Dive Brief:
- Interested Michigan high school students can begin receiving direct admissions offers this fall from 20 public and private colleges in the state through an initiative launched by the nonprofit Michigan College Access Network.
- Under the new MI College Match initiative, students will automatically receive admissions offers by uploading their transcripts to a free online portal. They will not need to submit essays or letters of recommendation, according to MCAN.
- The profile portal opened Wednesday. Students who complete their MI College Match profiles by Sept. 21 will receive acceptance letters by Oct. 5. Participating colleges will send offers to students who create their profiles after that deadline on a monthly basis.
Dive Insight:
MCAN Executive Director Ryan Fewins-Bliss said direct admissions offers help students see themselves as college material.
“When colleges say, ‘We want you here, and you’re already admitted,’ it changes the entire conversation around postsecondary education,” he said in an Aug. 12 statement.
Completing a profile for MI College Match should take students between 15 and 20 minutes, according to an FAQ on its website. After that, college admissions officials will see anonymized versions of each student's profile and issue offers based on them. They can also extend scholarship offers to students.
MCAN said it plans to promote the new program through its longstanding partnership with high school educators and counselors in the state. In the 2025-26 academic year, the nonprofit had 355 K-12 partner sites that collectively covered over 49,000 students, Kiersten Nolan, MCAN's strategy manager for high school innovation, said in the May webinar.
Participating students will not receive rejection notifications on the MI College Match portal, only offers, MCAN said.
As of Aug. 27, 11 private and nine public colleges have signed on to MI College Match. Among the public institutions are two University of Michigan campuses, six community colleges and a tribal college. The University of Michigan's highly selective flagship campus in Ann Arbor is not participating.
A mix of private and public colleges have joined the direct admissions initiative
Kalamazoo College, a private liberal arts institution, said it would participate in MI College Match earlier this month. The program will change how some students discover the college but won't lower its admissions standards, it said. That's because MI College Match allows Kalamazoo to set its own admission criteria.
“MI College Match lets us introduce ourselves to talented students who might not have pictured themselves here, and to answer the affordability question honestly and early," President Karlyn Crowley said in an Aug. 12 statement.
MI College Match mirrors a direct admissions program that debuted in Alabama last summer.
The Alabama Direct Admission Initiative launched in partnership with a local nonprofit, the state government and Alabama community college system. More than 18,000 Alabama high school students received over 141,000 admissions offers through the program during the 2025-26 academic year, according to program data.
Both the Michigan and Alabama programs use student-college matching software created by the education company EAB.
