Slacking seniors in high school: beware

Recently, there was a real nice article in the New York Times describing how colleges are dealing with admitted students whose grades during their senior year have fallen off dramatically. It seems that universities are really cracking down so that students don’t waste their senior year. The University of Michigan is specifically mentioned for the steps that it is taking.

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.

A couple interesting BusinessWeek articles

For those of you who might have questions about the newly-structured BBA Program, there are a couple of interesting and useful articles in BusinessWeek:

• “Big Changes for Michigan BBAs”, September 27, 2006: An interview with Michele Thompson, head of Ross Undergraduate Admissions.
• “A "Luxurious Position" at Michigan”, April 17, 2006: An interview with Al Cotrone, director of the Office of Career Development at Ross.

Taken together, these articles provide a lot of clarifying detail about getting into the program, about the program itself, and about getting a job after graduating.

While I don’t have anything to add to the articles themselves, I am going to take the opportunity and reply to a couple of the more uninformed comments at the end of the Thompson interview:

• We have lots of reasons for having a direct admit program, and copying Indiana’s program (or anyone else’s) was certainly not on the list. We added this because we wanted to provide attractive, high-performing high school students with another option. UM’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions had told us for many years that this would be an attractive option for high school students. They have the option of going to MIT and Wharton directly out of high school. We wanted to give the cream of the high school crop the opportunity to apply directly to Ross — given the quality of the applications that we received and the quality of the students who matriculated here this fall, I am happy to report that we have exceeded our expectations (in no small part due to the efforts of Ms. Thompson). Further, we are not going to be going to 100% direct admissions because we know that many students do not decide to go into business until after they get to college.
• As for the size of our courses: Core courses have 70 students, while electives usually have between 25 and 50 (usually around 40). I’m an associate professor and head of the BBA Program, and I have office hours twice a week for the students in my sections of the core.
• Related to the BBA and MBA: If you get a Ross BBA, then you may or may not need an MBA. It all depends on your desired employer. Some companies require that their employees get an MBA as a prerequisite to moving up in management. Others don’t care about it at all. For others, getting certified as a financial analyst or a CPA is what is really needed in order to advance. It just depends. A typical Ross BBA shouldn’t worry about this type of thing until several years out of school; he or she is very well prepared to succeed in his or her job immediately after graduating. The BBA is neither simply a preparatory degree for receiving an MBA nor a deterrent to getting admitted into an MBA program. It is simply an undergraduate degree that is also very good at preparing a student to succeed in business. Further, it is an excellent preparation for law school or graduate studies in public policy. We have an excellent track record at placing students in the best programs in the country in these fields of study.

So, that’s it for now. If you are interested, or if you have a friend or family member who is interested in the Ross BBA Program, pass along these links.