My guess is that this strong student has no real guidance about how to choose a college and TSU offered a “full ride”. She probably doesn’t know that a 52% employment rate is abysmal, that a 43% 6-year graduation rate is low, that its funding isn’t very good per student compared to UT (which she could choose but would likely have cost more - we don’t know by how much and whether it was affordable but the student couldn’t establish whether it was affordable even if not free or unaffordable, or even whether it was a better value). If her high school is a feeder to TSU she may have been encouraged by others who came before her or by familiarity.
@changethegame: you probably had to type each application. Here, just by sending the Black CommonApp, your application is automatically sent to 53 colleges. But after that it takes some effort. Not very selective colleges only require the basic common app (no supplement), that’s 20 more. I suppose she also applied to a few TNPromise colleges, plus UT and TSU. After that, I’m stumped. I guess that she thought, I’m on a roll let’s keep going???