IU has been getting an increase of applications each year. Last year they had about 75,000 applications. I imagine it takes a while longer to get through compared to previous years. In the 2021-2022/2022-2023 cycle they received about 50,000 applications.
I am curious if the admission rate will still be approximately 80% for the last cycle of applications.
I wish your kid good luck!
Thank you. And agree, big increases. Will be interesting to see if anything changes with the birth decrease in 2008.
Out of State: Early Admission Application
Majors: Kelley - Business Finance, Direct Admission Applicant
ACT: 33 // Reading: 36 Math: 32 English: 32 Science: 32
Unweighted GPA: 3.88
Weighted GPA: 4.44 Est. Graduating WGPA: 4.52
Coursework Rigor: 13 AP/IB 15 Honors
Selected Coursework: AP Calculus AB, AP Statistics, IB Global Politics AP Comparative Government and Politics, IB Philosophy, Economics and Personal Finance, Honors
Extra-curricular-
Leadership:
Captain – Varsity Cross Country (1 Year)
Co-Founder / Co-President – Women’s History Club (2 Years)
Vice President – Book Club (2 Years)
Indiana University – Kelley School of Business: Women’s Leadership Institute Selected Participant (Summer 2025)
Athletics:
Cross Country – Varsity (2 Years), Junior Varsity (2 Years)
Track (Spring) – Varsity (2 Years) / Track & Field (Winter) – Varsity (1 Year)
CLUBS AND VOLUNTEERING:
Key Club Member (4 Years)
Amnesty International (4 Years)
Women’s History Club (2 Years)
Book Club (2 Years)
NCFC Youth Soccer – Assistant Youth Coach (4 Years)
Red Cross CPR / AED Certified Adult and Youth (3 Years)
ACADEMIC AWARDS AND CERTIFICATIONS:
Summa Cum Laude – Class of 2026
North Carolina Academic Scholar Award
Presidents Education Award
“X-School” Scholar Award
Academic All-Conference – Cross Country (4 Years)
Academic All-Conference – Track (2 Years)
Internship / work:
Small Business Services & Consulting Intern — “X” Company (Summer 2025, 10 weeks, 32+ hrs/week, paid)
She’ll probably get a decent amount of money. My D25 had similar stats last year and got $10k/year.
Was she Business-Kelley ADA at that time?
She was. Her UW GPA was 3.96 with a 1460 SAT; she had 12 AP/DE classes by the end of her senior year including Calc BC and AP German. She was also a runner like your daughter. She ended up at UVA, but really loved IU when we visited.
Thanks - Ha, I’ve tried to get her to keep UVA on her list - but she keeps dropping it off. I may need to take her up there to see the campus in October, may change her mind. (My brother went there for law school, and I found the campus very nice).
If she’s set on business, UVA is not the best place to go. Students apply after their first year, and last year only 43% of the applicants were accepted. My daughter would be happy studying Econ, so it wasn’t an issue for her. UVA is also a lot smaller than IU so I can see why she might not want to go there.
Are there typical ranges of merit scholarships for out-of-state students? My son is applying with a 3.95 UW GPA and 34 ACT to College of Arts and Sciences. I would guess ECs (if important) here are average compared to other incoming students. Varsity sport and handful of clubs/volunteer things.
Last year my OOS D25 received $10K/year merit. She had a 3.96 UW GPA and a 1460 SAT. She had taken 14 AP/DE classes and had good ECs. She was direct admit into Kelley. My D26 is also applying this year. She has better stats, but not as much leadership, so it’ll be interesting to see if the merit, if any, is different and if she even gets in with the new holistic approach to Kelley.
Another vote for Kelley (or Haas). Who knew football stars interned in the summer! https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/fernando-mendoza-indiana-cal-2bd2445e?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1
My ds is OOS and has a 4.34 weighted GPA and 3.97 unweighted GPA. She took 6 APs and 6 honors classes. ACT superscore is 29. A bunch of ECs like Secretary of NHS, President of Students Against Cancer, and photo editor of the yearbook. What are her chances of getting into Kelley?
My theory is one reason Kelley got rid of Direct Admit is that they had to allow less qualified kids in than your kid because they hit the testing mark and their schools had some whacky grading scale that gave almost every kid a gpa above a 3.8. My D25 applied last year so I followed this thread and saw that happen quite often. I do hope they do a more holistic approacnow. Last year, you needed a 30 ACT to get in and no one really knows if they are keeping the same standards without saying it out loud. But I think she has a great shot with those grades and ECs.
