<p>Interestingly in the 2012 cycle only 10% of Michigan’s high school graduates even applied to UofM, perhaps they are voting with their feet. Why go to the effort of applying if there is a 50/50 chance your admittance will go to an out of state student and you have no clue what it takes after a high GPA and high test scores to gain admittance to your own state school? In 2012 Michigan was at 43% out of state students in enrollment and who knows what it will be this year. Also interestingly UofM reported in 2012 that recent data suggest that in-state students drop out less than out-of-state students. And Michigan is not alone.</p>
<p>Well, I am in Virginia and UVa, Wm & Mary and Virginia Tech remain VERY popular with instate students. There is some self selection with which schools they apply to. Kids and guidance counselors tend to have an idea of where a kid will end up based on SAT’s, GPA, fit, etc.</p>
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<p>But if statistically you can see that they are admitting fewer and fewer qualified in-state students makes you wonder what “holistic” really means as I’m sure no college has a check box for “high income zip code in another state” written on any website.</p>
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<p>Those are pretty good odds compared with most of the schools that get attention on this site. Why do anything if there is a risk? So fine, don’t count Michigan as a safety. It’s not the only public university in the state.</p>
<p>Look, it bothers me as much as anyone that state flagships are so willing to accept OOS and international students at the expense of home-grown talent. I get why they do it, but there are bad things that come along with the good. My professor friends are not happy about having to teach so many international kids who have limited critical thinking abilities and weak command of the English language. They complain that the classroom dynamic is negatively affected and that grading papers is a nightmare. </p>
<p>But the solution is not to scrutinize the minutiae of the holistic application process. It’s to demand transparency in the “quota” system that establishes targets for in-state versus OOS students and foreigners. It’s to insist on a dialogue about the mission of the university and who it is charged with educating. And subjects like different standards for athletes have to come up, even though no one wants to have that discussion. The details of an individual student’s rejection are not the overriding issue here.</p>
<p>^^that’s not really the point in post 124. I’m not sure what that has to do with admitting in-state kids based on qualifications at a state public university as opposed to the size of out of state parents’ bank account. As I said earlier, if those kids that are not accepted move to the other big uni they are punished if they have financial need because the other uni does not meet need, so they pay MORE for the privilege of being rejected. I think parents who have instate kids in Michigan may deserve the right to understand why their qualified kid might be rejected in favor of a higher paying out of state kid and kids who are thinking of applying ought to know what it really takes to get admitted if high GPA and high test scores aren’t enough. This has nothing to do with “safety”…most top kids in Michigan apply to more than 1 college, we’ve not that provincial.</p>
<p>The irony is Ted Spencer was quoted in 2012 as saying they visited MORE Michigan high schools than ever before to drum up applicants. Oh good grief, clearly they don’t WANT more in-state students and clearly they are on a mission to admit MORE non-resident students so why pay more money to send minions scurrying around trying to “drum up business” if you aren’t going to admit them anyway and you sure as heck aren’t going to tell them to their face WHY they aren’t being admitted.</p>
<p>My H is a professor at Cal, and he doesn’t need to blame international students for poor English. Plenty of home grown Cal students can’t write. I am fine with the fact that my D did not get into several UCs, probably in favor of OOS or internationals because I think that having some geographic diversity makes the college experience more rewarding.</p>
<p>That said, since I’m not facing another college application process for several years, I’d prefer the money spent on making the internship application more transparent. My D applied to several state and federal internships. Not only was she not told why she wasn’t accepted, she wasn’t told anything at all.</p>
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<p>I interview and make plenty of hiring decisions. Yes, my companys HR dept actually gives me a checklist of subjective qualities to rate on a numerical scale. Because the assessment is subjective, more than one person rates the applicant. The assessments from different people are compared for consistency, and then the assessments are kept on file for auditablilty.</p>
<p>College admissions is an annually repeated task involving a statistically relevant sample of tens of thousands of candidates. Because of the large pool, there is a checklist of subjective qualities to rate on a numerical scale; otherwise, it would not be possible to sort 42,000 applicants to UMich in the allotted amount of time. For each applicant, more than one person rates the subjective qualities.</p>
