The UCs aren’t crashing and burning, but being cash-strapped has its effects. My department regularly loses stellar PhD admits to places like Brown, Chicago, and Hopkins that have the money and resources to lure them. Funding slashes at the UCs has resulted in rather small stipends relative to the cost of living in places like LA or the Bay Area (often tied with onerous teaching duties, unlike the fellowships common at wealthy private universities), and some departments can’t even guarantee an OOS tuition waiver for the first year – an extra $25K.
The UCs are still great universities that provide awesome educations, but some of the wealthier schools can give them a run for their money at the undergraduate level, IMO. I was very surprised to see the amount and quality of research undergrads across town at USC are producing when I visited recently.
Increasing selectivity is more of a function of population growing faster than university capacity than anything else. Indeed, reduced state funding can mean capacity reductions or lack of otherwise planned growth, resulting in higher admission selectivity.
Some flagships, like in Mississippi, still have relatively low selectivity.
Berkeley has ALWAYS lost hot PhD admits and hot faculty to richer schools. As long as there are schools in this world that have more money than God, Berkeley will lose talent, at least for a while. I always loved to see what happens after a professor wins an important prize. Say, the Nobel. Somehow they quickly manage to take a few years off to make big bucks at Harvard, for example. Many later return to work for the rest of their careers at Cal or UCLA while living in the bucolic Berkeley hills or among the docks of Marina Del Ray. :)) But hey, that Nobel got them a parking spot on campus – no small perk at either campus.
This assumes that it’s politically possible for public universities to do so. At the public college I currently work at, tuition increases must be approved by the state board of regents, all of them political appointees (most without any background in education) and nearly none of them personally in favor of ever allowing tuition increases. At the public college (in a different state) I worked at previously, tuition rates were controlled by the legislature, which found it politically inconvenient to vote for increased student costs.
So, no—in at least many states, cuts in state support result in no quick way to make up the shortfall. (Research grants and alumni giving and such take time to ramp up.)
@twoinanddone, the top publics now can not afford to pay professors as much as the top privates whereas a few decades ago, they could. UIUC and Cal (and I’m sure other publics) have been pretty upfront about that.
@sevmom, does VA have a declining HS population like MI does?
I’m not worried about Berkeley (Go Bears, btw), Michigan or UVA. I worry about podunk u in flyover country, which, for fiscal or political reasons, may not have adequate funding to educate its residents. So what happens? You lose the young to other states and you create a huge educational and talent vacuum in the middle of the country. Do we really want to be a nation with vibrant coasts and nothing but yahoos everywhere else?
Michigan may or may not have a " declining" high school population . I don’t know since I don’t live there. But it seems irrelevant as only so many students in Michigan would probably be contenders for Michigan to begin with. So, doesn’t matter if there are 10,000 Michigan students vying for an admission or 20,000, Only some of those kids will get in, and more than likely, those that get in were very good students.
Again, the pool of HS grads is declining slightly in Michigan from one year to the next, so it’s not as if huge numbers of Michigan residents are being squeezed out of the University of Michigan. Their in-state admit rate remains around 50%. For OOS students, it’s slightly over 20% this year. But the in-state applicant pool is highly self-selective; for the most part, only the top in-state students even bother to apply.
I checked the archived Common Data Sets for both Michigan and Michigan State. A decade ago, in 2004-05, 35% of entering University of Michigan freshmen scored 30-36 on the ACT (36 being a perfect score). In 2005-15, 67% of entering University of Michigan freshmen scored 30-36. That’s a remarkable rise.
At Michigan State in 2004-05, 8.2% of entering freshmen scored 30-36 on the ACT. In 2004-15, 15.9% of entering MSU freshmen scored 30-36 on the ACT.
So, based on that single data point, both schools have seen a fairly dramatic rise in the number of top students they’re enrolling, but in some ways the gap between them is greater than ever. At Michigan, an overwhelming majority of students are in the 30-36 ACT range, while at Michigan State such students are in a small minority, albeit larger in number than a decade ago.
I think this is mostly the “flight to quality.” In uncertain economic times, which recent years certainly have been for many people but especially young people, more young people are looking to latch onto the best academic credential they can get, at a price they can afford. In Michigan for most top HS grads that makes the University of Michigan an extremely attractive value proposition. But there will always be some who prefer MSU because of family alumni ties, geographic considerations, particular programs that MSU may offer but Michigan doesn’t, or whatever. To some extent, MSU also benefits from the flight to quality, but to a lesser extent than the University of Michigan.
