Letter from the Editor: Notes on a correction

DANIEL DASSOW Editor-in-Chief

On Saturday, we issued a correction that I’ll probably remember forever. We had mixed up admissions data from 2022 and 2023 and reported that the acceptance rate this year had dropped by 6.6%, when it had actually dropped by around 30%.

It was one of those mistakes that feels horrible in the moment but quickly becomes a funny part of working in student media, and I was able to laugh about it after the fact because the correction was so stunning.

On one hand, all the information in our initial piece was correct except one line, and we made the mistake because of a simple misreading. But when a reader suggested the true figure to us, we assumed at first that she was mistaken because it was simply too staggering to believe that UT had gone from a school that accepted 68% of applicants to a school that accepted around 40% in the space of a single year.

But now I can see that this is where we’ve been heading for the last year. You cannot both receive nearly 14,000 more applications and decide to enroll a smaller first-year class without the acceptance rate decreasing drastically. And while what’s happening at UT is part of a larger national story, where applications to flagship public schools and selective private colleges have spiked since the COVID-19 pandemic began, this change feels especially dramatic.

When UT posted on Instagram to announce that acceptance decisions were live, hundreds of comments flooded the feed with spiteful messages about how UT had moved from a “safety school” to a wildly popular campus beset with a housing crisis which was now forced to reject students who, among other things, claimed they’d been accepted to Ivies.

This sudden drop in UT’s acceptance rate is the kind of news story that will break open dozens of other news stories over the next few years. Time will tell if this is our new normal or if the acceptance rate will settle somewhere above where it currently stands.

But we have to ask ourselves what kind of campus we are going to be if our acceptance rate has plucked us out of the ranks of places like LSU, Auburn and Alabama and placed us much closer to places like UGA and the University of Florida.

UT is clearly moving in the direction of selective public schools like Michigan and UNC Chapel Hill, where the acceptance rate is drastically different for in-state and out-of-state students, and this is part of the land grant mission as stat- ed by Chancellor Plowman and her cabinet to serve Tennesseans first.

With this newfound mark of prestige, will UT shed its reputation as a place that screws over its own students? Will UT commit itself to increasing campus wages for staff and nontenure-track faculty further? Will it be able to better control enrollment and prevent the housing shortage that began in earnest this year from becoming chronic?

These are exciting questions to consider, and the main emotion coming from current students and alumni in reaction to the news has been excitement. The most-liked comment on our corrected Instagram post simply reads “Diploma Value,” followed by an emoji of a graph with a red line shooting upwards. Another comment reads “we Harvard now.”

There is a sense that when the acceptance rate drops, it raises some tide of prestige that will lift all boats (except those manned by rejected students, of course).

I wrote in a letter for homecoming last year that “it seems like everyone wants to be a Vol,” which felt true even though we’re a school known for its famously cantankerous students. But we had not yet defeated Alabama. That was before the fireworks, and I could not have known then how much more real that statement would become.