Kelley still has direct admit (aka. you are ‘in’ the business school from day one) but it goes through a comprehensive review (think most other schools like Ross, Haas etc.) rather than a straight-line GPA & SAT cutoff.
I think it was what you were alluding to anyways but just in case people think everyone has to now go through the pre-business path, that is not the case
I think you are correct. My son is a DA in Kelley as a freshman and from my impression IU had to massage DA criteria for a period of time to make sure their yield worked. Last year really blew the doors off of kids taking the DA quickly, hence the aggressive weed out of pre-business kids and a new approach to selecting candidates.
Not quite accurate. 1. Kelley got rid of Finite Math which was causing grade challenges for pre-biz admits. 2. Business as a major has exploded nationwide. 3. The grading got easier for standard admit so more students were coming in. 4. The yield on DA (not quicker) was much higher than the prior few years. In part because people wanted the sure biz school vs some other schools to apply when there higher rated.
The issue here is they have too many students for too few of spots. They’d also like to be higher ranked which comes from admit % which gets lower when a group isn’t 100%. Like many “holistic” business schools they want ECs that smell business (people really misunderstand ECs as mattering specifically what event - it’s about telling a story and this one is telling business); rigor in classes that show it’s not just the high GPA and especially classes like Calc AB, and finally the ability to review some apps which the last two years it became nearly impossible to admit someone not Auto-DA which is especially important to IU and many schools regarding the gender disparity. It’s not about more qualified students - it’s about meeting their intake goals as a school. I doubt you see much difference in actually admitted profile other than more qualified women. I do expect the class to be much smaller as they catch up internally.
I am not sure the actual yield stats but I inferred that it was much higher simply due to the Kelley Admins shifting to a tougher pre-business threshold.
Business majors as a percentage of applicants in aggregate actually have been rather flat going back more than a decade so I don’t think that some expanding pie of applicants has much to do with it. I do think the common app and numbskull state level legislation like the Top 10% rule I deal with here in Texas has caused a lot of kids that normally would have stuck near home to cast a wider net and Kelley, with its brand name and rankings and association with an all around fun and respected university, is one of the first new looks for kids. The football team alone has peaked a lot of interest.
I was shaking my head at my son’s description of the Accounting 100 format, which seems purpose built to weed kids out. He said the class average for the first exam was in the low 70s, which was basically a dagger through the heart of the pre-business kids in that course.
In any event, IU has a very high class problem and I am a fan of the new approach. The purely quantitative criteria put in place by Universities like Texas A&M near me penalizes an enormous group of very talented kids at elite private schools and high quality publics while auto-admitting members of the poorest and least funded high schools in the State. That is not ideal.
Poets and Quants just had an article about biz degrees popularity but who knows, maybe I read their conclusion wrong on popularity. I can’t comment on Texas knowing nothing about it and common app has increased apps - but I had this discussion on the UO board last week - so have high school and private counselors telling kids to apply to X safetys and likelys. IU with its high admit or in its auto-DA days was one of these very popular schools.
IU Kelley apps went up close to 30% year: year - this was the number that scared them. Another 30% would be another 1k auto admitted at an overfull class already each year. That app number was why the immediate shift. The change on yield was even 3 years ago Kelley could get a pretty solid idea on who went to Auto-DA admitted days in person and the yield there was really predictable. Then people stopped going to Auto-DA as a predictor to enrolling. They just enrolled. And in 3 years the school went from 10k as a target maximum to 13/14k. This led to the inevitable surely I’ll get in with my TO or a multiple transcripts or even a really hard low-GPA school to shock I didn’t get admitted at all. And that caused serious problems.
It’s not really an aggressive weed out like IU wants people out - but IU has definitely asked its Faculty to teach to the score that is the score - not to give everyone a B which had been the case in recent years on either x-credit or a curve up. And frankly it’s pretty unfair for the students who all enrolled under a different standard. Sounds awful. And now they will make high math a part of the holistic process to stop this trend of thousands of Finance students who don’t have to have an entry barrier of math replacing what was Finite Math - be careful what you wish for. So happy for football, I attended a lot of tailgates in my days there but not a single actual game.
Agree with all your above points. On the note of finite math though, it has not gone away, but been replaced with something (in my opinion) even more challenging.
All students now take MATH-B 110, featuring both finite and calculus, crammed into 3 credits and 16 weeks. The only way to get out of this course is if someone got a 4 and above on AP Calc AB or BC.
The Math is required for degree but not standard admission right? I thought Finite was required as part of SA but I may be mistaken there’s been so many changes in 3 years
