@sevmom,
That’s interesting sevmom, thanks for the data. I stand corrected. Still, Michigan is probably getting about twice as many OOS applications as UVA. Michigan’s total applicant pool in 2017 was up another 7%, to 58,590… My guess is most of that increase came from OOS applicants, as the in-state applicant pool has been pretty constant at between 10,000 and 11,000 for some time, and the overall pool of instate HS graduates is actually declining.
@northwesty,
I agree with your description of the “virtuous cycle” of OOS admissions at Michigan: as the number of applications increases, it becomes more difficult to gain admission, boosting entering class stats and making admission appear even more desirable, leading to further increases in the size of the applicant pool. Rinse and repeat. But I think you perhaps overstate the degree to which it’s OOS stats alone that are driving up overall entering class stats.
The university’s admissions office has long maintained that the stats of instate entering freshmen are just as strong as those of OOS entering freshmen. They don’t provide hard data, but IMO it’s plausible. HS GC’s in Michigan tend to “steer” their students toward instate publics; there just aren’t that many Michigan residents (relative to the size of the college-bound pool) who leave the state even for elite private schools, and relatively few attend private colleges and universities in the state. But there’s also a lot of self-selection and GC steering when it comes to in-state choices: if you don’t have the credentials to get into Michigan, you probably don’t even bother to apply and instead shoot for Michigan State, and if you don’t have the credentials for Michigan State, you apply to one or more directionals. (It’s not quite as clearcut as that, but you get the picture). As Michigan has become more selective, it hasn’t increased the size of the instate applicant pool, but it has strengthened the quality of the instate applicant pool because weaker applicants self-select out and stronger applicants self-select in (and both groups are reinforced in those choices by their GCs).
And for the same reasons that drive the OOS virtuous cycle, instate yield continues to climb, now running around 70%. A combination of a stronger instate applicant pool and higher instate yield allows the admissions committee to be even more selective in instate admissions, and so you end up with an instate virtuous cycle operating in tandem with the OOS dynamic you describe. My perception is that the credentials gap between Michigan’s entering class and Michigan State’s entering class has continued to widen. Michigan’s 25th percentile ACT composite is 29, the same as MSU’s 75th percentile, suggesting relatively little overlap in the stats of their respective student bodies. Back in 1998, 70% of Michigan’s entering class had an ACT composite below 30, while at MSU that figure was 93%, indicating substantial overlap in entering class stats. In 2016, only 25% of Michigan’s entering class had an ACT composite below 30, while at MSU that figure remained at 81%. This can’t be explained by an increased OOS percentage alone, because Michigan was already at 29% OOS in 1998 (it’s now 40% overall and 47% in the 2016 entering class). And MSU has also increased its OOS enrollment from 9% in 1998 to 17% in the 2016 entering class. No doubt the entering OOS freshmen at Michigan have stronger stats and represent a larger fraction of the entering class than they did in 1998, but the instate freshmen are also stronger than they were a decade or two ago, as Michigan mops up most of the best-qualified instate students.
