Ball State University Admission
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Ball State University Application

The Facts

Ball State University is a rather large, public institution located in the town of Muncie, Indiana, and is home to over 14,100 undergraduate students and approximately 3,200 graduate and part-time professional students. The students are able to take courses in one of the university’s six undergraduate schools or one graduate school, which offer academic programs in the areas of applied sciences and technology, architecture and planning, business, communications, information and media, the fine arts, sciences and humanities, as well as teacher education. The school also has two honors colleges which are interdisciplinary. The schools’ academic divisions offer broad majors in the areas of agriculture (which includes a unique program in fishing and resource management), biological science (home to a renowned program in genetics), business (which has a unique real estate program), communications and the arts (a large program with a terrific film studies department), computer and physical science, education (also a very large, very extensive program), engineering and environmental design, health professions, and social sciences. Ball State University offers its students an extremely wide variety of majors in both the liberal arts and preprofessional studies; some of the most popular among students are architecture, business, general education, and elementary education.

Admission to Ball State University is somewhat competitive, particularly as there is growing interest from out-of-state students who are highly qualified for admission. Last year, over 8,000 students applied for admission to the school, and approximately 6,000 of those students were accepted; about 3,500 of the admitted students enrolled for the coming Fall semester. The admitted students had an average combined SAT score ranging from 1050 to 1160, and an average comprehensive ACT score ranging from 23 to 30. Additionally, more than 75% of the admitted students were ranked in the top 10% of their high school graduating class with an average high school GPA of about a 3.67.

Ball State University has a rather manageable student to faculty ratio of 18:1, and while many of the general education courses exist in the form of large lectures, the majority of the upper level classes are usually well below 20 to 25 students, and are usually discussion courses. Even for the lectures, however, students applaud their professors on their approachability and willingness to help.

The Social Scene

The town of Muncie is quite suburban and family-oriented and doesn’t really offer students much in the way of entertainment; however, the surprisingly cosmopolitan city of Indianapolis is only about an hour’s drive away, and consequently, many students who own cars (the majority) head into the city on the weekends to lap up its more exciting entertainment scene. Greek life is big at Ball State, which is home to 34 national fraternities and sororities. As a result, the weekend party scene is quite active, and drinking is definitely the most popular form of social interaction. Ball State is usually put high on lists of party schools if that tells you anything...

The dating scene is quite diverse, and there are certainly plenty of possible suitors/ suitor”ettes” to choose from...

What’s Good

“The party scene is ridiculous here, in the best way possible!”

“There are sooooo many courses to choose from here, and it usually take me quite a while to whittle all my options down to a manageable package.”

“The campus is really nice, and the facilities are wonderful. You’ve got the best of everything.”

What’s Bad

“I’m not really a big fan of the whole crazy weekend party scene. The sight of kegs is enough to make me run the other way.”

“The area around campus is really suburban, and has nothing for us to do.”

“If you want any morsel of city life, you have to brave the rather daunting traffic to get to it.”

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