I wonder how many of those 3300 come from system schools or Blinn? Outside of the co-enrollment programs, I would assume they have to keep those pipelines open or risk cutting the legs out from under those schools to some extent.

Texas A & M said:

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So John Sharp opened the flood gates while he was here, increasing enrollment by 1/3 in 10 years, leaving the university massively overcrowded with a host of problems.

Mark Welsh is attempting to clean up the mess while pausing enrollment growth for at least 5 years.

Per the Houston Chronicle, a pause still would place new undergraduate enrollment at 15,000 a year, with 11,750 new freshmen and 3,250 transfers.

Why admit almost 3,300 transfer students a year when so many highly qualified and deserving high school students with excellent GPAs and SAT scores can't get in?

How many flagship universities are admitting almost a quarter of their incoming class as transfers from junior colleges?

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Transfers are A&M's solution to the Top 10% rule. The Top 10% rule admits a ton of kids from poor HS's that are unprepared (this is less about rural and more the large but terrible HS's) and a lot of them flunk out. Then they give System Admit to the kids in the 20-50% group from the elite HS's who go for a year, get a 4.0, and transfer in to take the spot of the kids that flunked out. It's virtue signaling and counter productive because A&M wants to boost 1st Gen stats and then tries to ignore the end outcomes. A lot of others will end up having to transfer into a lesser major at A&M when they could have gone elsewhere and done Engineering or Business. Just about everyone loses the way we do it.

The far wiser path would be to have those kids from bad HS's who often are 1st Gen to go to a Satellite school for a year and then for them to transfer in. It would allow them to adjust and have a better possibility for outcomes. That's how other states do it. Rural outcomes tend to be better at A&M because a lot of those kids come from 2 Parent households and many have college educated parents so they are better prepared. A&M loves to brag about the 1st Gen stats though.

aggie93 said:

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Texas A & M said:

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So John Sharp opened the flood gates while he was here, increasing enrollment by 1/3 in 10 years, leaving the university massively overcrowded with a host of problems.

Mark Welsh is attempting to clean up the mess while pausing enrollment growth for at least 5 years.

Per the Houston Chronicle, a pause still would place new undergraduate enrollment at 15,000 a year, with 11,750 new freshmen and 3,250 transfers.

Why admit almost 3,300 transfer students a year when so many highly qualified and deserving high school students with excellent GPAs and SAT scores can't get in?

How many flagship universities are admitting almost a quarter of their incoming class as transfers from junior colleges?

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Transfers are A&M's solution to the Top 10% rule. The Top 10% rule admits a ton of kids from poor HS's that are unprepared (this is less about rural and more the large but terrible HS's) and a lot of them flunk out. Then they give System Admit to the kids in the 20-50% group from the elite HS's who go for a year, get a 4.0, and transfer in to take the spot of the kids that flunked out. It's virtue signaling and counter productive because A&M wants to boost 1st Gen stats and then tries to ignore the end outcomes. A lot of others will end up having to transfer into a lesser major at A&M when they could have gone elsewhere and done Engineering or Business. Just about everyone loses the way we do it.

The far wiser path would be to have those kids from bad HS's who often are 1st Gen to go to a Satellite school for a year and then for them to transfer in. It would allow them to adjust and have a better possibility for outcomes. That's how other states do it. Rural outcomes tend to be better at A&M because a lot of those kids come from 2 Parent households and many have college educated parents so they are better prepared. A&M loves to brag about the 1st Gen stats though.

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Well said. The system needs drastic repair but that wont happen.

I am curious if UT operates in a similar manner?

Texas operates similarly but they have more attractive options with UTD and UTSA and the like, they also do a similar program to Blinn Team with ACC. They are trying to emulate the UC model long term which makes sense. Essentially if you are a top student in California you get in the UC System but not necessarily Berkeley or UCLA. Still even if you are at Irvine or Santa Cruz or Davis those are excellent Tier 1 Schools to go along with strong options like Santa Barbara and San Diego. They have built up the whole system with some big gems on top to the point they don't have as many transfers because it isn't such a dramatic quality difference.

Texas has really invested in UTD for Comp Sci for instance and it's a great program there, I'd consider it comparable to NC State where it isn't elite like Austin is but it's very, very good with strong outcomes.

A&M has a big drop off (outside of Galveston which is technically part of CS) to the other schools because they don't get PUF money. Thus CS has gotten huge and they encourage transfers.

Essentially it's all a result of the growth of the state happening too fast for the overall A&M and Texas systems to adjust properly, especially with our unique political situation of 2 Flagship Systems and the PUF being the monster that it is.

aggie93 said:

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Texas operates similarly but they have more attractive options with UTD and UTSA and the like, they also do a similar program to Blinn Team with ACC. They are trying to emulate the UC model long term which makes sense. Essentially if you are a top student in California you get in the UC System but not necessarily Berkeley or UCLA. Still even if you are at Irvine or Santa Cruz or Davis those are excellent Tier 1 Schools to go along with strong options like Santa Barbara and San Diego. They have built up the whole system with some big gems on top to the point they don't have as many transfers because it isn't such a dramatic quality difference.