<p>In response to the OP’s question, I would say NO. </p>
<p>To those who are saying that the legislatures should stop cutting their appropriations for higher education so public universities don’t need to get money from OOS and international students, it would take a lot more $$$ than that, like making large increases in higher education spending to make up for all the years of cuts. I have not read anyone here suggesting that they want to pay more taxes so that their public universities are better funded and don’t need OOS tuition. </p>
<p>Some posts here seem to suggest that admission to flagship state universities should be totally based on quantitative measures such as standardized test scores, GPA, maybe class rank? A school that is supposed to serve the entire state is going to be concerned about geographic diversity and having a freshman class that includes students from all over the state. Diversity of other kinds may be factored in, including first generation students, economically disadvantaged students, veterans and students with disabilities, for example. Whether AA continues to exist or not, some state flagship universities will want to include other overlapping aspects of diversity among the factors going into admissions decisions. </p>
<p>How students present themselves in essays, what they have accomplished, their goals and even choice of major may be considered, and these things are difficult to quantify. With all these factors to consider, it is unreasonable to expect that admission for any one student could be 100% predictable.</p>
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<p>That actually doesn’t surprise me all that much and I don’t necessarily think it’s indicative of anything. Obviously, people in the bottom half of their class aren’t likely to apply to the state flagship so that’s half of that. Many, many students apply to their local directional because that’s where they’re going to go for $$$ purposes. Others go to military, trade, work for a few years, a CC, etc. 10% to a state flagship when we’re lucky to have two very strong universities, a strong tech school, and decent directionals + GVSU isn’t bad IMO. </p>
<p>I’d like to know where you found that though. Maybe it indicates the historical numbers for comparison.</p>
<p>And, fwiw, even if you got rid of the international and OOS students, it wouldn’t be a safety for anyone other than the very top students in the state. And considering our brain drain (40%+ of those who graduate from a 4 year college in MI move out of the state within a year), I really don’t mind bringing in the OOS tuition.</p>
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<p>But we’re not talking about telling the person they aren’t good enough. We are talking about having to list reasons. </p>
<p>Put it this way: there is a dish of fruit in my kitchen. I love fresh fruit. Whenever I go to the market, I always buy fresh fruit, but I try to avoid buying more than I can eat. I choose from among the types of fruit I like: apples, bananas, nectarines, grapes, whatever – and I always am careful to pick the fruit that looks ripe enough, but not too ripe, and has no marks or bruises. But I leave a LOT of fruit behind – way more fruit than I pick up and put in my basket. If the grocer were to come up to me as I stood in the checkout line, holding a bunch of bananas, pointing out that the bananas in his hand were just a ripe and yellow and blemish free as the ones in my basket – and ask me why I hadn’t picked those other bananas – I’d say, “No thank you, I already have enough bananas.” I know every time I go to buy fruit that I am leaving perfectly good fruit behind. I tend to pick up the first “good enough” fruit that I see, rather than rummaging through everything in the bin. </p>
<p>There are X number of spots, and X+Y number of applicants. The school does NOT start the process by treating all applicants as admitted, and then looking for reasons to reject until they have carved the class size down to what they want. They make the decisions as they go through the apps, based on the information on hand that day. </p>
<p>So for many strong applicants, the truthful reason may be: “it wasn’t your day.” </p>
<p>Now it is very possible that for others there are plenty of reasons an admissions reader would determine out the outset that the student should not be admitted – but those are going to tend to be strong reasons that should be obvious to the student. Does anyone really need to be told that that their SAT’s are too low or that they have a weak GPA? Or they may be things that the ad com would like to hold confidential, such as negative information drawn from a LOR.</p>
<p>The point: they do not need to have any “reason” at all for not accepting a given student. The reason for many students literally is – the class is already full. I do think that they do read all applications, but the degree of consideration a student gets might really depend on the number of spaces left at the time the app is read. At the end of the process a student might have to be truly exceptional.</p>
<p>@rigaudon
But all these things are being quantified</p>
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These extenuating circumstances get quantified too</p>
