When Amin Bahari considered his college options, he had his heart set on the University of Texas–Austin.
But the now 22-year-old says when he was a high school senior at Pflugerville High School in Pflugerville, Texas, his grades weren’t high enough for the public flagship school.
“I worked really hard toward the end of my junior and senior year to get my grades up, but it was a little too late,” says Bahari, who enrolled at Austin Community College before being accepted at UT–Austin as a transfer student, having met the minimum required 3.25 GPA.
UT–Austin, similar to other top-ranked public state universities, has become more selective because of growing applicant pools.
In fact, the school accepted 40 percent of applicants in fall 2016 — a 9 percentage-point drop since the 2006-2007 school year, according to data submitted to U.S. News in an annual survey. The number of applications at the school grew over the last five years from 32,589 in 2011-2012 to 47,511 in 2016-2017.
“Universities that are increasingly well-known — which is many of the flagships of public institutions — are garnering more applications across the nation,” says Rosemaria Martinelli, senior director of higher education at Huron, a firm that works with colleges on branding and marketing to attract prospective students.
Martinelli says the increased applicant pools allow these schools to be more selective and “craft their class.”
Higher education experts say space limitations, such as those related to class size and student-to-faculty ratio, constrain enrollment and allow top-ranked public National Universities to be more selective.
Lower acceptance rates are driven by a combination of perceived value, increases in international and out-of-state applicants and more in-state students who accept offers, admissions directors and higher education researchers say.
[Read about in-state tuition increases at these state schools.]
“Because the reputation of the institution is rising more and more people want to go to that university,” Martinelli from Huron says of top-ranked state schools.
Among the 189 ranked public National Universities, 14 had an acceptance rate of 40 percent or less in 2016-2017 compared with six schools in 2006-2007, U.S. News data show. The schools that have become more selective in the last 10 years include the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California–Santa Barbara and San Diego State University, to name a few.
UM–Ann Arbor, which accepted 47 percent of applicants in 2006-2007, had one of the most notable drops, according to data reported to U.S. News. The school shrunk its acceptance rate to 29 percent in 2016-2017.
“The number of applications has grown every year for the past decade,” said Rick Fitzgerald, a spokesman for UM–Ann Arbor, in an email. “This year we had 60,000 applications for a freshman class estimated to be 6,700.”
Getting an acceptance letter from a top-ranked public flagship can be even more difficult for an out-of-state applicant. At UM–Ann Arbor, for example, 44 percent of in-state students were offered admission compared with 25 percent of out-of-state and international applicants in fall 2016, according to UM’s spokesman.
Georgia Tech is another well-known state school with a plummeting acceptance rate. The school accepted 69 percent of applicants in 2006-2007, but that rate has since dropped to 26 percent within the last 10 years, according to U.S. News data. That makes Georgia Tech the third most selective public university after the University of California–Berkeley and the University of California–Los Angeles.
Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech, says some of the growth in applications is a result of joining the Common Application in 2013 as well more interest from out-of-state and international students.
Georgia Tech shattered its record for receiving the most applications with 31,504 for the fall 2017 entering class, he says. Most of the application increase, he notes, came from nonresidents.
[See the top public universities rankings.]
While the school only accepted 18 percent of nonresidents for the fall 2017 freshman class, Clark says selectivity has also increased for in-state applicants since more students are saying “yes” to their offer. “They’ve been accepting our offer at a higher rate, so that’s also contributing.”
Wes Butterfield, vice president of financial aid services at Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a firm that provides strategic fundraising and enrollment management services to colleges, says demand and capacity are pushing top flagship schools to choose students who stand out academically.
“There are greater pressures on retention and completion than ever before,” he says.
[Discover which public schools offer an honors college.]
The enrollment strategy at UT–Austin, for example, is to increase the four-year completion rate so there are more incoming seats for freshmen without growing the total number of students, according to J.B. Bird, the university’s spokesman.
“We are 51,000 and we feel like that is the right number or range and that’s been our number for the last couple decades,” which includes graduate students, Bird says. The university also provides more slots for in-state students compared with out-of-state students: 90 percent.
Despite not qualifying for UT–Austin’s academic requirements as a high school student, Bahari says he’s thankful the school gives students who didn’t qualify the first time around a second opportunity.
His advice to high school students interested in a top-ranked public school: “Figure out what it takes to get into these schools and work as hard as you can. Take academics seriously at a young age.”
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It’s Tougher to Get Into These Public Schools originally appeared on usnews.com
