Geographic Quotas and Targets and the #UVA Admission Process

Our office has a tradition of deans coming out of their offices to greet our tours when they return to Peabody Hall. Our front desk emails us to let us know that the tours are starting to end and everyone who is available gathers in the lobby to answer questions. When students from my territory are on break, I tend to be a little more enthusiastic when families come through the doors. I grew up in an area that's sometimes referred to as a "pressure cooker" and I remember how reassuring it was to meet a friendly admission officer on college visits. I want to be that friendly face for students and parents.

We often find ourselves fielding questions that are about quotas, but phrased in a roundabout way. We are more than happy to talk about this topic. We know that rumors about quotas are pervasive in densely populated areas. I remember being convinced that my admission chances were related to how many students from my high school or county applied to the colleges on my list. For some of the schools on my list, that was probably correct. Some schools do have limits on how many students they'll take from a school or region. UVA is not one of those schools. 

UVA made an agreement with the Commonwealth of Virginia to maintain a 2/3 to 1/3 ratio* between Virginia residents and non-residents. Beyond that, there are no restrictions on how many students we can take from any school, town, county, or region. You aren't competing with your classmates or neighbors for an allocation of spots.


As always, I'm happy to answer questions in the comments.

Quotas, again?

*Every now and then, a state representative will introduce a bill to mandate a change to our ratio, but the bills always fail in committee. Here are the bills from 2017, 2014, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007 on Richmond Sunlight, a great website for following the state legislature.

**Thank you to the kind parent who wrote to me about an error in this blog post. The Restructuring Act failed in 2004, but was successful in 2005 and has been amended a few times since. I apologize for my mistake.

UVA Admission Quotas for Northern Virginia

"Beyond our in-state to out-of-state ratio (2/3 of our students are Virginia residents), there are no restrictions, targets, or quotas regarding 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've been at UVA for 11 years, so you can imagine how many times those words have come out of my mouth!

Rumors of regional quotas are pretty prevalent in my territory in Northern Virginia. My students in Fairfax, Arlington, and the continuous cities (cities are separate from counties in Virginia) are convinced that we have to balance out the class between the 95 counties and 38 independent cities in Virginia and that means it's easier to be admitted from the counties with smaller populations. Let's look at some of the most common things I hear and some data...

1. Only __ people are admitted from my high school each year.

Many conversations I see about admission quotas cite enrolled student numbers that have been confused with admission numbers. This is probably because many schools publish lists of college destinations for the graduating class and people count up the number of times a certain school is listed. What's missing is a discussion of yield. Yield is the percentage of admitted students who decide to matriculate at a school.

At UVA, we break down our admission and yield stats by residency. About 60% of the Virginians who get offers of admission wind up enrolling at UVA. When you see a certain number of seniors headed to Charlottesville, remember that there were probably some more who were offered the option, but turned it down to attend another school.

2. The students from my area are more qualified than students from other places.

The notion of "qualified" applicants is a little bit funny to me. Students have access to so much admission information between their counselors, data that we put out, and data that high schools collect that most of the people apply because they know they are qualified. 

In a selective admission process, academically qualified students get denied because the vast majority of the applicant pool is qualified. Those students aren't denied to make room for students who can't do the work. The applicant pool is full of people who are prepared and ready for UVA.

3. UVA doesn't like my school because last year's seniors didn't attend in high numbers.

This is a relatively new rumor and I hear it in different iterations. One student told me that someone  said that her brother turning down his offer from UVA and attending another school a few years ago was going to be held against her.

We don't hold grudges. Students say no to us every year. That's how this process works. Our feelings aren't hurt.

Okay, now let's look at some maps!

UVA Magazine published an awesome article about the Class of 2020 that includes a lot of admission data. My favorite part is the map area, where you can hover over a county (or state or country) and see how many students in the first-year class are from a particular area. If you hold the shift key and click on multiple areas, you can get a summary. 

Above, we saw that 3,720 students are in the Class of 2020. If I add up the counties/cities in Northern Virginia, I can see that 1,130 students are from the area. So, four counties and four cities are pretty well-represented in the class. So 2,590 students are from the other 91 counties and 34 cities that make up the Commonwealth.

Side note: Back in the day, I'd set aside a day or two for Loudoun County visits. These days, one of my colleagues covers Loudoun while I cover Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria. The number of Loudoun high schools has increased as the area has been developed!

You can see how the numbers increased in our student body on the map:

Keep in mind that when you see charts with admission data on them, you are seeing the results of an elaborate review process plotted using just a couple variables. Things like scattergrams don't tell you how we make decisions. 

 

 As always, I'm happy to chat with you via the comments!

Quotas. Again.

Here's the CavDog image I pull out anytime I fear I'm covering a topic so much that regular readers will be horribly bored by the post:

Really? You're talking about this again?

He's only about six months old in that picture. I think the dog was born to be on a blog because he gives me so many great expressions to use here. Anyway...


