“What I find weird is that so many apply yet so few enter in a school that is fairly easy to get into.”
What I find weird is that you posted that remark after a lengthy explanation of why the yield rate is not really low at all. That you added the ridiculous comment that the school, “is fairly easy to get into” also indicates to me that your original statement was meant to disparage the school and its students.
OP is consistent in making illogical comments. For in state students, the admission rate is near 50% and the yield rate is around 75%. For OOS students, the admission rate is near 20% and the yield rate has been around 24%. It is relatively easy to get into from Michigan but not so few to enroll. For OOS, it is difficult to get admitted while the admission rate is lower too.
“When evaluating the selectivity of a university, it is more important to gauge the strength of the applicant pool, and the strength of the students who are admitted and who enroll. In this regard, Michigan is very selective.”
Alexandre is correct, the OP needs to learn about conditional expectations: conditional on having won a Nobel prize, it is probably easy to find an academic teaching position in physics at an Ivy League school; conditional on being an electrician, the hill is quite a bit steeper.
Students above the 30 ACT score level – Michigan’s 25th percentile – are at the 95th percentile in the general population; fully 7,000 kids on the Michigan campus are at an ACT score of 34, which is at the 99th percentile…more students than on 7 of 8 of the Ivy League campuses. So if a low percentage of students accepts, that event is partially indicative of a student pool which has a lot of choices. With the exception of a very small handful of schools (maybe 8-10 in number), it is possible for an elite school to increase its yield based on reputation, but it must then struggle to win a student who can go anywhere…which event decreases yield.
As noted above,there are many superb schools which evince low yield. Yield is far from the final word as to assessing either student or school quality.
It should be noted that Michigan is very good at managing “fit”: 97 percent of first students return for the 2nd year. Bragging about yield does’t mean much if you can’t retain students, and Michigan is superb at retaining students. It would be interesting to see 2nd year yield after a given cohort has already attended for 1 year. I would guess, you’d see a number of high yield schools adjust their figures down.
“For in state students, the admission rate is near 50% and the yield rate is around 75%. For OOS students, the admission rate is near 20% and the yield rate has been around 24%.”
This seems to suggest that yield is more a function of school wealth (ability to fund scholarships; tuition reductions) than quality. That inference seems valid to me: Michigan’s in-state pool evinces high yield and the OOS cohort is relatively low yielding. As Michigan increases funding, that disparity should vanish. Currently, it is especially notable that Michigan pulls 80% of its applicants – applicants who are highly qualified – from OOS, when Michigan’s OOS tuition figures are comparable with elite privates (at full private sticker price). Those elite privates can win the “auction” for elite students based on net or after funding pricing. Notwithstanding which Michigan wins many of those auctions and will win more as the current capital campaign bolsters funding for OOS students. The current pool for aid is around $2,000,000,000 and is expected to be supplemented with $1,000,000,000 from the current campaign.
Note that the OOS applicant pool should already be self selected. Off course, there are still students applying to schools blindly. But it is easy to find out an OOS public school with a $55k-$60k cost per year is not for everybody. It would be hard to believe the much lower yield rate of OOS students is because most of them found out UMich is not affordable after admission. Nevertheless, when the endowment increase leads to more financial aid to OOS, the OOS applicant pool will increase and that would decrease the admission rate further. While the yield rate should increase because of the increased financial aid, but it would not near the in state yield rate. Remember UMich meets the need of in state student. Not until they can do that for OOS students, the OOS yield rate would remain far lower than in state yield rate. It would be hard for UMich to raise enough money to bridge the $30k gap per year per OOS student when there are over 10,000 undergraduates are from OOS.
Unless UMich starts offering the in-state tuition discount to OOS as well, I don’t see why OOS yield rates would be close to in-state yield rates even when/if they meet full need for all*.
*And even then, in-state yield would be higher because it seems like more students want to be relatively close to home vs. farther away.
