The Michigan legislature has very little authority over the University of Michigan, which under the Michigan constitution is governed by an independent, elected governing body, the Board of Regents, which “shall have general supervision of its institution and the control and direction of all expenditures from the institution’s funds.” Article VIII sec. 5. The legislature’s only assigned constitutional role is to “appropriate moneys to maintain” the University; however, the University must make an annual accounting to the legislature for how such funds are spent. Article VIII sec. 4. Michigan courts have said this establishes “constitutional autonomy” for the University, and strictly limits the power of the legislature and state bureaucrats to meddle in University policies, including admissions policies. At an informal level, however, it’s sound practice for the University not to ruffle the legislature’s feathers too much, because the legislature does have power to increase or decrease its appropriation to the University. At this point legislative appropriations represent only 6% or so of the University’s total operating budget, but it’s a 6% that isn’t easily replaced as other funding sources are already tapped to full capacity.
That’s a closely guarded secret. The Admissions office could easily break down entering class stats by in-state and OOS, but it doesn’t do so, at least not publicly. A lot of OOS students suspect the stats of in-state students are lower overall, or at least at the bottom end. Admissions officers sometimes deny this, but they don’t back it up with hard data. I’m not sure. The difference could be that if you’re a Michigan resident and the Admissions committee thinks you’re truly well qualified, you’re just in, whereas for OOS students you need to be not only good but lucky because there are so many well qualified OOS applicants that the Admissions committee knows it can’t admit all of them, so it just cherry-picks among many equally well qualified OOS applicants. Or it could be that the OOS applicant pool is on average actually less qualified, because OOS applicants are less self-selective–many think it should be relatively easy to get into a large state flagship, and many OOS guidance counselors may not realize just how selective Michigan is, so the school gets a ton of OOS applicants with less than stellar credentials who, if they were Michigan residents, would be told not to bother to apply to Michigan. Or both things could be true, because the OOS applicant pool is just so huge. We just have no way of knowing