He Who Shall Be Unnamed said:aggie93 said:
Most public schools in the South have had an increase in applications driven by a variety of factors. You have states like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia that have grown significantly in population and at the same time have become popular destinations for OOS kids to want to attend. Part of that is value. Part of that is weather. Part of that is culture.
One big driver is less about woke per se as experience, especially for boys. Boys don't want to go to Liberal Arts schools anymore. Same with drab public schools with no culture outside of school that are common in the Northeast. A dirty little secret in college admissions is the boys drive the applications because the girls chase the boys. Boys don't care about what the ratio of male/female generally but girls do. It's considered a death spiral for most schools when they go over 60% female because girls don't want to go there and boys likely weren't interested to begin with. They tend to be Liberal Arts focused schools and most boys are majoring in Engineering, Business, or Sciences. You also have the reality that overall the college student population is now 60/40 female. It's gradually killing colleges, many of which are in financial trouble and are unlikely to pull out of it. I expect the number of colleges that close in the next decade to explode.
The public schools of the South offer a great college atmosphere that boys are interested in and thus girls follow. They also tend to focus on Business, Science, and Engineering, not Liberal Arts. Covid also played a hand in this for a lot of people, they want a fun atmosphere that has sports and activities. Girls love the Sororities and activities as well and to have fun. The rankings, job placement, and value of those schools is also going through the roof and a lot of them offer nice scholarship money (esp the states that aren't growing as fast).
The strong schools in the South are also now becoming super selective, especially in the most popular majors. UNC is probably the most difficult OOS admit in the country. Georgia Tech for some of the Engineering specialties is harder to get into than MIT. Florida and Texas are pushing 100k applicants. Those schools have strong advantages for In State students in admission so OOS is just insanely competitive with so many applicants for so few spots. It's thus moving down level by level. UGA and NC State are getting really competitive as is A&M of course. Then Auburn/Clemson/UT etc are moving from virtually automatic admission to more and more competitive and less scholarship money thrown around. In the end as the Liberal Arts private schools are dying the big publics are doing better than ever down South.
Certainly affordability is driving students to a lot of these schools, and SEC schools in particular are "playing the game" with Common Market and other programs aimed at luring out of state students. In Georgia and Florida, which do not have the oil and gas revenues that Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma in particular have, education is subsidized by the only regressive tax there is - the lottery. As a result, they are retaining a lot more students with the Hope and Zell scholarships in Georgia and Bright Futures in Florida. At U.F., the last admitted class had a 19% admissions rate. Mid-50 ACT and SAT scores were:
UGA 30-34 ACT, 1300-1470 SAT
UF ACT 31-34, 1380-1510 SAT
Those stats are considerably higher than both A&M and U.T. Austin. UGA definitely tries to "spread admissions around" the state - if it were a pure meritocracy, they would fill their class every year with suburban Atlanta kids. I do not get the sense that U.F. does that much at all. It seems to be more of a meritocracy in a state that is rapidly growing. I can't see it getting any easier to get into those two schools, U.F. in particular, any time soon. I wonder what the numbers U.T. Austin and A&M would have if they weren't offering auto admits across the state.
I just went through a couple of years of pretty in depth college search stuff with my youngest who is a strong student and learned a LOT about the current state of admissions. Probably listened to 1000 hours of Podcasts and visited a ton of campuses and had countless conversations with counselors and admission folks. Prior to that my experience was very Texas focused but I really learned about how each state operates (as well as the private schools).
I've always thought the model that A&M (and Texas) should be looking at is North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and their flagships. They have steadily increased in ranking and in basically every statistic that matters while making college far less expensive for the most part than we do in spite having a fraction of the money we do.
North Carolina and Georgia have different models in one significant way, they have a real distinction of school focus. UGA and UNC operate as more traditional Liberal Arts schools but both have very strong Business schools and networks but both have small and unimpressive Engineering. Georgia Tech and NC State have the premium Engineering schools. They are also parts of the same System and operate in concert. North Carolina offers lower tuition at both schools and has a lot of scholarships. In Georgia a very high percentage of kids who get into UGA/GT get Zell Miller or Hope which basically pays for tuition. They all run about 70-80% in state and it's difficult to get scholarship money from OOS, they let the OOS kids help with funding the school (the UC schools and Michigan really lean heavy on that model, UM is about 50% OOS in part for that reason). The NC and Georgia schools all do holistic admissions and try very hard to get rural kids a bump. They don't want everyone to be from Atlanta in Georgia or from the RTP area or Charlotte in North Carolina. Georgia Tech and NC State also are very major specific in admissions and the acceptance rates vary greatly based on major. My son is going to NC State next year and at NSC they said that they had 13k applications for Engineering and have 1900 Freshman starting, it's getting really competitive to get in there. The other majors less so. At GT the school is overwhelmingly Engineering to start but the premium Engineering majors (CS, Mechanical, Biomedical, etc) have admit rates that are approaching MIT as I mentioned and have gotten dramatically more difficult in just the last 10 years (from 20-30% to lower single digits).
UF is the closer model as they are 50k students and offer all disciplines and all are respected. FSU is still a good school but a definite drop down from UF. Most kids are either using Bright Futures or one of the other scholarship programs they have that benefit in state kids. They used to offer a lot of OOS money and now still do offer some to strong students but it's fading as they just don't need to do so. UF is now consistently seen as a Top 5ish Public School and is only getting stronger. Florida is less concentrated than NC/GA as well which is similar to Texas in that the good students are spread out among many areas of the state whereas in NC/GA a few areas really dominate. Rural kids will always be squeezed of course but each of those states works to try to help there as they know a kid from a rural school is not going to have 12 APs and be engaged in some of the activities available to someone at a premium suburban high school much less private school.
A&M does so many dumb things in admissions it frustrates me to no end. Top 10%. Rolling Admissions. No Superscore for SAT/ACT. Lack of almost any merit aid unless you are NM. We do less with more than any school in the country, just no excuse for a school with an endowment that is the 2nd largest of all Public schools and is 10x most schools we are considered peers to and most of it is because of those policies that make us into a Safety school for top students and frustrate many students that would love to come here and push them away. A&M gets away with it because most people simply don't know how other states operate.
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