News & Observer | newsobserver.com | 2008 NCAA Men's Bracket

Breaking news from Chapel Hill: UNC-CH's freshman class is talented.

So went the message this week from Stephen Farmer, the undergraduate admissions director. Each fall, Farmer gets to tell university trustees about all the talented youngsters calling Chapel Hill home for the next four years.

A few highlights:

• 21,507 applications, the most ever and a 20 percent total increase over five years ago.

• 7,309 admitted. That's 34 percent of all who applied, a record low.

• 3,864 enrolled. That's actually a three percent drop since last year in what admissions folks call the "yield rate." Nobody's getting too excited about that, however.

"There are plenty of schools, peer schools, that would love to have yield rates that high," Farmer commented.

• 79 percent of students in this year's freshman class were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. That's up from 76.7 percent a year ago.

• 42.9 percent were among the top 10 students in their class, up from 40.6 percent. As benchmarks go, it's worth considering both the top 10 number and the top 10 percent number since high school classes can vary widely in size and quality.

• The average SAT score of this year's freshman class was 1,301. Pretty good, right? It's actually - gasp! - a one-point drop from last year's 1,302 average. Again, nobody's too worried.

• Higher education seems a lot like a business these days. Admissions folks spoke this week of "market share" and their desire to get more and more of the best students from North Carolina. If you haven't heard, state law requires that Tar Heel residents make up at least 82 percent of each year's freshman class at public universities.

UNC-CH is doing fairly well in this regard, though Farmer said he'd like to see the university snare more North Carolinians scoring at least 1,400 on the SAT. Of those, 1,227 applied to the Chapel Hill campus - 86.3 percent of the whole - and 576, or 40.5 percent, have enrolled.

A final note: Farmer and his folks at Jackson Hall clearly need to pay more attention to Avery County. It was the only county among the state's 100 not to send a single freshman to UNC-CH this fall.

"We did admit some students from Avery, but none of them enrolled," Farmer said.