unwelcoming out of state public university info session/tour

Parents Forum
41

“if you think private institutions always provide better customer service, try talking to a few cable TV customers about their cable provider.”

The private university we visited the day after the visit I described in post #30 did an absolutely abominable job of making it easy to find the “welcome” center - and the bored, apathetic students at the desk and lack of relevant hard copy information made it worse.

I don’t think it’s a public / private characteristic any more than one could say all private schools are good and all public schools are bad, or vice versa.

42

One big difference between public and private universities is size. That characteristic affects the experience in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of advantages that come with a big sized school, but lots of personal attention is usually not one of them.

If your kid needs a lot of hand holding or is put off by an apathetic administrator, a big school may not be for him.

43

I did the UC Berkeley info session and tour and didn’t find it to be a turn off like a previous poster said. I think my takeaway from our different experiences is simply that the presenters are people, and as such bring their own opinions and perspectives. One presenter might be all rainbows and unicorn farts, and another might be trying to scare away people that aren’t serious.

At both UCB and UCLA the people giving the sessions and campus tours were students. I expect inherently less professional and consistent messages from students, so really I’d view your experience as one data point, but not necessarily a significant one. TBH what I looked for from the students giving the tours was their level of enthusiasm for their experience at the school; any information on difficulty of admissions I was either going to gather on my own from hard statistics or speaking directly to an actual admissions officer.

44

Whether a public flagship wants and welcomes OOS students for financial or other reasons is quite independent of whether it’s easier for OOS students to be admitted. At Michigan, for example, recent freshman classes have been about 60% OOS and 40% in-state–a very high OOS rate for a public flagship, because Michigan has no cap or quota for OOS students. People at the university will tell you that’s a good thing because it makes for a more diverse student body, because the OOS students who ultimately enroll are extremely well qualified and strengthen the student body, and because the OOS students bring in more tuition revenue per capita, strengthening the university’s finances. Yet this year the in-state acceptance rate was around 50% and the OOS acceptance rate was around 22%, for a combined acceptance rate of 27%. A lot goes into that, but mostly it’s just that Michigan gets around 10,000 in-state applications and 42,000 OOS applications per year. It’s widely understood within the state that you don’t have much of a chance of admission unless you’re in the top 10% of your class–and lo and behold, about 10% of the state’s graduating seniors apply. As a public institution, the university does feel an obligation to serve in-state students, and it admits pretty much all the in-state applicants it deems well qualified. It doesn’t have room to admit all the well qualified OOS applicants and must turn some away. Those it admits it welcomes with open arms, but it’s harder to get in as an OOS applicant than as a similarly well qualified in-state applicant.

45

@northwesty, there are some relatively small publics and some large privates as well. However, how bureaucratic or supportive a school is may not correspond to size.

46

@northwesty,
The private NYU (total enrollment 44,599) is roughly twice the size of the public UVA (23,464). Others in UVA’s size class are Columbia (23,606), Penn (21,358), Cornell (21,593), and Northwestern (20,997), with Harvard (19,992) not far behind. The private USC (total enrollment 41,368) is bigger than UC Berkeley (36,204). At the other end of the scale, only 8 of the private research universities ranked in the top 50 by US News are smaller than the public William and Mary (8,376). I wouldn’t care to predict which of these are most or least responsive on the basis of size.

47

State schools are generally a different experience than private schools – bigger classes, less individual attention and resources. My shorthand for that is size, even thoug a small public can be smaller than a big private.

Like s/f ratios. NYU 10/1; USC 9/1, Columbia 6/1, Penn 7/1, Cornell 9/1, Northwestern 7/1, USC 9/1.

UVA 16/1, Cal 17/1. Tiny public W&M is 12/1 – very low for a state school but higher than all those big privates.

48

“This goes against my understanding that OOS students have an easier time being admitted to many state schools. They bring in higher tuition offset by less finaid.”

Depends on the school.

Harder to get into OOS – UVA, UNC, Michigan.

Easier to get into OOS – Berkeley, UCLA and less selective flagships dependent on OOS students like Oregon and Colorado.

49

@northwesty, the number of OOS applicants to Cal and UCLA have gone up, so now OOS acceptance rate is about the same as in-state.

50

@northwesty, where are you getting your s/f ratios?

According to Wikipedia, UVa has 2102 academic staff to 21238 students (10/1 ratio) while USC has 3941 academic staff to 43000 students (11/1 ratio).

51

UCLA seems to still be easier OOS. Cal is closer to even, which is still a pretty different pattern than the other public Ivies.

UCLA 2014 cycle was 16.3 percent IS, 26.2% domestic out-of-state, 17% foreign.

Cal 2014 was 18.8% IS, 19.4% domestic OOS, and 9.9% foreign.

52

I look at it this way, if you want to go to another state’s university it’s not any news that generally you will pay more than the in-state kids. But I’ve never heard or seen any evidence that the other state’s university has an obligation to give someone paying more “a better experience” or “an easier path in” than in-state kids. it’s actually rather refreshing when large state universities put it on the line and tell kids if it’s more difficult to be accepted rather than painting some gloriously inaccurate picture that more $$ greases the admission wheels.

53

I’d say that if he likes the school and feels that he meets the admissions criteria he should apply. You never see or deal with admissions again once you get in and decide to attend a school. However if he was so turned off that he lost interest in the school then just move on to other choices.

54

@northwesty,
Take a closer look at those s/f ratios. Most private schools use a ratio based on total FTE faculty to undergrad students. Most publics use a ratio based on total FTE faculty to total students, graduate + undergraduate, excluding faculty and students in graduate-only programs like law and medicine. The way the publics do it is not only a truer reflection of how much time faculty have for individual undergrads, but it also comports with the instructions on the Common Data Set. In short, most of the private s/f ratios are pure fiction.