Sorry, this is an extremely “coastalist” perspective, and deeply insulting to those of us who don’t live on either the East or West Coast (though I have lived on both, truth be told). Apart from the UCs, Virginia, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the University of Washington, most of the best public universities in the country are in “flyover country,” as you so dismissively put it. Every Big Ten school except Nebraska is in the US News top 100; Nebraska pulls up the rear at #103.
And truth be told, most states in “flyover country” don’t export large numbers of students. Most, including top students, are content with their state flagship—unlike many Northeastern states where top students wouldn’t dream of attending their public flagships, which means the public flagships in the Northeast historically have enjoyed less political support, and generally less public funding, and as a consequence are less highly regarded, making them even less attractive to state residents. Partly as a consequence of this. the biggest net exporters of college students are New Jersey, California, Texas, Maryland, and Connecticut—mostly coastal states.
That’s not to say that de-funding of public higher education isn’t a serious concern in “flyover country,” as it should be in every part of the country. But let’s not let coastal chauvinism lead us off path here. This isn’t a regional problem, it’s a national problem. For whatever reason, we seem to be much less willing to invest public money in higher education than in the past. That has adverse consequences for the nation. Including the coasts.
@bclintonk
I think you misunderstood. Its BECAUSE I’M NOT A COASTALIST (I live in landlocked state in flyover country myself) that I worry about funding schools in areas besides wealthy California and school-studded East Coast.
The only reason my flagship U has decent funding is because of federal aerospace money and because we’re close to world-class skiing, attracting rich California kids whose daddies and mommies can afford our outrageous OOS tuition. So it’s funding somewhat by a lucky coincidence. Something most of my neighboring states can’t depend on.
Post #51, I think you should tone down on the rich California kids, the ones I knew or my kids knew who went to Colorado were not the rich kids, more middling class. The rich kids with parents who owned Berkshire Hathaway shares went to a Chapman.
Middle class kids can afford $200,000 for an undergraduate degree? Your idea of middle class is clearly different from mine. By the way, my son counted five BMWs with California license plates outside a CU-Boulder dorm. Several other luxury cars as well. You can say a lot of things about the OOS Californians at CU Boulder, but the fact that they’re middle class is USUALLY not one of them.
Parents are teachers, live in what I considered ghetto area of my neighborhood. Sorry for the term ghetto. I guess on the internet I have to apologize for everything that sounds deragotary.
Well somehow these teachers can afford $200,000 for kiddo to get a bachelor’s at a state school. Good for them. It either says something about their salaries, their own parents’ geneorosity, or their ability to take on a lot of debt.
It certainly doesn’t change the overall demographics of who attends CU Boulder as an OOS student. Trust me on this. I’m 45-minutes away from Boulder and half my kids’ friends go to school there.
Just to interject: Isn’t CU-Boulder big enough that maybe, just maybe, the OOS students who attend there include both middle-middle-class kids and trust-fund babies, and trying to say that all of them or one or the other could quite easily be influenced by observation bias?
A combination of observing those kids, their cars and the (very expensive) skiing and snowboarding equipment they bring to school with them – along with understanding that MOST middle class families can’t afford $200,000 for a bachelor’s degree.
Look, Boulder isn’t a private school. Colorado is usually ranked #49th or #50th in per-student spending on the college level. There’s not a whole lot of money to go around, and the campus doesn’t give a lot of FA to out of state students. The state has specifically excluded California from WUE – the interstate exchange that offers reduced tuition to residents from nearby states. And on top of this Boulder is a very expensive place to live in part because it can’t grow. (Surrounded by mountains on one side and preserved open space on the other.)
All of this contributes to it being being a very costly choice for out of state students. And the state likes it that way. Because, as someone upthread commented, OOS tuition is a planned way to get much needed infusion of cash, much of it by way of California. A few years ago, 23% of Boulder undergrads were from from there.
The fancy new residence halls and apartment buildings are often profit centers for a college. Many colleges are using their food and housing profits to subsidize tuition discounts. Many public universities have also greatly increased their mandatory “fees” so they can claim they haven’t increased tuition as much as they really have.
UVa loses some full pay out of state students to other universities that offer substantial merit aid. Almost all UVa aid is need-based. The Dean of Admissions said he would love to have a reservoir of merit aid money, but not at the expense of reducing the university’s current promise of meeting 100% of need for all US undergrad students.
