Michigan releases admissions statistics for the high school class of 2015

Submitted by SAMgO on

http://admissions.umich.edu/apply/freshmen-applicants/student-profile

The highlights:

13,555 acceptances out of 51,753 applications, for an overall admissions rate of just over 26%. The out of state rate is assuredly much, much lower

6,269 students enrolled for a surprisingly strong yield of over 46%

Middle 50% ACT range: 30-34

Average unweighted GPA: 3.85

It's pretty impressive how much the strength of the student body has grown since Michigan went to the common app. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the admissions rate continue to drop in the years to come to level off somewhere between 15-20%. It was sitting around or just under 50% before we went to the common app and the average ACT range and GPA were 28-32 and 3.7.

umrinkydink

July 13th, 2015 at 11:20 AM ^

It's a unified system that allows you to apply to many colleges very easily. Originally, each college had it's own application system - you had to re-fill out everything from your name to your essays. The Common App has one unified application for all of the basics: demographics, grades, activities, recommendations, one essay; each college can then have an additional short portion for additional info or essays that it wants (called a supplemental application). This allows students to more efficient apply to many more colleges than they used to. When I applied as HS Class of 2010, 8 of my schools used Common App (I think) with Michigan being the only one that didn't.

fleetwood

July 13th, 2015 at 11:26 AM ^

The common app is a college application that has been standardized and used for a bunch of different schools. You can fill it out once and apply to different schools that associate with the common app. Schools still have different essay prompts or additional materials that need to be added to the application, as well as individual application fees, but it seems like the common app has streamlined the application process and has made it easier for students to apply to a large amount of schools.

Edit: rinkydink was quicker than me, although I will add that the common app has greatly increased the number of applications which has in turn lowered the acceptance rates for schools like Michigan

aiglick

July 13th, 2015 at 10:18 AM ^

Only 3,500 transfer applications.

If some passionate Michigan fan wanted to transfer in those would be pretty good odds assuming the number of applicants doesn't rise significantly next year.

DrMantisToboggan

July 13th, 2015 at 10:19 AM ^

The admissions rate was always so lofty because Michigan is a backup school for so many Ivy applicants. The enrollment rates usually ended up at 16% or so, so I could definitely see the acceptance rate settling there in the future.

That being said it seems as though this class has much higher statistics than when I was accepted, which wasn't all that long ago. I'd be sitting on the bottom part of that middle 50 and my unweighted gpa would be below average. Good thing I got in when I did, and I can continue to tout our great institution as it grows even more selective yet.




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SAMgO

July 13th, 2015 at 10:23 AM ^

Well 46% of accepted students enrolled this year, so they could easily push the standards even higher and still find more than enough interested students to enroll if they were okay with a lower yield.



There have also been more out of state students accepted every year for the past three or so. I think the out of state undergrad rate wil settle at around 50%, and right now it's around 60%. As that number drops, so will the admit rate.

Michigan Eaglet

July 13th, 2015 at 11:36 AM ^

I'm pretty sure the state of Michigan is moving to the SAT because the company than gives the test gave the state a bunch of money, so you'll probably see ACT scores go away and replaced with SAT scores. I don't like that because of the format of the test (penalized for getting a question wrong instead of 0 points for leaving it blank), but such is life.

Michigan Eaglet

July 13th, 2015 at 12:36 PM ^

That's great to hear! I took them both when I was applying because I was looking at some Ivy's. I did well on the ACT so I didn't try as hard on the SAT and my scores varied widely, like well outside the standard deviation and I took the ACT 3 times (the last one was when we had to take it at my high school) and those scores were all pretty closely clustered. I don't mind that change at much then at all.

Everyone Murders

July 13th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^

High school has changed over the years.  An "A" truly is the new "B", and it's very rare for a h.s. class (at least in my sons' urban public h.s.) to have what we used to consider a "true curve".  Many schools are on a 4.5 scale, which also pumps median GPAs up (I'd be curious to see how Michigan and other schools normalize GPAs - years back the UofM admission formula even took into account where you went to school to ferret out inflation).  The fact that your kid is a straight A student, even if in all AP classes and higher level classes, is not as exceptional as it was 20-30 years ago. 

Also, SAT and ACT re-testing is rampant, and some schools let you take your pick of highest scores.  So there's a bit of smoke-and-mirrors involved.  You might have a chance in Hell.

For all of that, Michigan's standards are high compared to numerous other schools, and these kids are generally very bright and motivated.  And that's good to see.

SAMgO

July 13th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^

Michigan does re-evaluate everyone's GPA on a 4.0 scale, but yeah I bet it's significantly easier to get an A in most high school classes than it was a decade or two ago.

