Enrollment increases by close to 3%

[Corbett]

Located in a predominantly middle-class Detroit suburb within a 20-minute drive of Ann Arbor, Plymouth-Canton Community School’s graduating class submits on average 300 applications to the University of Michigan each year. About one-third are usually admitted and choose to matriculate, according to Renee Eley, a high-school guidance counselor in the district.

As an adviser to many students applying to the University over the years, Eley said there has been a noticeable trend toward higher competition in admissions.

“It slowly keeps getting tougher,” Eley said.

The Numbers Game: Changing Trends in College Admissions

This is a familiar story to me, because the same thing is happening with University of California admissions. But in California, it's clear that the number of in-state applicants is climbing fast. At UCLA, for example, there were 63,516 in-state applications for Fall 2017, compared to 43,938 in 2007. So the number of Californians applying to UCLA increased by 45% over the past 10 years (without including any non-resident applicants). UCLA has not been able to rapidly increase its capacity to match the rapid increase in demand, so the in-state admission rate has fallen. Nobody likes this, but at least it's understandable.

Is UM getting similarly flooded with in-state applications – in a state where the number of high school graduates is falling? If not, then the decreasing in-state acceptance rates over the past 10 years may be harder to explain.

Eley said she has noticed an increasingly competitive admissions process turning away students whom she would describe as otherwise qualified, reflecting the increased selectivity of the application process.

“Last year I had a student who had a 3.9 (GPA), and she was accepted at NYU and some other highly competitive schools, but then she was deferred at Michigan, so she ended up attending Michigan State,” Eley said. “There’s no reason she shouldn’t have been at Michigan, and that’s where we get confused, because we can’t really get straight answers.”