Dean Scott Meiklejohn: Admissions and Maine

I’ve been having lots of conversations lately about Maine. Many alumni and friends understand that we think about Maine as we select the class, and it seemed like a good topic for the Bowdoin Daily Sun, particularly as we head into early decision discussions about the Class of 2015.

The College wants many characteristics and qualities in the new class, and part of that assignment (one of our trustees recently referred to it as a “moral mission”) is the commitment to enroll talented students from Maine. From Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Brewer) and George Mitchell (Waterville) to Joan Benoit Samuelson (Cape Elizabeth) and current Trustee Chair Steve Gormley (Houlton), Bowdoin’s alumni rolls are filled with talented Mainers who have gone on to become leaders in all walks of life.  Two centuries of giving opportunity to students from Bangor, Sanford, Fort Kent, Dexter, Deer Isle, Brunswick and other locations around the state is a significant part of our history, and the “Maine commitment” is one of many important—often competing—factors as we compose the class.

We enroll several dozen students from Maine each year. Even as our applicant pool has become larger and more national and international, Maine has been pretty consistently the #2 state in the class, for number of students, behind Massachusetts. We don’t have specific targets for each of the 50 states when we think about the class (okay, the Dakotas get us excited, since we rarely have applicants from Fargo or Bismarck) but we do pay some attention to Maine.

Applications from Maine have increased 60% over the past decade, right along with the overall applicant pool. Maine applicants represent about 8% of our candidates for admission, nearly identical to a decade ago, and Mainers end up being somewhere between 10% to 12% of each entering class. We aren’t the only college that pays attention to its home state; Colby and Bates are also about 10% from Maine. At Williams, Massachusetts is the #2 state in the entering class. An online profile for Middlebury’s entering class calls out the percentage of the class from just one state: Vermont.

This year, we admitted Mainers at a rate of 19.9%—only a little bit higher than our overall admit rate of 19.7%. Some of you may be thinking: so, where’s the preference, exactly? Well, the admit rate is mostly a function of our yield, of what we know will happen in response to sending our offers. If we expect few of our admitted students to enroll, we have to send more offers to yield the class, and vice versa. The response rate from Mainers is always the highest in our pool, and it has been rising. Almost 58% of the students we admit from Maine decide to come to Bowdoin, compared to an overall yield rate of about 43%. Interestingly, the admitted student number has actually dropped slightly over the past decade because our yield in Maine has increased. More applicants, fewer admitted, higher yield—it sounds like bad news, but we have about the same number of Mainers at Bowdoin as we did ten years ago.

Maine is our “back yard” in terms of admissions travel and outreach, but it’s not something that we take for granted. We spend time visiting Maine’s 195 high schools; not every school, every year, but most schools over a period of time. Bowdoin admissions and financial aid staff conduct essay-writing workshops and financial aid programs across the state, not simply to talk about Bowdoin, but to educate students, families, and counselors about the college search. We send an annual State of Maine Guidance Counselors Newsletter focusing on Bowdoin and Maine, and we host Maine Day each September, drawing hundreds of Mainers to our campus for a full day of programs for in-state students and families.  For the past few years, former Maine Governor Angus King, now a distinguished lecturer at Bowdoin, has kicked off Maine Day with his “Top Ten Reasons for Maine Students to Attend Bowdoin College.” In addition to our staff efforts, we get a tremendous assist from Maine BASIC volunteers, who help with college fairs and provide 25% of the interviews given to Maine applicants.

For many Maine students, the availability of financial aid is crucial in their decision to enroll. We speculate that one reason the applicant number has increased, particularly in the past three years, is the “ripple effect” of Bowdoin’s no-loan announcement close to home. That’s good, and we want students to view Bowdoin as an accessible option, but we also know that many talented Maine high-schoolers still don’t get as far as visiting the campus, or investigating the College, because they think they can’t afford it. Getting students past the perception that it’s too expensive, to understanding that Bowdoin could turn out to be quite affordable, is a continuing challenge.

Another challenge is the interest that other highly selective colleges now take in top students from Maine. I don’t know if the proverbial statement that “every valedictorian in the state used to go to Bowdoin” was ever true, but I’ve heard that more than once. We do pretty well in competing for Mainers at the very top of the admitted-student group. Still, a majority of the Maine students we consider “the best” on academic measures decline a Bowdoin offer of admission and choose to enroll elsewhere. There are many excellent colleges out there, and many factors involved in these decisions.  We are giving it some attention as we think about Maine.

According to the State Planning Office, Maine has the oldest median population in the country, the second-smallest percentage of the population under the age of 18, and the second-highest percentage of non-Hispanic white residents. These factors, along with low birth rates and low rates of in-migration, all combine to give Maine a rapidly aging population and slow growth. It’s hard to know what this will mean for Bowdoin’s applicant pool (and we take nothing for granted), but our long and deep connection to the state says that we will have plenty of talented Mainers interested in the College each year.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions about other admissions and financial aid topics that might be interesting for Bowdoin Daily Sun readers.