Let's talk about quotas
I'm going to talk about quotas again since it came up in the Washington Post today. Reporter Michael Chandler linked to my last post about quotas (unfortunately, it was the mobile version, so folks won't see that big, beautiful picture of CavDog), but I thought I'd revisit the topic just in case it will help quell some of the anxiety that will come up if people see this tweet and the related article:

I'll say something I've danced around through all of my posts about this topic. I think quotas are dumb. I want to concentrate on reading applications, not constantly have an eye on some counter that will stop me from admitting people. Quotas get in the way when you're building a great class. I don't think I could ever work for a school that has a cap on how many students we could take from a particular high school.

Look at posts on my Instagram account from the fall travel season and you'll see that I adore my high schools. I adore my applicants. I adore their Career Center Specialists (I'm resisting the urge to do shout outs right now). I spend a lot of time telling my colleagues about my fabulous visits to schools in Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun. If someone suddenly told me there was a cap on how many students we could take from each of those schools, I would be completely gobsmacked. Honestly, I would leave if that ever happened.


About those numbers...
A parent quoted in that WaPo article cited his daughter's GPA. The GPAs at many schools these days are approaching 5.0, so it's hard for some of us who grew up with unweighted 4.0 scales to understand what the numbers mean. What's more, the GPA doesn't tell us about the courses the student selected and the rigor of the applicant's high school program is hugely important in this process.

Each high school sends us a profile that explains how they calculate GPAs so admission officers understand the context. The profile explains the hierarchy of the curriculum at the school so we can assess how challenging the student's chosen program is. When you have lots of fabulous options, the expectation is obviously that you'll take advantage of them. Every school is different, of course.

If you haven't seen your school's profile, google it. You can usually find them online. If you don't see yours online, your school counselor can show it to you.


Feel free to ask questions in the comments. As always, this is anonymous, but please pick a nickname to use.

The EA Deadline is Approaching!

I've been getting so much email from worried students in the last few days that I think I need to draw attention to some things that have been covered on the blog this season. Feel free to use the comment section on this post to ask a question about anything application related.

How we are dealing with Common App issues
Hints for those submitting art or architecture supplements
Logistics of submitting SAT and SAT Subject Test scores
How applying for aid affects your application
Sending extra supplements
Demonstrated interest as a factor in our review
Quotas for densely populated areas like Northern Virginia

Every year, I implore students not to procrastinate when it comes to submitting applications. You can imagine that the support team at Common App is already inundated with requests and the volume of help requests is apt to increase dramatically as deadlines approach. Submit well before deadline in case there's a problem on your side or on the Common App's.

 The EA deadline is coming!

UVa Admission Quotas for Northern Virginia

If you ever want to fire an admission officer up, mention the word "quota." Back in 2010, I wrote a post in which I said we bristle at the word and I still think that's valid.

Every admission officer I know bristles at the mention of the word "quota". Maybe we hate it because it implies that we don't have control over our processes and that we are slaves to demographics while we read applications. During every Q&A session, every College Night panel, and every phone call, I think we all brace ourselves for that word, which usually comes in a sentence that starts with "We heard that UVa..." and ends with the name of a county or a region.

The one statistic that governs our process is that two-thirds of the students at UVa must have Virginia residency. One-third may come from out-of-state (commonly referred to as OOS). Beyond that, there are no restrictions on how many students we can take from a school, town, county, or region.

Rumors about quotas are particularly pervasive in densely populated areas. People worry that they are at a disadvantage because they are in NOVA or Richmond or at the beach. Those areas have lots of great students and we admit a lot of them. 

Year after year, when I talk to families from Northern Virginia (or read college admission discussions online), I find that someone has declared themselves an expert on our process and tells anyone who will listen that UVa has a quota for NOVA as a region or for individual schools in the area. This stuff never comes for someone who has worked in our office. Oftentimes, that person has never worked in any college admission office or a high school's guidance office or career center. They are wrong.


I'd be the first in line to rally against a NOVA quote if we had one. After all, I've been covering the region for a long time. I visit high schools in Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, and Loudoun every year (I'm well aware that the definition of "NOVA" now includes more areas, but others travel to those areas). I love those schools. They have amazing counseling staffs, the most amazing resource in those wonderful Career Center Specialists, and fantastic students.

CavDog is bored of quota talk.

If you want to dig around in more admission statistics, check out the Office of Institutional Assessment's website. They are the official statisticians of the University. Remember that the statistics are the result of the process. We don't walk into the year with targets beyond that 2/3 : 1/3 ratio.

UVa Admission and regional quotas

Many rumors grow steam, get debunked, and fade away.  One rumor about the admission process at UVa never goes away: the rumor about regional quotas.

There is one quota that affects the admission process at UVa.  The Commonwealth of Virginia mandates that 2/3 of the students at the University be Virginia residents.  Beyond that, there are no quotas with respect to regions, counties, or high schools.  There are trends in the population here, of course.  Densely populated areas of the state tend to have many high schools and send many students to UVa.

Obviously, most admission offices want to bring in an interesting class that has people from many backgrounds, but we have not been handed target numbers for different regions, counties, or populations beyond that 2/3 : 1/3 ratio.

If you want to see admission statistics by residency, check out this chart on the Office of Institutional Assessment's website.