<p>So since we are talking about Michigan now, who’s complaining? Are there a bunch of Abigail Fishers wishing they could sue the university for being rejected? Are the residents of the state unhappy overall with the composition of the student body at the state flagship, or are whole sections of the state not represented there? Is Michigan losing its edge because every year a few more kids from Bloomfield Hills get rejected and have to go to Michigan State or Western Michigan?</p>
<p>A lot of the foot stomping around this is reminiscent of the “voter fraud” issue in some states…a solution in search of a problem. Which makes me think there is an underlying motivation that has nothing to do with demanding accountability. Is it perhaps a back-door effort to challenge AA again?</p>
<p>Yes. Really, it is good if any place could. But public universities definitely should.</p>
<p>Romanig…It was in a Michigan Daily link this winter after 2012 enrollment information was released on this year’s freshman class. Mary Sue Coleman is generally downright gleeful about the number of out of state students and internationals that are admitted. I have a friend who was a regent for a long time who also is very much concerned about the trend. It’s not just Michigan though, I bookmarked an article for a California sib that pointed out that the acceptance rate at UCLA and Berkeley is LOWER for in-state students now than out of state students. So it’s not a “one-state” issue.</p>
<p>And yes, Sally I think residents of Michigan that are aware and understand what is happening have concerns. And if it’s not a concern then why does Mary Sue Coleman have to keep telling everyone why it’s such a good idea? But she’s retiring so time will tell.</p>
<p>GMTplus7, what I meant to say is that those things such as essays and ec’s are not quantifiable in a way that any individual student could predict with certainty their likelihood of being accepted when those individual and more subjective factors are included as they could if the school based admission on something like a combo of ACT score, class rank and gpa. </p>
<p>I am not clear on whether the people concerned with transparency just want to be assured that the decisions are being made in an objective way, or actually want to reduce/eliminate the more subjective factors in admission to public universities.</p>
<p>Actually, I had the same thoughts as sally305 in post #133 as I was reading this thread.</p>
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<p>I think these are the types of explanations that some people find unacceptable. Admission to one’s public university shouldn’t depend on whether or not it happens to be “your day.” Nor should universities that have been in existence for (in some cases hundreds of) years be unprepared to consider all applications equally, regardless of where someone in the office happens to place the folder on the stack. There needs to be more to it than that.</p>
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They are accountable, just not to you as an individual. They have jobs that give them the authority to exercise discretion within the scope of their duties. </p>
<p>Quick Law lesson: A public employee or officer who has a discretionary responsibility has a legal duty to exercise that discretion, but cannot be compelled to exercise that discretion in any particular way, so long as the decision made is not clearly an excess or an abuse of that discretion. </p>
<p>In other words, when the pick and choose among students who are qualified by law to attend the university, they are doing the jobs they are supposed to be doing. Explaining why is not part of their job. </p>
<p>The admissions officers know what the overall standards are for admissions to their respective universities. Not the individualized - shall we let in Mary Jones? decision – but their ultimate responsibility to have the numbers come out so that they end up meeting their diversity goals, so that the right balance is struck between in-state and out of state admits, so that the right balance is struck between students who want to reside on campus and those who will commute, so that they have the right number of students coming in to each of their separate undergraduate colleges, so that they avoid overcrowding already impacted majors.</p>
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<p>Yes, I understand how they do their jobs. The question was whether there ought to be more transparency in how they do it.</p>
<p>I’m totally confounded as to why some people prefer that the information not be made available to the applicants. Maybe they can explain why they think disclosure would be a problem, other than their (strange, imo) opinion that anyone wanting to know must be selfish, annoying, “entitled,” whiny, or prone to temper tantrums. This is what this thread is about, I think - a discussion of why or why not there should be more transparency.</p>
<p>Some people seem to be saying that it is impossible to articulate why an applicant is rejected. If this is case, why do some find this type of process acceptable?</p>
<p>A lot of all this is “I want” and “I think…” Now, what’s the plan proposed? There are differences between two things advocated here: telling the student where he missed points (ugh) and proving to citizens the process is legit.</p>
<p>On the latter, you realize we “transfer authority” all the time, in public affairs. I suspect this particular accountability has some emotional basis. Are there other public services some of you similarly examine, where you expect disclosure and participate?</p>