PurpleTitan, yield increases as perceived selectivity increases. Look at the University of Chicago. When its acceptance rate was 40%, its yield was 35%. As Chicago’s admit rate dropped, its yield rate increased. Most recently, Chicago admitted 8% of applicants, and its yield rose to 50%. I think Michigan’s yield rate for OOS students will increase as its acceptance rate continues to drop, and it will increase even more as OOS FA continues to improve. We are no talking in-state level yield mind you, but I can see the yield for OOS students increase from 25% to 40%.
When OOS yield rate is 40%, the overall yield rate would be over 60%.
billcscho, you are assuming that the in-state to OOS ratio will remain 11:9. I see it reversing to 11:9 in favor or OOS students. In the mid-term (5-10 years), I think Michigan’s overall yield will hit 50%-55%.
As the level of prestigious increase, I would expect the in state yield rate to increase also. I am expecting it to be a even split between OOS and in state within the next 5-10 years. The overall yield rate may still be over 60% if the OOS yield rate is 40%.
Good point. The next 5-10 years are going to be very interesting. So far, things have changed much as I expected them to…for better or worse.
All this focus on yield is completely misplaced. It was always a flawed statistic to some degree, but these days when students are applying to 12, 15 even 20 schools it means almost nothing. @Alxeandre doesn’t quite get it right when he says
That may be true within a narrow peer group, but all one has to do is look at the yield for Yale (about 67%) and the University of Nebraska (about 63%). http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2015/01/21/national-universities-where-the-most-accepted-students-enroll
Yale has an admit rate of 6.9% http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate While Nebraska has an admit rate of 64% http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-nebraska-2565
So in the end the more telling stat would be who chooses which school among a set of schools where they have been cross-admitted. But that statistic is not available in a comprehensive manner, as far as I know. But it is well known that UMich gets a lot of cross-applicants with the top 30 privates, but for OOS is just as expensive (more after private’s FA in most cases). So naturally they lose a lot of those admitted after the applicant sees all their options, if the applicant is OOS. It has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with state law. After all, why would the taxpayers of Michigan want to give their money away to people from the other 49 states? Heck, in California the taxpayers are moaning and groaning about the $32 million that the UC system uses for OOS (including internationals) for financial aid, even though I recently demonstrated that for the entire UC system that is only about $1,300 per student, while OOS total cost is almost $60,000 per student. They make money on OOS attendees. I am sure UMich does as well.
So @BeCambridge I think you can see that your knowledge and assumptions of the admissions process relative to overall quality of schools is quite flawed. In the case of certain state universities such as Michigan, UNC-CH, UC Berkeley, etc. that are considered top state schools that attract a lot of OOS applicants (but can only take so many per state law in most cases) the yield is quite different relative to admit rate than a Nebraska or Alaska-Anchorage where the vast majority of applicants are in state students that have little intention of attending elsewhere if accepted.
Oh, and it was only few years ago the private schools ranked in the top 15 sometimes had admit rates of 20-25%. Again, the Common App. along with heavier marketing, has made that obsolete. But it remains that comparing a state school’s admit rate to an elite private is a foolish thing, even for the best state schools. UCLA, who for years has gotten the most applications of any school in the country, has the lowest state school admit rate at about 21%. Not that different than UMich. So for a state school, a 20-30% admit rate is actually very highly selective.
^ Note that UMich is using the private donated endowment for this OOS aids, not Michigan tax money. After all, Michigan state does not give much to UMich.
It’s an interesting point, but I wonder if a state school, chartered under the auspices of the State, really has any “private money”, no matter where it comes from. After all, the amount the state budgets to a school directly from state tax coffers is at least partially dependent, in theory, on what they see coming in from other sources. But I don’t know Michigan law on this matter nor the particulars of the UMich charter.
In any case, the fact remains that OOS students in general are not going to get a ton of financial aid, from what I have seen.
Perhaps you are not aware of the amount of endowment UMich has. The state government has no control of its finance at all. It pretty much runs like a private although the board is elected. In addition, the state fund received is not even enough to cover the difference in tuition rate for in state students. It is sadly small compare to the school budget. It is mostly financial independent of Michigan State. One of the main reason for the recent endowment fund raising is to provide more financial aid to OOS students. UMich has already guaranteed need met for in state students and is providing generous aids to low income students from OOS. Just run the NPC or look at their sample aids and you will see. Majority of OOS students are not qualified to need based aids though.