I don't think the scoring scale on the ACT has changed, but the prevelence of prep classes and taking it three or four times has definitely grown.

maizenbluenc

July 13th, 2015 at 2:09 PM ^

than it was. My oldest son just graduated, and we compared my grades and GPA in high school to his. To be a competitive college applicant, he had to take a much harder schedule than I did, including 8 AP courses. His weighted GPA was a full point higher, but his  unweighted GPA was just slightly lower than mine, and he was a full 5% further out in class rank. His SAT score was 200 points higher than mine. (I think part of the difference in test scores is better prep-books / practice tests, and his AP coursework leading into that third fall senior year final test.)

For clarity, I went to high school in Reston in Fairfax County, VA, which at the time was one of the top school districts. He went to one of the top high schools in Wake County, NC. The student body make up is similar.

He did not get into his top choice schools (UNC, UGA).

My conclusion: while overall grading may be "easier" today, what you have to do to get into a school like Michigan is more difficult. Those that get in completely on merit have been competing at the highest level all through high school, and more kids are competing because parental involvement is higher.

MichiganTeacher

July 13th, 2015 at 10:51 AM ^

Yes. It is very difficult to compare SAT, ACT, and GPA scores from even the 90s, let alone the 80s, to today's numbers.

GPA: Forget it. If you were anywhere in the 3.0+ range from 1970-1990, you'd be 3.85+ now with the same level of dedication. Of course, the culture has changed somewhat, and kids' time is fragmented so much now that you might not put in the same effort now that you did back then. I routinely have decent/good students tell me that they don't study at all for tests in any subject. I did not hear that in the 90s, when I started teaching, and it certainly wasn't the norm for kids at my high school in the 80s. Kids who don't study do the minimum homework to get by. They still end up with 3.5+ grade averages if they're intelligent. Math and some science classes are really their only 'hard' classes. Anyone who is intelligent and does actually study for tests can easily hit 3.85+ these days.

SAT/ACT: The SAT in particular is FAR easier than it used to be. The math section, for example, instead of gradually increasing in difficulty now has about 80-90% quite easy questions and then only the last few are difficult (still sometimes reasonably difficult, but nothing outrageous, and no more IQ-test type questions - well, not the obvious kind, anyway). Back in the 90s, the SAT was renormalized and 100 points was just added to everyone's score. I think they are going to do something like that again when they go back to two sections (currently three) next year. The ACT hasn't lowered its difficulty level as much ast the SAT, but it has lowered it significantly, in my opinion, especially in the last five years. Now this I don't have much to base my opinion on, to be honest, because it's so recent - but the reported scores of kids these days are higher than kids of similar quality from five-ten years ago. So, purely anecdotal, but take it fwiw.

Honestly, the bachelor's degree is becoming the new high school diploma, and high schools are becoming day care. Every student is being funneled into college whether they should be there or not. It is frustrating. 

On the other hand, it's summer. Also Harbaugh.

 

alum96

July 13th, 2015 at 11:10 AM ^

Why have they moved the curve like this in HS? I dont get the "time fragmented" argument.  Most kids arent working 20+ hrs a week.  They have sports now like we had sports.  They have video games like we did.  Is Instagram and Facebook that much more of a time suck that school is not worth the time?

I didnt think HS was "difficult" back then but a lot of people did fail.   You did have to open a book and study but yes you could get away with cramming for an hour or 90 minutes (this is at the college prep or AP level).  

The basic classes that they utilize just to get the "herd" of people through were ridiculously easy even back then- just stay awake and absorb half the teacher comments and you should not get less than a C.

So why the grade inflation? Parent pressure that every 1 of their kids is a A/B student? Everyone should go to college so the old D is now a B?  The old C is now an A?  Lack of time argument just cracks me up.

And now it sounds like you are indicating the standardized testing is headed the same way.   I guess we want to be a country of delusion.  It parallels the thing they have done in women clothing sizes - saw a story on this 2 years ago and apparently due to the increasing girth of the population they have made what used to be a 12-14 an "8" and what used to be an 8 a "4" so everyone feels better I guess.  Weird times.

Photogenic

July 13th, 2015 at 11:18 AM ^

The labor market is much smaller now than it was in the 90s, and while the baby boomers are beginning to retire they are still largely a part of the job market. If kids weren't automatically being pushed through and allowed to delay employment until 22(or later), the labor market in this country would be in absolutely horrible shape right now.

umrinkydink

July 13th, 2015 at 11:11 AM ^

While I agree that GPA inflation has probably increased (haven't looked into this at all), the test inflation suggested by a few here isn't too accurate. Since the switch to the current ACT structure in the 1990, the average has increased slightly but remained pretty steady (20.6 in 1990; 21.0 in 2013). They do a pretty good job of curving the test so that it remains this distribution. What IS probably true is the increase in multiple tests per student - that probably explains the increase, and partially explains the increase in admissions statistics (as well as, of note, the number of "perfect" scores of a 36).