Texas has really invested in UTD for Comp Sci for instance and it's a great program there, I'd consider it comparable to NC State where it isn't elite like Austin is but it's very, very good with strong outcomes.

A&M has a big drop off (outside of Galveston which is technically part of CS) to the other schools because they don't get PUF money. Thus CS has gotten huge and they encourage transfers.

Essentially it's all a result of the growth of the state happening too fast for the overall A&M and Texas systems to adjust properly, especially with our unique political situation of 2 Flagship Systems and the PUF being the monster that it is.

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It sounds to me that that UT system/process is much more streamlined and efficient.

BoDog said:

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aggie93 said:

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Texas operates similarly but they have more attractive options with UTD and UTSA and the like, they also do a similar program to Blinn Team with ACC. They are trying to emulate the UC model long term which makes sense. Essentially if you are a top student in California you get in the UC System but not necessarily Berkeley or UCLA. Still even if you are at Irvine or Santa Cruz or Davis those are excellent Tier 1 Schools to go along with strong options like Santa Barbara and San Diego. They have built up the whole system with some big gems on top to the point they don't have as many transfers because it isn't such a dramatic quality difference.

Texas has really invested in UTD for Comp Sci for instance and it's a great program there, I'd consider it comparable to NC State where it isn't elite like Austin is but it's very, very good with strong outcomes.

A&M has a big drop off (outside of Galveston which is technically part of CS) to the other schools because they don't get PUF money. Thus CS has gotten huge and they encourage transfers.

Essentially it's all a result of the growth of the state happening too fast for the overall A&M and Texas systems to adjust properly, especially with our unique political situation of 2 Flagship Systems and the PUF being the monster that it is.

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It sounds to me that that UT system/process is much more streamlined and efficient.

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It is but basically all of the UT schools qualify for PUF money, thus they have been able to invest and build them up while keeping Austin the same size as it was over 30 years ago. The overall Texas system has about 250k students with about 50k in Austin. The A&M PUF qualified schools (CS, Galveston, Prairie View, and Tarleton) total about 100k but the 3 Non CS schools are niche schools.

Still, A&M could do a lot of things to make a better system. A lot has been done but the biggest challenge is the growth has been too fast for the school to adjust. People can only handle so much change so quickly and most people don't have a perspective of how other states operate their systems so they assume how A&M operates is the only way.

In truth we have a more "Progressive" Admissions and especially Financial Aid system than just about any public University System in the country, much more than California and vastly different that states we should emulate like Georgia and Florida.

An adjustment to the Top 10% rule requiring PSA with a guaranteed transfer path to CS campus at certain performance levels vs requiring auto CS admission would solve a lot of this. But that is in the legislature's hands (and probably taken to court after that).

DannyDuberstein said:

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An adjustment to the Top 10% rule requiring PSA with a guaranteed transfer path to CS campus at certain performance levels vs requiring auto CS admission would solve a lot of this. But that is in the legislature's hands (and probably taken to court after that).

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That's a fig leaf though. If A&M and Texas want to band together and change the Top 6/10% rule they can. They have the political clout. The reality is they don't want to.

Buck Turgidson said:

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The transfer students aren't taking freshman level classes, so transfers and incoming fish aren't really competing for the same spots.

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From what I've seen, yes, they are.

Texas A & M said:

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Buck Turgidson said:

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The transfer students aren't taking freshman level classes, so transfers and incoming fish aren't really competing for the same spots.

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From what I've seen, yes, they are.

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Some are but the numbers are not that significant.

Of course there would be some resistance. The schools/state had to get sued in the first place to stop race based admissions and the legislature passed the top 10% rule as an alternative. So it's in the legislature's hands to change the law again. Been about 16 years since they put the 75% cap on. Time to change it again. I think the admissions mess it is creating now would result in the schools being more accepting of an alternative option than maybe they would have in the past.

so why is it that texas only has to auto admit top 6% while A&M has to auto admit top 10%? Just because we have more space so the legislature says we have to take more kids?

phorizt said:

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so why is it that texas only has to auto admit top 6% while A&M has to auto admit top 10%? Just because we have more space so the legislature says we have to take more kids?

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There is a 75% cap on top 10% kids admitted in the class. So once you hit the cap, you can start cranking it down. Since we had room to grow while they are landlocked, we haven't reached the cap. There was debate of it being 50% instead of 75% when it was passed, but 75% ended up the #. They passed this modification about 10 years after the initial top 10% law was passed, which initially just had every state school was required to take top 10% kids with basically no limit

DannyDuberstein said:

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Of course there would be some resistance. The schools/state had to get sued in the first place to stop race based admissions and the legislature passed the top 10% rule as an alternative. So it's in the legislature's hands to change the law again. Been about 16 years since they put the 75% cap on. Time to change it again. I think the admissions mess it is creating now would result in the schools being more accepting of an alternative option than maybe they would have in the past.

