Our changing admissions rate

I recently received a question from a student related to the recent change in the admissions rate from 47% (for the class of rising juniors that we admitted last summer) to 30-35% (for the class of rising sophomores that we will be admitting this summer). The question is the following: “Does this mean the average GPA is going to go up and getting in is going to get a lot harder really fast?”

Short answer (that probably doesn’t answer the intent of the original question): I have no idea if the GPA is going to go up this year and I won’t until the end of June when we’re all done.

I would be really surprised if it’s going to get that much harder to get in that quickly. The rate changed so much this year because our whole structure for accepting applications from UM students changed. We used to accept applications from sophomores. These students had taken Econ101, Econ102, Math115, and one (or both) intro accounting classes. By the time these courses were done, it was pretty clear to students 1) whether or not they were interested in business, and 2) whether or not they could succeed in and would like taking business classes. The result of these two factors was that students self-selected themselves out of applying to business by the end of their sophomore years. There are now fewer classes for convincing students not to apply to Ross, so the end result is that Ross receives more applications. I believe it’s currently the case that there are no more students entering UM at the beginning of their freshman year who are interested in business than there were a couple of years ago. The difference in the number of applications is that fewer of these students have been convinced not to apply to Ross. I hope this changes in future years (that is, I hope that the number of applications goes up because more students are interested in business), but I don’t believe it has happened yet (though it may have).

Now, in several years if my plan for global domination succeeds (evil laugh echoes off the walls of my imposing maize & blue castle), then it might be the case that applications will be up because there simply are more students entering UM with a plan for studying business. But I don’t think we’re there just yet.

So, what does this all mean? To me, it means that students this year competed with basically the same number of UM students that they did in the past — it’s just that more of them hadn’t removed themselves from consideration by Ross.

What’s the end result of this in the short run? I believe that the UM GPA of admitted students won’t change by a significant amount this year; it didn’t change much last year. Further, I don’t believe that getting into Ross is going to be any harder than it was in the past — as long as you take into account the fact that we now have a two-phase admissions process. I believe this might have made it slightly more difficult to get in for the average student because we might have (I hope) gotten the attention of more highly attractive high school students and subsequently gotten them to apply to Ross simply because they could get in right out of high school. But the data for this certainly isn’t in yet. We probably won’t have an answer to this question for another couple of years.

So, if you assume that half of our preferred admit class are made up of applications from students who would not have applied to or chosen to attend UM/Ross without the PA program, then that would mean that we have 50 fewer spots for our usual set of (historically, very high quality) applicants. Given that, you might think that next year it would be harder to get into Ross.

But have you considered the fact that we have already thought through this and might be thinking of increasing the size of the BBA Program? If that were to happen, then it might not end up being any more difficult to get into Ross than it was before — it might just end up being a larger (really high quality) program than it was before. (We of course would like, in this scenario, to be both larger and higher quality.) Now, don’t go thinking that the Dean or I have approved this change for next year. We haven’t even discussed it. I am simply saying that this type of change is at least going to be considered. (I haven’t presented the reasons for not getting bigger — and these are fairly reasonable — so don’t think it’s a straight-forward case for increasing the size.) And what matters to you is that it is a complete and total unknown at this point so don’t think that you can guess what we’re going to do by deciphering my writing. (“Oh, he’s clearly not going to make it bigger! I should give up!” or “It’s definitely going to get bigger. I can just cruise from here and wait for my acceptance letter.” No. Resist the temptation!) Because even I have no idea what we’re going to do.

So, don’t despair. Just do what you think you should do in order to increase your chances of getting in. Continue to get advice. But do what you can to ensure that your record is high quality, apply to the program, and let the chips fall where they may. You won’t help anything by worrying about this type of detail.