"Beyond our in-state to out-of-state ratio (2/3 of our students are Virginia residents), there are no restrictions on how many students we may take from a high school, town, county, or region."
I say this sentence during every information session, evening program, and high school visit. I say it regularly during live q&a sessions. I post it regularly on social media. I've been at UVA for 19 years, so you can imagine how many times those words have come out of my mouth!
Rumors of regional quotas are a common concern among college-bound students. At UVA, we don't have them. We're large enough that can have many students from the same high school/town/county in our class. There's no directive that we must have someone from every state or county in the incoming class, either. With close to 18,000 undergraduate students, we have geographic diversity here.
Having some numbers can help manage expectations about the admission process and prepare you for admission decisions (no update yet, ED applicants!). Let's go over some places where you get get factual information about UVA's enrollment and admission.
1. The Enrollment Maps
The Office of Institutional Research and Analytics publishes enrollment maps and charts that show the home countries, states, and counties/cities of UVA students. They are on the third tab of the Enrollment Data page on their website. At the top of the tab, you can switch the view from the world, the United States, and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
You can zoom in on the maps and hover over an area to see the number of students at UVA from that specific country, state, or county/city (in Virginia, cities and counties are separate).
Below the maps are charts with raw data. You can export those to see them in a spreadsheet. Here's just a snippet of one:
You can use the drop-down menu to look at specific populations within UVA (undergraduates, graduates, different schools/colleges).
2. Official UVA Admission Data
The Office of Institutional Assessment & Analytics also has pages of admission data that you can view using the same system of drop-down menus. The data goes back to 2016 and can also be seen by school of entry.
3. Official SCHEV Admission Data
The State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) collects admission data for all of the colleges in Virginia. There are all sorts of charts on their website. Some items of note:
This chart has a general profile for each school. Just remember that GPAs are not standardized in Virginia, so the average GPA stat isn't all that significant. It's better to get data from your high school. Remember that at UVA, we are more concerned with coursework and grades than GPA, as you can have students with the same GPA and very different transcripts.
B10 also shows you how many first years submitted an SAT score. Remember that we are still more concerned with sustained classroom performance at UVA and that many of our students have surpassed the material on the SAT (especially the math section).
Chart B15 Regional Data
These charts show first year admission and enrollment data by nine regions: Greater Charlottesville, Shenandoah Valley, Northern Virginia, Greater Fredericksburg, Hampton Roads, Greater Richmond, Southside, Roanoke/New River/Lynchburg, and Southwest. Enrollment data is at the top, but scroll down for admission data.
These charts show first year admission and enrollment data by nine regions: Greater Charlottesville, Shenandoah Valley, Northern Virginia, Greater Fredericksburg, Hampton Roads, Greater Richmond, Southside, Roanoke/New River/Lynchburg, and Southwest. Enrollment data is at the top, but scroll down for admission data.
It's not all that surprising...densely populated areas have lots of high schools, so we wind up with lots of students from NOVA, Richmond, and Hampton Roads.
This page has admission data for all of the Virginia colleges broken down by county/city going back several years. The raw numbers are helpful, as there could be a county with a very high admission rate, but only a few applicants. For example, Mathews County had a 100% acceptance rate in the 2023-2024 cycle. We admitted the one applicant from there.
Note: SCHEV's Chart B08 and B08H is very buggy and is showing me incorrect data. I'm guessing it's combining first-year and transfer data (maybe even graduate student data?) in some of the charts. I'm not in Institutional Assessment, so I can't be sure. I just know that their numbers are higher than the ones I have.
