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<p>No, I don’t think that’s right; you may be thinking about some other state and some other school. I grew up in Michigan and attended the University of Michigan as an undergrad, and have closely followed the University as a loyal alum ever since. There was never an OOS quota back in my day, and there never has been since. Over the years, the percentage of OOS students has continued to drift upward, in large measure because the University has been attractive to highly qualified OOS applicants, and partly, frankly, because the University nets more revenue per student from OOS students than from state residents. Fortunately for the University, these two things have tended to work in tandem: the OOS students it lands tend to be slightly better qualified and, on average, more affluent than the state residents it gets. There have been occasional statements from the admissions office about “targets” for the percentage of state residents it would like to achieve, but those have never been hard quotas, and when push comes to shove they have always gone for the strongest class they can get, so the “targets” end up being pretty meaningless, and the actual freshman class composition often varies from the “target” by as much as 10% (that’s 10% of the freshman class, not 10% of the target, so, e,g, an announced “target” of 70% in-state might yield a freshman class that is 60% in-state). </p>
<p>There may also have been the occasional loudmouth state legislator who grumbled about the percentage of OOS students, though to be honest I can’t even recall any of that, and there’s certainly been far less of it in Michigan than in places like California or Wisconsin. And given the University’s governance autonomy, there’s not much the legislature could do about it anyway, except to cut state funding even further. But because state funding is already down to 6% of the University’s budget, that doesn’t seem like much of a threat. In fact, many people think if the legislature were to cut off funding altogether it would be a great boon to the University, because then they could charge state residents the same as OOS students and dramatically cut their class size while retaining the same level of tuition revenue and substantially improving selectivity. Since the big losers in that scenario would be Michigan residents, no legislator wants to go there. </p>
<p>For the most part I think both major political parties in the state have been content to let the University go its own way, recognizing that it brings enormous prestige to the state, is a great boon to Michigan residents who are fortunate enough to attend, and is a major engine of jobs and economic growth even when the rest of the state’s economy is struggling, as it often has in the recent past. And it does all this at minimal cost to the state and to the taxpayers of Michigan, who pay per capita about $30 per year to fund the University, making it one of the best bargains ever for state government and for state residents. If, in order to maintain all that, the University deems it prudent to admit a high percentage of OOS students, Michiganders and their elected representatives have always been ready to go along with the program.</p>