WASHINGTON — Amid enrollment declines and economic woes, states and public college systems are increasingly considering direct admissions as a way to attract local students. The method proactively offers graduating high school students admission to one or more colleges without first requiring them to apply.
Such programs offer significant potential benefits without much, if any, risk, Cate Collins, principal research analyst at the Idaho State Board of Education, said this week during the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association’s annual policy conference in Washington, D.C. But they can also be challenging to implement and administratively taxing, Collins added.
Idaho, which launched a statewide direct admissions program in 2015, is among several states to go this route. Collins and higher ed executives from three other states shared insights Wednesday about their direct admissions programs and how they’ve overcome challenges.
Communication and transparency
In Minnesota, 57 institutions — including community colleges and four-year universities — participate in the state’s direct admissions program, according to the Minnesota Office of Higher Education’s website.
Students in participating high schools receive letters offering admissions to at least 26 institutions, said Wendy Robinson, assistant commissioner for programs, policy, and grants at the Minnesota Office of Higher Education. The highest achieving students get accepted to every one.
Joining the program is not compulsory for colleges, Robinson said. Her office counted on internal competition to compel institutions to join — and it worked. No colleges have left the program since it launched in fall 2022. In fact, more have joined.
From the start, transparency with colleges around the direct admissions process was critical, Robinson said.
In some cases, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education had to explain to participating institutions how direct admissions works, Robinson said.
“Somebody from a school asked, ‘How does this align with the holistic review process?'” she said. “Of course, it doesn’t, you’re looking at students’ GPA. But when was the last time you turned down someone with a 3.5?”
Demonstrating to colleges that the direct admissions process would align with their standards and values was critical to getting institutional buy-in.
“The truth is that most colleges admit most applicants most of the time, and that students and families disproportionately worry about their ability to get accepted into higher education,” Robinson told conference attendees. “They probably don’t worry enough about finding the right fit.”
Different ways of operating
Georgia is one of the most recent states to start proactively offering college admission to high school students through a program called Georgia Match.
Beginning last October, the state sent over 120,000 high school seniors letters telling them which of the state’s public colleges were holding a spot for them this fall.
“They get to ‘claim their spot’ — that’s the language we use,” said Scot Lingrell, vice chancellor of enrollment management and student affairs at the University System of Georgia. Ideally, he said, Georgia Match will become a household name, similar to the state’s popular HOPE Scholarship that helps cover tuition costs.
“The dirty secret is, it’s not a direct admission program yet,” Lingrell said. “It’s a pre-program that allows them to tell institutions that they want to be considered. Then they have to do the rest of the application.”
These conditional offers require students to provide information like high school transcripts in addition to completing the college application.
A majority of colleges in the University System of Georgia are participating, as are all institutions in the Technical College System of Georgia. The university system’s three most selective institutions — Georgia College & State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Georgia — do not take part.
The truth is that most colleges admit most applicants most of the time, and that students and families disproportionately worry about their ability to get accepted into higher education. They probably don’t worry enough about finding the right fit.
Wendy Robinson
Assistant commissioner for programs, policy, and grants at the Minnesota Office of Higher Education.
Georgia’s program came in an edict from Gov. Brian Kemp as a way to raise educational attainment in the state, Lingrell said. It is geared toward students who never knew they would be eligible for college, he added.
Lingrell said Georgia is working to create a common application for participating colleges. Additionally, students next year will be able to deliver their transcript information to Georgia Match directly, rather than asking their high schools to send it.
In Wisconsin, students aren’t required to submit college applications for the direct admissions program.
Instead, the Universities of Wisconsin automatically populates its common application with students’ information using their high schools’ data, according to Julie Amon, Universities of Wisconsin’s associate vice president for enrollment and student success.
The system will also include information about Tuition Promise — a state program that covers tuition and fees for students whose families earn $55,000 or less — in its direct admissions letters to the high school class of 2025.
Amon said the addition is meant to communicate to students that college is an option open to them, not just intellectually but financially.
Funding the letters
How much funding direct admissions programs receive varies widely by state.
The Minnesota Legislature initially allocated $1 million to its program. During the 2023 session, lawmakers increased its funding to $1.3 million. With that backing, the state is on a path to scale direct admissions to serve all of its roughly 800 high schools, Robinson said. As of this next academic year, the program will be in some 200 schools.
In comparison, the Universities of Wisconsin’s direct admissions program received about $50,000.
But the funds do not come directly from the state. Much like the idea for the direct admissions program itself, the money came directly from the system’s board.
“This initiative didn’t have a budget. There was no state mandate,” Amon said.
Idaho’s direct admissions program — one of the oldest in the country — also operates on about $50,000 a year, which is mostly dedicated to covering the cost of mailing letters, Collins said.
There’s a lot more resources that go into it than just that $50,000.
Cate Collins
Principal research analyst at the Idaho State Board of Education
“Everyone gets a letter regardless of their academic performance,” Collins said. Idaho community colleges are among the institutions participating.
She likened academic outreach to a marketing campaign — the more work you put in, the more success you’ll see.
But she says the $50,000 figure underrepresents the resources dedicated to the program.
The state education board’s staff, high school counselors and college admissions experts all put in hours to make the program run smoothly, Collins said.
“There’s a lot more resources that go into it than just that $50,000,” she said.
Coordination is key
Direct admissions programs require a significant amount of administrative coordination, according to the SHEEO panelists.
Georgia Match uses the Georgia Student Finance Commission as its central hub, but also requires collaboration with the state’s education department, higher education systems, K-12 and the governor’s Office of Student Achievement, Lingrell said.
Pain points arise with so many stakeholders, he said. For example, Georgia’s universities are frequently competing for students.
Likewise, the Universities of Wisconsin campuses are often in competition with one another, Amon said. At the same time, the process has given institutions a chance to collaborate. For example, the universities had to jointly define admissions terminology to standardize the process across the system.
She did note, however, that there remains a sense of “us versus them” in terms of universities participating in the program versus those that don’t — which includes the flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ten of the system’s 13 institutions take part, and each college is able to set its own GPA requirements for automatic acceptance.
“We are playing a little bit more of a service and support role to the enrollment teams on our executive campuses than we have in the past,” Amon said. “We’re seeing a kind of redesign of admissions operations around direct admit initiatives.”