Example 1 (private): Penn’s 2014-15 Common Data Set, page 28, line I.2, reports a s/f ratio of 6 to 1, based on 9,540 students and 1,652 FTE faculty (all full-time faculty + 1/3 of part-time faculty). Sounds great, right? Yet on page 5, line B.1 of the same document, Penn reports 21,296 total students, of whom 11,550 are graduate students and 9,746 are undergraduates (full-time plus part-time). It’s.clear that Penn is counting NO graduate students as “students” for purposes of calculating its s/f ratio. It is also clear, if you look at line I.1 on page 28, that Penn is including ALL of its faculty for purposes of calculating its s/f ratio, despite clear instructions on that page to “exclude both faculty and students in stand-alone graduate or professional programs such as medicine, law, veterinary, dentistry, social work, business, or public health in which faculty teach virtually only graduate-level students.” Penn claims ZERO faculty in such “stand-alone programs,” (i.e., it counts ALL faculty in its s/f ratio) and it includes NO graduate students in its s/f ratio, even if they are graduate students in fields like psychology, political science, history, English, biology, chemistry, or what have you, where faculty typically teach both undergrads and graduate students.

Example 2 (public): Michigan’s 2014-15 Common Data Set, line I.2, reports a s/f ratio of 15 to 1, based on 37,063 students and 2,444 faculty. On line B.1 of the same document, Michigan reports a total of 28,395 undergraduates, of whom 995 are part time, which translates to 27,400 FTE undergraduate. So who are the roughly 10,000 additional students Michigan counts in calculating its s/f ratio? Well, obviously, they’re graduate students who are NOT in “stand-alone programs” like law, medicine, dentistry, etc.And notice also that in counting faculty for purposes of calculating its s/f ratio, Michigan is excluding 337 full-time and 235 part-time (=401 FTE) faculty who teach in “stand-alone graduate and professional programs.”

In short, Michigan is following the CDS instructions to a tee. Penn is not. And because Penn is not, you can’t compare Michigan’s 15:1 s/f ratio to Penn’s 6:1 ratio. They’re simply measuring different things. If Penn calculated its s/f ratio the way Michigan does (and the way the CDS instructs it to make those calculations), Penn’s s/f ratio would be at least 12:1, probably higher. Penn actually has more graduate students than undergrads (see line B.1).

I stress that these are not outliers. Check it out for yourself. Most privates calculate s/f ratios the way Penn does. Most publics calculate s/f ratios the way Michigan does. So you end up comparing apples to oranges, or perhaps more accurately, radius to circumference.

55

My s/f ratio numbers come right out of the USNWR rankings for undergrad programs.

Since schools are careful about and sensitive to their USNWR rankings, I doubt that Michigan or other publics are intentionally doing their numbers in a way that depresses their ratings indicators as compared to all the private schools they compete with. But whatever.

You’ll also get the same story if you look at the number of big classes or spending per student.

You usually don’t go to a big state U if you are hoping to get a whole lot of individualized attention. You seriously question that proposition?

56

@northwesty, nope, you don’t go to a big state school for individualized attention in general, though you could get it at some honors/other colleges and programs and maybe small departments. Really depends on the school so you have to do your research.

Also, I’ve noticed that some colleges game/fudge their USN numbers more than others. Not all schools are the same.

57

It depends. In some majors, you get plenty of individual,attention if desired…once you are an upperclassman.

And even in small schools, the required freshman courses can be quite large. I went to a college freshman year with 900 students. 900. All of my freshman classes were large. Psych 101 was well over 100 people. Even my English classes were large…because they were required for everyone.

I transferred to a large public university. I declared my major as a sophomore…there were less than 50 other sophomores admitted to the major (you had to request admission). I got plenty of attention there.

58

BC – I have a sneaking suspicion that the publics do their numbers differently from the privates because that is most favorable to them.

Meaning that a Michigan gets a lower ratio if they include the graduate program head count than if they limit the numerator and denominator to just undergrad.

Can you caluclate UM’s number on just an undergrad only basis?

59

Personally I never get why people choose to attend a public university as an OOS, unless there’s tuition reciprocity. As far as employers and the general public are concern, except for a handful of better known ones, these public schools are pretty much interchangeable. The only thing that might be of interest to anyone is maybe some geographic preference, sometimes due to familiarity. UCT, UDE, UMN, UWI, UCO…makes little to no difference to most employers. What matter is your major, and after your first job, even that no longer matters.

Plus, attending a public school as an OOS can be a very lonely experience. Most students will be from in-state and if the state is small, most likely within driving distance, which means many will go home on weekends and the campus empties out beginning on Thursday afternoon. Many students will also commute which makes it hard to make friends.

60

CMS – there’s a lot of different models and a lot of exceptions to your rules.

One example. University of Colorado in Boulder is 50% OOS. Its model it to offer a relatively reasonable OOS sticker price to kids from TX and CA who can’t get admitted to UT, UCLA or Cal. Because of that, CU/Boulder prices its in-state tuition at a relatively high price so it has seats to sell to OOS-ers. They really are not all that interested in working hard to enroll incremental in-staters.

In contrast, nearby Colorado State is about 85% in-state. They work REALLY hard to let in-state kids know they are wanted/welcome. And their in-state sticker price is a good bit lower than CU’s.

And then there’s nearby University of Wyoming, which offers an extremely low OOS price. So low that it basically competes on a level playing field with Colorado State for Colorado kids. It is pretty much like going to a Colorado state university.

University of Oregon lives off of OOS-ers from California. It is basically UC-Eugene.