives?
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Some of the increase in applicants and decrease in acceptance rates can be attributed to joining the common app a couple of years ago. Also speaking as the mom of Georgia resident who chose Auburn over UGA for engineering, Auburn is a more established engineering program than UGA. They also rank very high for happiest students according to the Princeton review.
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The weather and the lifestyle.
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Two words:
War Eagle
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Not “War d___ Eagle”? 
Auburn is still like many of the comps mentioned (Tenn, S. Carolina, Ole Miss). They are all getting an influx of applicants and are now able to be choosier (check out the admission stats from last year for those other guys, and they will likely increase applicants again this year). What makes you think Auburn has pulled ahead of the pack?
In addition to points listed above, I also think it tracks with acceptance rates at large public universities in nearby states. The harder it is to get into UGA, GT, UF, now Clemson, the more popular Auburn becomes. I’m guessing a big driver is specifically metro Atlanta families. For those families, top choices are UGA and Tech. But the acceptance rates are low. So kids look around at similar schools, and Auburn looks very attractive. It’s less than 2 hours away, the COA is on the lower end for OOS (~10k cheaper than Clemson for example), it still offers some decent scholarship money for OOS, has a well regarded engineering school, all the game day spirit, no essay/LOR, fast EA decision rounds (first decisions came out mid Oct).
We really liked Auburn when we toured so it deserves all the love.
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We know people with ties to Clemson and Auburn, and they are in many ways equivalent schools. For the past few years, Auburn has been more generous with financial aid making it more appealing to many families.
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There also seems to be more of an effort to recruit students from further away, like the Northeast. This raises awareness in these areas and attracts more applications, which then lowers acceptance rates.
Auburn has a good veterinary program and a good engineering school.
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All great points. I wonder if the other SEC schools will benefit also as more families branch out?
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Last year there were record applicants across the SEC, UGA had 61,000. Clemson was overwhelmed and put a large percentage on deferred. South Carolina actively recruited kids to Honors programs and then deferred them. FSU had record applicants, LSU had close to 50,000 applicants.
I live in the northeast and way more kids went far south than had happened in previous years. So Auburn is just included in that group
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For Future OOS applicants, this year it appears admits from EA1 are only getting automatic merit if ACT is 33 or higher and SAT around 1500. Sadly my daughter is below that and as much as she loves Auburn, it isn’t worth leaving Florida cost wise for her. So, even though they posted merit of 3 levels for OOS, only the highest Presidential is happening so far and it doesn’t sound promising that anymore will be provided.
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When my kids were applying to college – 8 years and 6 years ago, respectively – the University of Tennessee in Knoxville was about 85% in-state students. Now it is about 60% in-state. I don’t know how many of the OOS students are from north of the Mason-Dixon line, but probably a decent number.
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I am trying to confirm that OOS will not get a Heritage or a Charter scholarship with a 32 ACT and higher than the 3.5 GPA. Do we know for sure if there is now a cutoff at 33 ACT?
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Not definite, but based on the FAQ it doesn’t sound promising
That’s really a shame. I am assuming many applied to Auburn because of a belief they would receive merit. This should not have happened.
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I might argue that applying to any school with an assumption of merit is a bad approach. A hope for merit, certainly. Just like your post on the other thread I don’t think anyone here - and possibly no one at Auburn at this point - can definitively answer the question around what merit tiers might be adjusted and by how much. They have a fixed pool of money and depending on the applicant criteria and their expected yield they may need to adjust awards. I wouldn’t THINK they’d completely abolish specific tiers but based on what they did with the first round it sounds like things are being reduced.
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I understand your point; however, when a school is posting a chart in plain view delineating scholarships, of course people are going to use the information when applying. In my example, a 32 ACT is the top end of the range for the second level of scholarship, Heritage, which is why I used that number. Wouldn’t it be safe to assume a person with a score of 32 would at least get the lowest level of scholarship, Charter. If you can’t at least give a kid with a 32 ACT and a 3.5 GPA a Charter, should you even post the chart on the webpage in the first place? The only possible explanation is the applicants this year were so much more qualified than last year, which seems hard to believe. This could all be just speculation, but time will tell.
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Why hard to believe? Applications across the board are on the increase and particularly (for whatever reason) for many schools in the South. Numbers in the table are number of applicants as reported in the Common Data Set. So they have almost a 2.5x applicant pool from 2018/19 to last year.
2018 20,742
2019 20,205
2020 17,946
2021 27,619
2022 45,693
2023 (from press report - 48K+)
If Auburn didn’t footnote that awards are subject to change based on competitiveness of applicants I’d agree you have a legitimate complaint. The alternative is for them to not post anything and folks would then complain about the lack of transparency on who gets what.
I’m not defending Auburn per se - just pointing out they’re in a bit of a no-win situation and IMO have struck a reasonable middle ground. Whether or not your child gets X scholarship, and how much that’s worth - I suspect you just need some patience to find that out and not overthink it until that point. I get how tense these months can be waiting to see what the full picture might be (acceptances, financials, fit, etc).
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Where I live (mid-atlantic) top students never used to consider going south- schools in va and pa were popular, and top kids who went further afield all went to New England or New York. My daughter attends the same private school I did and it’s amazing to me how many head south- SC, GA, even AL and MS which would have been unheard of. Auburn doesn’t seem to be on the radar as much as Clemson, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s in the mix for some kids.
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