University Times

What a difference a decade makes in the world of the Pitt Admissions office.

Between the fall 1995 entering freshman class and the entering class of 2005, average SAT scores went up from 1110 to 1234; by comparison, national SAT scores only went up from 1010 to 1028 during the same period.

The percentage of freshmen at Pitt in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class went up from 19 percent to 43 percent, and those in the top 20 percent of their class from 39 percent to 74 percent.

The Admissions staff also had a larger class to fill: Pitt’s administration increased the entering class size from 2,424 in 1995 to 3,249 last fall.

But there are more applicants for the increased number of spaces. Reflecting a national trend, applications over the decade also are up at Pitt. Between 1995 and 2005, the number of applications more than doubled from 7,825 to 18,153.

Applications have gone up nationally in recent years, in part, because there are more students graduating from high school and more students on average are applying to a larger number of schools, according to Betsy Porter, Pitt director of Admissions and Financial Aid. While colleges and universities keep applications statistics, not all of them are willing to share the data, she added.

“It’s our belief that the University’s applications have gone up at a higher rate than schools nationally or regionally,” she said.

But statistics aside, the role and methods of the Admissions office also have evolved in sometimes overt, sometimes subtle ways, according to Porter.

She presented a report to the Senate budget policies committee (BPC) on April 28 profiling last fall’s Pittsburgh campus entering class and discussing recruitment strategies in an age of virtual tours, on-line applications, college advising web sites and “helicopter parents.”

It used to be that a high school junior would meet with a guidance counselor who would recommend one school that was a good fit for the student, one that was a “reach” and one “safety” school to fall back on, Porter said.

“Now you have on-line applications, and applicants who want more control over the process,” Porter said. “And you’ve got families more involved and you’ve got independent counselors and all kinds of search engines and web sites that help with college planning. Students can go on line and in a half an hour they can apply to six schools. I do think there’s a lot of that,” she said.

Porter is quick to point out that there are many reasons for Pitt’s improved admissions picture. “I want to stress that recruitment is not an isolated activity done only in our office,” she said.

“Everything you do as faculty, everything the University’s done with regard to facilities, such as building residence halls, everything done in the Provost’s office, such as setting standards and providing scholarships, everything Student Affairs does to have a positive impact on student life — all have a role in our recruitment issues.”

At the macro level, Porter credits a change in philosophy dating to the early 1990s when the Provost’s office created a University-wide enrollment management committee (EMC) to deal with issues of recruitment and retention.

The creation of that committee, coupled with the 1995 charge by the Board of Trustees to improve the quality of undergraduate education beginning with improving the credentials of the incoming classes, led to more comprehensive strategies for admissions, she said.

“For example, the University now views housing as a critical dimension in our ability to recruit undergraduate students,” she said. “In the mid-’90s we had no housing policy. We now have a very stable housing policy, and we can guarantee three years of campus housing. That’s pretty important when 96 percent of freshmen want to live on campus. We now compete with largely residential colleges for students.”

The EMC also must balance revenue streams with class-size goals, she said, which means, among other things, determining the number, the amount and the requirements for scholarships. “The EMC annually looks at a number of issues: How do we offer financial aid to those in need and still generate sufficient income to run the University? Can we improve the quality of students and still maintain our commitment to diversity, and afford to do it? The intent of the EMC was to deal not just with incoming students but to deal with retention and transfer students, and other issues.”

Porter cautioned against looking at applications, admissions and other statistics in isolation. “Our applicant pool has increased very significantly, which really is the cornerstone to building any kind of a successful program, but it can’t be just any applicant pool, but a pool where the applicants have some level of interest in coming to the University,” she said. “Every school does things differently, and not a lot of schools will admit what they do. But I think a lot of schools do measure interest.”

If a student has visited a campus and kept in contact with admissions staff, those schools looking to increase their yield rates (the rate of accepted students who actually enroll) would factor that into the admissions process, Porter said.

But other institutions still will take their chances admitting a student who has applied to numerous other schools, not shown particular interest, but has the qualifications that they are looking for, in other words, de-emphasizing their yield rates, she said.

Pitt’s yield rates have declined in the last decade. In 1995, there were 7,825 applications, 6,193 admitted applicants (79.1 percent) and 2,424 who enrolled (39.1 percent yield). In 2005, there were 18,153 applicants, of whom 9,654 were accepted (53.2 percent) and 3,249 who enrolled (33.7 percent yield).

“It’s a rule of thumb that with the higher quality of students you have, the lower yield you’ll get,” Porter said, because brighter students tend to have more options.

Pitt does not measure a student’s interest in attending formally, she said. But if a student visits the campus and meets with a counselor, for example, there are notes from that meeting that the admissions committee would review for signs of a student’s interest in enrolling.

