Colleges Fail to Meet Admissions Targets

As we’ve lost manufacturing jobs, the demand for college goes up. That’s why we’ve seen an upward trend from 2000 to 2015. In recent years, we’ve had an uptick in manufacturing jobs, so enrollment is going to fall off somewhat. How long that lasts is anyone’s guess.

Many lower ranked (100+)/regional LACs may well be THE university students can commute to. They offer a half tuition scholarship for half decent local students and it’s the same for them or even cheaper than paying full costs with room and board at their flagship.
A problem with that approach is that in the Northeast and Midwest, the population is dwindling with young people moving away. There are fewer teenagers and thus fewer applicants, then fewer families, fewer young children who’ll become teenagers, etc. Those who do exist often move away to better job opportunities.
A politician would make a killing in these regions if s/he had a solution to keep young people near their hometowns to have good jobs after college and start their families, instead of letting families be dislocated when young adults move away and start a family hundreds of miles from where their parents and grandparents live.

Better economic growth would help keep those kids local. We already see large amounts of out migration from states with antigrowth policies, many in the northeast, Illinois, CA, etc. while people move to the south and south central US.

Lately that has been changing, at least in most of the center of the country. In my state (Michigan) we have lots of people from Illinois and the NE moving because of jobs, better quality of life and affordable housing. Some areas have influxes for other reasons, such as the Kalamazoo promise. Not many people want to move to CA anymore, unlike the 70’s and 80’s.

Actually, California has net positive inbound migration.

  • from international
  • from other states
  • bachelor’s degree graduates
  • those without a bachelor’s degree

California has a lower rate of departures (-19.80 per 1,000 people) than all other states except Michigan (-19.01). Highest departure rate was North Dakota (-62.31).

Net domestic migration for California was 27th out of the states (-1.91 per 1,000 people). The biggest gainer was Oregon (+13.91), while the biggest loser was North Dakota (-13.84).

https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-population-migration-census-demographics-immigration/

People still want to move to California. It’s just hard to make enough money to live in California. Last year 5 million people moved to California from other states, but 6 million moved away. 1 million moved from foreign countries. The most interesting part is it’s the lower middle class moving out and highly educated moving in. Colorado and a few other Western states are seeing a similar pattern.

This all comes back to it’s hard for the NE schools to compete with the demographics working against them.

I wonder how much of that net migration to CA also purchases RV’s to live in. :lol:

I’d be happy to lose a little population here in CA.

@sushiritto it’s not the inbound migrants that are purchasing RV’s to live in it’s existing residents who are being forced out of their homes due to increased rents by landlords taking advantage of being able to demand higher rents from the inbound migrants. A certain percentage of those existing residents eventually throw in the towel and move away. Others are forced to live in RV’s because it’s all they can afford.

Colleges have known about the demographic trend for more than 15 years, obviously. It seems a little late to be starting to adjust.

Yet the instate number at UW Madison is also at a near term high. The state has a declining college age population. If UW Mad takes more the other UWs shrink worse than they have. They have a target and they met it plus some. https://madison.com/wsj/opinion/column/drew-petersen-and-rebecca-blank-statistics-show-uw-madison-s/article_18ef3d6b-c6b6-5326-893c-533bacb9e6f4.html

Why do people keep on claiming that it’s taxes that are deciding where people live?

The two states with the highest levels of people leaving are Wyoming and West Virginia. Wyoming has the lowest taxes in the USA.

There is little correlation between the level of taxes of a state and the population trends.

For example, Texas has the fastest population growth. Unfortunately for claims of people like @TooOld4School, this is not because of people leaving California and Illinois. The majority of population growth in Texas is Hispanic, not Whites from Illinois. Since 2010, the population of Texas has grown by about 3.4 million. Of those, 1.9 were Hispanic, and only 0.49 million were White. Florida has both Hispanic population growth and growth of the population of retirees who are going there for the weather, not the taxes.

