In-State vs. Out-of-State Enrollment

bclintonk
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 19:13:36 +0000

twoinanddone:

Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia all have instaters who wanted to get into those schools but didn’t, and feel their spots were taken by OOS interlopers.

I’d really question how much that’s the case in Michigan. You certainly don’t see much of that kind of griping on CC. The school has always been selective, and while it’s gotten more so, I’m dubious that many people fault OOS students for that development.

Michigan’s in-state admit rate is still close to 50%, while its OOS admit rate is now below 20%. Yet admissions officers insist their in-state admits are as strong as the OOS admits. I think that reflects a lot of self-selection among in-state applicants who usually have a pretty good idea where they stand in the pecking order, and HS GCs in the state reinforce that by steering weaker applicants away from Michigan. That leaves a fairly small in-state applicant pool that skews toward the highly qualified, and I think Michigan doesn’t turn away many of the state’s top students—though they do turn away many highly qualified OOS applicants. In-state applicants who would be borderline at Michigan but don’t make the cut can usually get into Michigan State or Michigan Tech (an excellent engineering school) and most seem pretty content with that. In fact, some prefer Michigan State which is a pretty good school in its own right and gives some nice merit awards to top students. And the state also has a fairly strong network of “directionals.” In my experience, in-state applicants who aren’t admitted to Michigan usually assume they just didn’t meet its admission standards, rather than blaming “OOS interlopers.”