Sorry, I am ignorant about the admissions process of Umich and other universities. This thread has indeed revealed the opposite of what I previously believed; that Umich actually has a high yield rate even if it looks like 6k out of 50k are admitted.
Let me enlighten you. The University of Michigan is a state institution, but it is an independent state institution, established by the state constitution. Pursuant to that constitution, the University is governed exclusively by an elected Board of Regents. The Regents are state constitutional officers, elected at large (statewide) in staggered terms. They are neither appointed by, nor accountable to, either the governor or the state legislature or any part of the state bureaucracy. The Regents alone are responsible for setting the University’s budget and establishing policies on things like curriculum, tuition, admissions standards and priorities, personnel policies, student codes of conduct and disciplinary policies, etc. The legislature essentially has no say in the University’s governance; its only assigned responsibility under the state constitution is to appropriate funds to support the university, but the constitution says nothing about how much support the legislature is to provide, and over the last several decades the legislature has exercised its discretion to whittle away at appropriations to the University to the point where they now make up around 5% or less of the University’s annual operating budget. The rest comes from tuition (both in-state and OOS), annual payouts from the University’s $10 billion endowment (9th largest of any college or university, public or private), externally funded research grants (to the tune of $1.3 billion annually, mostly federal but some corporate or foundation-sponsored), annual giving by alumni and friends, intellectual property royalties, enterprise funds (the University’s health and hospitals system is entirely self-funded, as is the athletic department), and so on. It is true that these funds are not, strictly speaking, “private” insofar as the university itself is a public entity, governed by elected public officials, the Board of Regents, But under the Michigan constitution, the University is so autonomous from the rest of state government that it might without exaggeration be considered “quasi-private,” fully in control of its own destiny—subject only to the continued approval of Michigan voters through Regents elections.
If you crunch the numbers, I think you’ll quickly see that the subsidies and special benefits the University provides to Michigan residents through preferential admissions policies, steeply discounted in-state tuition rates, and generous financial aid (Michigan is one of a small handful of public universities that meet full need for in-state students) far exceed the value of the modest annual appropriations the University receives from the legislature. Personally, I am fine with that. The University is, after all, a public institution, and I should think most or all of the Regents would see it as a central part of the University’s ongoing public mission to continue to provide a first-class education on favorable terms to the most highly qualified state residents. But the University has also been gradually ratcheting up the financial aid it provides to OOS students, and it recently embarked on a $4 billion capital campaign–the largest ever for a public institution–that is expected to increase the endowment to the point where the University will be able to reach its stated goal of meeting full need for all students, in-state and OOS. That is a decision the Regents have approved, making it official university policy. And the legislature has no authority to say otherwise.
Fascinating. Excellent stuff, @bclintock and @billcsho. Just for the record, I was completely aware of the huge endowment and the low percentage of funds that have been coming from the state for some time now, but definitely not as aware of how little political influence there seems to be at the school as compared to so many others such as Texas, the UC system, and of course currently famously Wisconsin. Although with the last there was that short lived proposal that it become private. But that is off topic. Thanks for the education, I am always happy to be enlightened. I mean that seriously, btw.
The last few mails are very informative.
fallenchemist, I think, you have made some very interesting observation in post # 31. I must admit that both billchso and bclintonk have given a whole lot of information about the governance of the budget at Michigan.
The latest US News Ranking is out ! I am pretty sure none expected any surprise in the ranking of the public universities. Therefore, if one is considering any movement in the ranking of public universities with respect to the privates, based on ‘Selectivity’ and ‘Yield’ , then it is a long drawn affair.
From the perspective of an employer, rank has no meaning and Michigan graduates enjoy as much demand as most of the privates in the 11- 25 range!
@fallenchemist, well, the UC’s, Texas system, and Wisconsin system still get a greater percentage of their budget from their state than UMich, I believe.
If their state funding falls to a really low percentage as well, expect them to push for more autonomy.