A record number of students want to enroll at Cal Poly next year, the university announced, but the number of available open spots makes their chances not much better than a long shot.
Cal Poly has received more than 48,000 applications for admissions from first-year freshmen, the university said in a news release, and more than 8,500 requests to transfer in for the 2017-18 academic year, which starts with the summer quarter on June 20. The fall quarter starts Sept. 22.
The school has openings for a fraction of those applicants, however. “Cal Poly has openings this September for 4,500 first-time freshmen and 820 spots for incoming transfer students,” explained Cal Poly spokesman Jay Thompson.
“This was the largest undergraduate applicant pool in Cal Poly history with 48,215 first-time freshmen and 8,553 upper division transfers submitting on-time applications,” said James Maraviglia, associate vice provost for marketing and enrollment development. Poly records for applicants seems to grow along with its prestige in numerous areas, particularly engineering, architecture and entrepreneurship, among other growing academic majors.
The numbers mark a 2.8-percent increase in freshmen applicants over the current school year (46,897 applied in 2014) and 7.7% increase for transfer students. Some 22.5% of freshmen and 14.35% of the transfer hopefuls only applied to Cal Poly, according to the university, which plans to send out acceptance and rejection letters before the April 1 “national acknowledgement” date.
And the rise carries throughout the CSU system. This year marks the sixth consecutive year the CSU has set a new record for applicants. More than 830,000 applications were submitted by prospective students for fall 2016 — a 4.8% increase and more than 40,000 applications over last year’s total, according to the CSU Chancellor’s Office. This unprecedented number of applications to the CSU’s 23 campuses reflects the growth in demand for high-quality public higher education in the Golden State, said the Chancellor’s Office.
Though the numbers are staggering, they might not be all that accurate either. “The counts do not include applications submitted through the international application module,” reads the news release.
