Correct blossom is 100% wrong and the numbers support that: UT Austin ig just posted another record “almost 100k” undergrad apps received this cycle. Interest only increasing.
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A very smart person once said to me, the data don’t lie. The story you make up to explain the data may be a lie.
The data are clear that application volume in the south is up significantly. We can all make up our own stories why that is the case.
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OOS apps are up at a higher rate.
“The University of Georgia continues to attract record numbers of applicants from throughout Georgia and the United States. More than 34,000 students applied for early action consideration this year, a 12.8% increase overall, with out-of-state applications growing at nearly double the in-state rate. Out-of-state applications rose by 17.9%, while in-state applications increased by 8.54%. In total, more than 10,700 early action applicants were admitted.”
A friend who was a school counselor said she used to see students apply to schools whose football teams did well the season they were applying. Not a reason I’d use to pick a school to apply to, but to each his/her own.
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This definitely happens, I’ll be curious to see whether applications to Penn State fall precipitously this year or next.
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As long as UConn keeps winning basketball games, they’re looking pretty good for more applications too.
But U Conn isn’t in the South! U Conn gets snow! U Conn is so “everyone is leaving New England and moving to Florida. Everyone knows that Alabama and Texas are where it’s at right now”. U Conn is too PC and Connecticut still cares about DEI– nobody wants to go to U Conn anymore.
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But it’s cold in CT and football is king. (I love UConn).
I guess I’m just confused by increased applications meaning more people are going south? By that logic, so many more people must be going to Ivy+ schools as well? 
Are these schools increasing the size of their incoming classes? Or are they just becoming more selective the more applications they receive?
Perhaps more students applying doesn’t necessarily mean more students going?
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CU Boulder and the ‘Prime Effect’ is going strong
CU sees record number of applicants, stops short of crediting ‘Prime Effect’
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FWIW, it did mean that at UConn.
Don’t forget- we have long time posters here who insist that HS kids don’t care about access to healthcare- it’s a made up issue by the mainstream media. HS kids don’t care about states which vilify Trans or “other” populations. HS kids don’t care about ANY social issues– they just want nice weather (which U Conn does not have btw, and the early snowfall and arctic chill in December just reaffirms), living near the beach (a solid “no” for U Conn), and cheap tuition (YMMV).
I guess all these U Conn applicants come from Vermont, Maine and upstate NY where the weather is even colder?
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It’s funny; one of our top choices (Gonzaga) is apparently huge for basketball too, about which we couldn’t give two poops 
Perhaps if one wants to continue the off-topic conversation of choosing colleges based on the success of their sports teams, someone can start a new thread?
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I would like to know if anyone cares to chime in, how many posters on this thread 1) live in the South and 2) are parents of LGBTQ+ kids, or are in that community themselves.
I both live in the South (NC) and am parents of two LGBTQ kids who have no plans to move anywhere else. Hordes of people of all ages move to NC all the time. Raleigh and Charlotte are super hot places for young people looking to start their careers.
I get really annoyed at people from outside the region who make assumptions about what it is like here or, worse, the people who move here and then try to deny that they live in the South.
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My daughter lives in a smaller college town in NC and identifies as bisexual. She was easily able to find her people when she moved. She feels like people really live the “ya’ll means all” motto. She also really likes and feels very comfortable with her health care providers.
My H and I lived in NC for a short time when our D was a baby and I loved it.
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I’m originally from New England and have been living in the Atlanta area for 30 plus years. Yup, I was one of those Northerners who went South for college and stayed. I went to a D3 school that doesn’t even have a football team and at the time the student body was about 30 percent Jewish students from the Northeast. Sports and Greek life had nothing to do with my college choice - but a milder winter was definitely a plus. Believe it or not there are some excellent academic institutions in the South. Why wouldn’t there be kids from other parts of the country interested in attending?
For most of my adult life, I have had family and friends from my hometown make comments about how racist and bigoted the South is. Yet, they live in a community that is nearly 90 percent white and has fought tooth and nail for decades against a county wide school system because that would mean bussing in minority and lower income students from a nearby city. They don’t want to hear that the schools in my higher income Atlanta community are majority minority or that my next door neighbors like thousands and thousands of other highly educated African Americans chose to leave the North and raise their family in the South. Folks should Google “reverse Great Migration”. African Americans have been relocating en masse to cities like Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte since at least the 1980s.
My kids are not members of the LGBTQ community, but they have friends and members of our extended family who are. My oldest (HS class of 17) was one of the founders of what is essentially a gay/straight alliance club at his small private school in a more conservative area of the Atlanta suburbs. One of his closest friends came out as trans and the friend group decided to start a club to support members of the LGBTQ community at their school. Within a year, the club’s membership swelled to over 200 kids out of a student population of 300.
I fully understand concerns about restrictive abortion laws and why some students avoid the South for that reason. At the same time, there seems to be a lot of anti South bias and a lack of recognition of how demographics have shifted over the past several decades. There was one poster a few weeks ago who described applicants from Southern states at a few colleges as coming from the “Confederacy” and the “Old South”. I promise things have changed a bit since the Civil War. Lol. Most of my neighbors are transplants and many of my closest friends grew up in other countries ( France, Senegal, India, Nigeria, Brazil). But - I have no issue with folks who don’t want to live or go to school down here. Too many people have moved here.Traffic has gotten terrible and I’d really prefer that they go somewhere else.
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I live in the south. Of my three children, one is nonbinary and the other two are LGBTQIA+.
My eldest didn’t apply to a single school in NC. For them, it was because they were acutely aware of how hostile our legislature is to people like them, combined with a desire to live somewhere with a better climate. We live in a blue are, but even still when a new Pride group wanted to participate in the town Christmas parade (in this decade), right-wing groups tried to get the whole parade canceled rather than allow gay people to march openly. I’d be lying if I said the political climate here was 100% hostile, but it’s not 100% welcoming, either.
And our legislature is increasingly flexing its muscle to force even school systems in blue areas to knuckle under (the just recently demanded that the Chapel Hill school system appear before the NC House, where one member literally threw books about, if I understand correctly, a gay Santa, anatomy and (I think) a trans kid, implying that the schools in Chapel Hill were making kids read them, when in fact the schools don’t carry any of those books). The same pattern is taking hold with regard to our public university system, over which the legislature is asserting more and more control.
My middle child also intends to leave NC; there are no schools here that they’ll consider. They, too, want a better climate, but that’s more about the literal climate than the political one. (it’s too soon to know what my youngest will do; he’s just a freshman).
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