Overall, if anybody does a correlation between tax burden and population growth by immigration/emigration, they will not find a correlation. All the anti-tax people do is point to Illinois and New York, and then to Texas and Florida, and then claim ti have “proven” their point.

Once again its argument using the fallacies of claiming that correlation = causation, ignoring all other possible causes of a phenomenon, and cherry-picking data.

It is a good time to be a college in Texas and Florida, with a boom in college age students of any ethnicity. It would seem a ripe market for NE liberal arts schools to market to, but it doesn’t appear to occur much.

Acceptance to UWisconsin from our Illinois high school used to be much more difficult. Even two years ago, it took an A average and at least a 32 ACT. In the last two years, UW has started taking kids with lower stats. Seems to everyone here that they are willing to go down the ladder a little bit now to get OOS full pay students.

At least for Texas, the boom may be in low SES students, which is less of a target demographic.

There are plenty of middle class and wealthy Hispanics in Texas now. In any event, one might have thought that the NE LACs would target, say, the top 5 private schools in the top 5 Texas cities-plenty of high SES there, and most of those kids can’t attend UT Austin due to the 6% limitation, even if they have stellar scores and activities. But very few students seem to even consider that option

[qutoe]Why do people keep on claiming that it’s taxes that are deciding where people live?

[/quote]

Well, tbf, a former skeptic, Andrew Cuomo, NY Gov, is a believer:

“Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich and now what do you? The rich leave,” the governor declared, …New York is at a “long-term competitive disadvantage” on tax burdens."

^Sounds like some random quote designed to please an audience and/or shift blame, though, rather than data-backed fact.
NYS doesn’t seem to be doing too badly and some of the wealthiest pockets of the country are in/near NYC…

It well may be fact-challenged (and his own spin), but the Governor was very clear about this back in February when he announced the state’s budget shortfall, so no, not a random quote and not tossed out for a local audience. It was part of his major press conference (easily google-able).

The data do not support your claim. Avg ACT up a full point in last three years. Avg SAT up around 100 points. 2019 they had much higher yield from OOS resulting in class being about 700 over target. Next year likely to tighten more. https://chancellor.wisc.edu/blog/state-of-the-university-address-2/

Aggregate data doesn’t tell the full story in education or in business. Looking at the excellent link provided by@ucbalumnus does not tell you about the tragic deterioration of CA public (K-12) schools to rock bottom or the high levels of poverty (30% of US welfare recipients). Mostly only highly educated people can afford to move to the state ; middle class people are leaving. That is not surprising when those same people are too poor to afford alternate education or even housing ; they move somewhere else for a better quality of life.

Along with the high taxes come more regulations and impediments to starting new businesses. This could be permitting problems, corruption, slow walking inspections, etc. etc. And new plants/warehouses/offices don’t locate there because it is too expensive. Anyone who says that it doesn’t affect site location can only look at Amazon’s cancellation of their 2nd HQ in NYC.

High taxes disproportionately target middle and upper income workers and business owners. For business owners this directly targets their available working capital ; hence they can’t expand more. More insidiously, they affect the long term growth of the taxing entity. That’s why 9 of the 10 top growth states in the country have fiscally conservative governments, and why states like CA , CT and Il are in financial distress. That directly affect their ability to subsidize their state colleges and universities.

It seems to me that with the available supply of students decreasing overall, colleges need to focus on reducing price and improving the student experience. When I say ‘students’ that also means a lot of non-traditional students , lifelong education needs to become the norm rather than the exception. Many colleges, especially the elite ones, are coming in late to this realization. Their facilities are mostly used 10-3 pm 4 days a week ; they have few online options ; and even fewer satellite campuses and alliances. This is just crazy and horribly inefficient. Things need to change.

When my older DS was going through the college process, he was accepted to a smaller private school in California. This school is well-known in a few areas, but largely unknown outside of the state. They wanted over $70k per year! Even with a great merit award, it was still the most expensive school on his accepted list. He ended up at Arizona State in the Barrett Honors College at a fraction of the cost.