“We still are clinging to the idea that the actual file folder in the Admissions office [counts for something],” she said. “We believe that if you want diversity in your undergraduate student population, you have to review applications holistically, you have to take other things that you can’t quantify and take them into account. You can’t do that very well if you don’t gather the information. And we really do take seriously everything an applicant sends us,” including personal essays and letters of recommendation, she said.

“We want students to self-advocate, we want them to tell us what they do outside of the classroom, we want letters of recommendation, CDs, videos. Don’t laugh: They send us music that they’ve composed. It’s really quite remarkable some of the things we get.”

Other differences affecting admissions and recruiting strategies over the last decade or so include how the University uses its student SAT scores in recruiting, what defines University Honors College eligibility and a forced de-emphasis on class rank.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a big concern, but something to be aware of is that there are now a large number of school districts that no longer rank their students,” she said. “Ten years ago just about all schools would provide a ranking so you would know who were the better students at least in their particular peer environment.”

Higher-quality high schools in particular are getting away from class rank for a variety of reasons, Porter said, including pressure from parents who think their kids are penalized by the stiffer competition; the fairness of weighting honors or Advanced Placement courses, and students choosing easier elective courses just to move up in rank.

“Quite frankly, I think schools are afraid of litigation,” she said.

“But we think class rank is a meaningful statistic and we use it to evaluate scholarship eligibility,” Porter said. “In many cases if you were in the top 10 percent you would be eligible for a scholarship and if not, you aren’t.”

Pitt enrolled 702 students from schools that did not provide class rank in the fall 2005 freshman class compared to 183 in fall 1995’s class.

Pitt requires the SAT — now taken by about 1.5 million high school students annually — as an important standardized measuring stick and one factor in admissions decisions, Porter said.

But while Pitt as an institution is proud of its students’ increased SAT scores, for recruiting purposes there are some pitfalls. “We don’t give out the average SAT scores to our recruits because if 1110 is the average, you might get a brighter student saying ‘I’m not going to a school that averages only 1110.’ Conversely, what we don’t want to do is give out our current number of 1234 and have the student who has 1190 and happens to be first in the class say, ‘I’m not even going to get into Pitt, so I shouldn’t even apply.’”

Instead, Pitt provides the mid-50 percent range of scores in its admissions materials. “What we say is that 50 percent of our students have SAT scores between 1150 and 1310. What that says to the student/athlete, for example, who has 1020 but is in the top 10 percent of a top school with a very good curriculum, they shouldn’t opt out of applying,” she said. “Conversely, the student with 1450 can say, ‘About 25 percent of the students at Pitt look a little like me.’”

The University Honors College holds a special place in the hearts of Admissions staff, Porter said, “because we can say to the very high-end students there is a good academic home for you here.”

But Pitt’s administration heard some grumbling among parents and applicants in 2000 when the percentage of Honors College-eligible admitted students grew to 23 percent. “We were hearing from parents who said: ‘If almost a quarter of your students are eligible, how much of an honor could it really be?’”

The administration then decided that 20 percent of a class was an acceptable target and adjusted the eligibility requirements accordingly, she said. “Since our whole population is improving, didn’t we really have an obligation to improve the quality of [those] that are Honors College eligible? And it’s good we did that in 2000, because if the requirements stayed the same, in 2005 about 53 percent of our students would be eligible.”

Other highlights of Porter’s report to BPC include:

• The 3,249 students in the fall 2005 freshman class came from 1,000 high schools in 43 states.

• Out-of-state students represented 21 percent of the 2005 class, up from 18.6 percent in 1995.

• A survey of students who were admitted to Pitt but did not enroll revealed that the University’s biggest competitors for in-state students were Penn State, Maryland, Delaware, Boston University and Duquesne. Penn State, Maryland and BU also were the biggest competitors for out-of-state students.

• The enrollment goal for the fall 2006 freshman class is 3,325, slightly larger than the current freshman class. Pitt won’t know the total number of admitted students who send in their deposits until mid-May, Porter said. Even then, she expects some flux before students arrive in the fall.

Upon receipt of the $300 deposit, the Admissions office then requires a $350 deposit for room and board for the large majority of incoming freshmen who request on-campus housing.

“We really want families to think about this as making a commitment,” Porter said. “It used to be we charged a $100 enrollment fee, but some Septembers we were seeing cancellation numbers in the range of 350 students, so we decided $100 was not enough. I’m probably right on the cusp of asking the Provost’s office to increase that again.”

Also on Porter’s wish list is finding better ways to enlist the faculty in recruitment of admitted applicants. “We have literally thousands of students who come to visit our campus. We’ve found an enormous number of them who ask to meet with a faculty member, or attend a class, usually in a particular subject,” she said. “We do have some faculty volunteers who are willing to meet with a student or phone a student. But family campus visits are usually in the summer or Saturdays when it’s hard to get faculty or to match them with the student’s interest. We need to begin to look at that and find better ways to make that connection.”

—Peter Hart