This is, to say, the increase in rigidity of these numbers for Michigan is probably a real and tangible increase in strictness, rather than just a product of test grade inflation.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(test)#/media/File:Historical_Average…

/takes academic hat off

MichiganTeacher

July 13th, 2015 at 11:35 AM ^

If I implied or said that the overall ACT average, or SAT average, had gone up among all test takers, sorry, I didn't mean to. I meant that the average score _for a decent high school student_ has gone way up. I think the facts back me up.

It's because so many more people are going to college now. On that same page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(test) - you can see that the number of students taking the ACT has doubled in the last twenty years. You have people taking the test now who never would have taken it in the 90s. These people would have scored terribly in the 90s (for the most part, and I know some wouldn't have, and yes it's great they're going to college now), and these new, less talented people are responsible for keeping the averages where they have historically been. On the other hand, the more-talented kids who would have, in the 90s, applied to colleges, are now scoring much higher. Someone must be, after all, to keep the average where it was with so many new test takers entering on the low end.

Also, as umrinkydink says, score choice and taking the tests multiple times has become the standard. This pushes 'final' scores up - the ones that colleges report, I assume. On that same page that rinkydink quotes, you can see that nowadays there are almost 5 times more 36s on the ACT than there used to be in the 90s.

So yeah, tl;dr is that college-bound kids from the 90s would earn a significantly higher standardized test score if they took it today.

Everyone Murders

July 13th, 2015 at 11:22 AM ^

I hear you that your observations are anecdotal, but I think it's a bit "get off my lawn" to proclaim that high schools are becoming day care.  The kids I see going off to prestigious schools are every bit as motivated as the kids I grew up with.  But like a MacDonald's in the Netherlands, it's just different.

My experience is anecdotal, too, but maybe instructive.  My sons go to an urban public h.s. that draws from all sorts of economic, racial, and social backgrounds.  The school has a 15-20% or so dropout rate (measured across 4 years), but also sends kids to many "prestige" schools.  It is a lot of things, good and bad, but it's certainly not day care.  You're free to sink and there's not much of a safety net, and you're also free to reach high.  H.S. in my day had a lot more of a safety net to keep you on course.

And grading is just different too.  For example, if your kid is on a college track, you can be taking 4-5 AP classes a year, and your kid is taking that class with all the other smart kids.  So if a class is curved, it starts to make a bit of sense to soften that curve.  But the general grade inflation makes it so that getting a "B" in a hard class can be difficult to shake off.  So you see a kid who loses a parent, or whose parents get divorced, suffer mightily for a temporary decline in their grades.

Also, the growing presence of "college track" vs. "vocational track" leads to some funny results.  The valedictorian is often a kid in the "vocational track" who is taking classes generally seen as less demanding than the pallate of Calc, Stats, Physics, Euro History, Adv. Lit that are the fare of the "college track" kids.  Most of the "college track" kids and their families are chill about this, but some get their panties knotted. 

On the SAT/ACT scores, remember that those are normalized tests, so it really doesn't matter if the scoring changes - you can still get a percentile from them.  But what HAS changed is that some schools will only look at your highest score from multiple testings, and other schools will look at your highest score in each category from multiple testings.  Once you start doing that crazy quilting of scores, the scoring and percentiles get skewed.  (My understanding is that the schools fostering this are doing so, in no small part, to puff up their academic profile.)

MichiganTeacher

July 13th, 2015 at 11:50 AM ^

If kids are free to sink at your children's high school, that's awesome. I'm sure it keeps the atmosphere at the school far better than it would otherwise be.

Here in NY, kids are absolutely not free to sink. In some cases, school officials will drive to people's houses and get the kids and drive them in. The school districts are very keen to have everyone in every seat because of many factors including aid based on district population and the administration looking bad for having a high dropout rate. I've kept track and most years more than 80% of all faculty meeting time spent on kids is spent on kids who are sinking. The meeting is devoted to stopping them from sinking. In a lot of cases that's great, but there are some kids who need to or deserve to sink, and our current system doesn't let that happen.

It's also very, very difficult to kick a kid completely out of public school in NY. In practice, the only way to do it is to trade the kid to a neighboring district and take one of their problem kids in return.

The top kids are still great, sure. They're self-motivated. But, in my experience, larger and larger amounts of kids in the 25-75% range are doing less and less schoolwork. 