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The biggest issue with the Top 10% rule is the math doesn't work. Texas has over 400,000 HS Graduates every year now and growing if you count private schools. Then homeschool kids adds even more and homeschool kids who also can qualify for Top 10% more easily than someone at an elite HS. So that means over 40,000 students who merely have to apply to A&M are automatically accepted and soon it will be 50,000 with the growth in the State. A&M can't handle 1/3rd of that number. Of course that assumes that no one from the other 90% gets in and no one from OOS.

It was a clumsy rule that doesn't work and the discussion is maybe we make it Top 8% that doesn't fix the issue at all.

You could certainly make Top 10% mean you get a System Admit to A&M and Texas. That said the best method is to go holistic with a mandated percentage of in state students and giving kids from rural areas a boost in the evaluation process. That's how other states do it and it works. Whenever you have a single metric as the main evaluation point for acceptance or for scholarships it is a terrible idea because the variables are simply too great. The current system will continue to have more students who are likely to fail be accepted while many of the strongest students in Texas leave to go elsewhere that they are offered more scholarship money and don't have to deal with ETAM.

Texas A & M said:

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Buck Turgidson said:

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The transfer students aren't taking freshman level classes, so transfers and incoming fish aren't really competing for the same spots.

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From what I've seen, yes, they are.

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Care to elaborate? How are transfer students taking Freshman classes? Are they starting over in new majors?

What is retention rate at A&M for the 12K freshman. You're always gonna lose some that just don't prioritize and go crazy but how many made straight A's in high school and think it's gonna come easy.

Big Al 1992 said:

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What is retention rate at A&M for the 12K freshman. You're always gonna lose some that just don't prioritize and go crazy but how many made straight A's in high school and think it's gonna come easy.

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Officially between 90-95%. 4 year graduation rate is 55-60%. 6 year is around 80%. A lot of Freshman simply end up changing majors and getting a less valuable degree but still graduating eventually.

1Aggie99 said:

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I wonder how many of those 3300 come from system schools or Blinn? Outside of the co-enrollment programs, I would assume they have to keep those pipelines open or risk cutting the legs out from under those schools to some extent.

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This is the reason. It's how my son got in, and many other qualified students we know.

So many kids, at competitive High schools have great grades and GPAs, but are outside the top 10. This is a good route for them, and continues to put $$ into the A&M system coffers instead of them going elsewhere.

aggie93 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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An adjustment to the Top 10% rule requiring PSA with a guaranteed transfer path to CS campus at certain performance levels vs requiring auto CS admission would solve a lot of this. But that is in the legislature's hands (and probably taken to court after that).

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That's a fig leaf though. If A&M and Texas want to band together and change the Top 6/10% rule they can. They have the political clout. The reality is they don't want to.

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In your opinion...why do you think that is?

They'd have enough people applying to fill their classes with competitive students (maybe better students if they begin to rate high schools).

Curious why you think they dont want to fix it.

AgGrad99 said:

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aggie93 said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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An adjustment to the Top 10% rule requiring PSA with a guaranteed transfer path to CS campus at certain performance levels vs requiring auto CS admission would solve a lot of this. But that is in the legislature's hands (and probably taken to court after that).

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That's a fig leaf though. If A&M and Texas want to band together and change the Top 6/10% rule they can. They have the political clout. The reality is they don't want to.

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In your opinion...why do you think that is?

They'd have enough people applying to fill their classes with competitive students (maybe better students if they begin to rate high schools).

Curious why you think they dont want to fix it.

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Many reasons.

First off A&M and Texas are both doing very well and don't have much political pressure on them. Not a lot of need for accountability when both schools are rolling in cash and all stats are improving. That creates an environment where difficult changes are less likely. Texas as a state is cranking out so many high school grads and so many who are academically prepared there just isn't much pressure to be competitive.

Second you have an interesting dynamic of progressives and rural conservatives that love those rules. Progressives like it as a way to keep affirmative action by a different name. Rural conservatives have bought into the myth that this is the only way to get rural students in to A&M and Texas because they don't understand how other school systems handle holistic admission. Can't tell you how many folks I know that I would assume would oppose Top 10% that are ardent supporters because they think kids from rural Texas will be shut out and it's very hard to reason with them.

Both of these have combined for an environment that makes change difficult. Most don't understand the problem and those who do don't want to expend political capital on it because the juice isn't worth the squeeze even if it would end up with a far better system.

Few people understand the politics of the state and that A&M and Texas wield immense power when they want something Thus it makes it easy for both schools to just say, "that's the law" and wash their hands of it.

There could also be a money aspect to this transfer issue. Advanced UG students taking advanced UG classes (that is, junior/senior level classes) generate more revenue per credit hour than freshmen taking freshmen level classes. If TAMU could farm out all lower level UG students and make up the numbers by taking more junior/seniors taking junior/senior level classes, TAMU revenue would increase. (Of course, there is also a cost side to the equation, which is the underlying justification behind the differential in state payments for lower level vs upper level classes. MS and PHD classes are even more richly rewarded, but again there is the cost side to the equation.)

Has anyone heard that the admissions office at A&M has taken over transfer admissions? My understanding is that the departments no longer have as much control over which transfer students to accept into their department. My husband is faculty, and has confirmed it is the case for his department. I am wondering if it is a widespread policy yet.