I am fully aware that this sounds like Get Off My Lawn stuff. :) I try to look at it objectively but hey, maybe I'm fooling myself. I will say one place that the schools are vastly improved since the 90s: elementary language education. Remember Whole Language in the 90s? We had about five or ten years of kids raised without phonics or spelling. That was... bad.

LKLIII

July 13th, 2015 at 11:24 AM ^

This makes me feel a bit better.  I got into Michigan--the HONORS college no less--with a 3.6 GPA and a 31 ACT score back in 1993.  I ended up going to a division III school because I wasn't ready for a huge campus (although I later went to Michigan for law school).  

Not that I'll force her, but I'd love my daughter to at least get accepted to Michigan and have the option of attending.  She's not in school yet so I have no knowledge of the current school systems/grading/new scoring on standardaized tests.  Looking at those stats, I was thinking "there's no way I would've gotten in these days."  Maybe my own stats would have been somewhat inflated putting me in the middle of the pack of admitted students then.

 

Also, is there a breakdown between in-state vs out of state kids?  I was accepted as an in-state kid. My kids will be Illinois residents when applying.  Is it TOUGHER to get into Michigan as an out of state kid?  I always thought it was.  But recently somebody told me that the schools are money driven so much, that if you're willing to pay through the nose for out of state tuition, they're actually MORE forgiving on the academic front than if you were an average kid from, say, Troy or Rochester or Brighton.

Commie_High96

July 13th, 2015 at 12:07 PM ^

I transferred from UM to a DIII Nescac school to leave A2 for once in my life, question for you: do you think the school you went to is worth it today? Cause right now the place I graduated from is charging close to $60,000 per year. I don't think an elite liberal arts school is worth 2x what UM charges.

Doc Brown

July 13th, 2015 at 6:43 PM ^

I agree with everyone comment as a teacher. With the push towards inquiry based pedagogy, I am finding I am doing less and less actual teaching. Now I am doing more baby sitting and making sure they don't kill themselves in my biology lab. True they are using more higher order thinking skills, but students are now struggling to understand just basic biological knowledge (cell structure, biochemistry, photosynthesis). The attitude of my administration seems to be if they can Google it then why teach it. My students can plot experimental results but they cannot give basic reasons why they are seeing their results.

Sorry I had to rant about the Next Generation Science Standards.




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UMQuadz05

July 13th, 2015 at 10:21 AM ^

26% acceptance is insane.  That's elite liberal arts school territory, and 15-20%, if they get there soon, is essentially Ivy League level. 

I was super proud of myself for getting accepted out-of-state in 2001, when rates were about 50%.  Any enrolling freshmen this year get a major hat-tip from me. 

umumum

July 13th, 2015 at 10:42 AM ^

some in-state applicants simply aren't very good at reading the likelihood of acceptance charts.  Or they apply on a hope and a wish.  And I'm not entirely kidding.

My school district is sending (not just accepted) over 30 seniors to Michigan in 2015-16--as it does almost every year.  Knowing many of them, they seem fairly comparable to the incoming in-state student body when I arrived in Ann Arbor.

quigley.blue

July 13th, 2015 at 10:23 AM ^

The out of state acceptance rate isnt necessarily much lower.  I thought I read recently that more than 50% of the student body is not from MIchigan at this point.  I guess this makes me curious what the percentage of total applications from students actually from Michigan is.

SAMgO

July 13th, 2015 at 10:30 AM ^

50% of the overall student body is now out of state, but graduate students skew heavily out of state. For undergrads it's around 60% in state still. Far more out of state students apply than in state. Around 3.5-4x more usually. You'd have to imagine that the yield is higher for in staters though.

bluebyyou

July 13th, 2015 at 10:30 AM ^

As the population increase and as the number of seats available remains relatively constant, your pool of applicants slowly improves.  This has happened nationwide to most state schools where attendance is relatively affordable. Schools that once were snubbed as being second rate have become very good institutions.

I'd be curious to know the percentage of in-state vs OOS students.  

Michigan Arrogance

July 13th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^

I attended a brief presentation from the office of Admissions about a month ago: due to population loss (or relativly low gain) the state isn't providing the best applicant pool. As a result, the %age of OOS student admittance has risen.

BTW, they also made it a point to hammer it in that the UofM would NEVER go private. I'm sure that's been a talking point for every talk an admissions officer gives. Seemed almost to belabor the point, IMO. 

As an ASR living OOS, my communications from the admissions office has indicated that they are not excited to generate more applications unless they are from very compeditive students/schools. Any additional recruitment must be in a very targed manner to attract the best to apply.