<p>I am curious as why do you University like Cornell, RIT, Rochester, Syracuse etc don't target NY and Upstate students that have decent grades - High GPA/SAT. It looks like more and more students are going to PA/the South, MA ets. as they seemed to be readily admitted by some top universities in these areas. </p>
<p>Is it because, these Universities see the quality of education with different sets of eyes that Native NY'ers. Could be? or maybe they simply see that if you can make it in NY, you can anywhere and NY'ers don't. Just saying. Also, why all the fuss of NY trying to attract start up in NY state and no initiatives to attract their own student and keep them. I guess they like the "brain drain" Any thoughts on this?</p>
<p>Cubey, thanks!, LOL. I was tired and I wasn’t in a writing mode. Feel free to edit for grammatical correctness.</p>
<p>Myo, I got the stats from the school acceptance profile. Thought NY is up there with acceptance rate, so is the rejection list. </p>
<p>Peter, though the other schools are private universities, they are still getting NY State tax breaks for being non for profit institutions. Wont it be a bit logical for them to at least help retain some of NY brightest students? Just a thought :)</p>
<p>“they are still getting NY State tax breaks for being non for profit institutions” There’s no quid pro quo. They are also huge employers whose workers pay nicely into NYS income taxes. </p>
<p>But if I can back up: you make lots of assertions about their not being friendly to in-state schools. Can you point to admissions statistics that back up this claim? I find it hard to believe that NYS isn’t extremely represented among the student bodies of those schools.</p>
<p>I agree with both replies. I saw those #'s. However a 30% rate is still a tad bit low. Don’t you think? Maybe they should aim to get that to ~ 40%. All I am saying is that these Universities need to emphasize the importance of home state education and they should promote recruiting home state students. Its known that there is a tendency for students to go to less cold weather states and eventually making them their home state. Also, State Universities I think at times prefer out of state students due to the higher tuition.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the replies. Keep them coming.</p>
<p>I am not sure why a private university would have a motive to favor students from its home state? The opposite it seems, as universities attempt to get representation from as many states and countries as possible and then brag about those statistics in the name of “diversity”, the buzz word of the decade.</p>
<p>Now if you want to focus on SUNY schools then what you are saying(although I am not ever sure I know what your point is) makes sense. A huge campaign to attract top NY students to SUNY schools to increase the likelihood that they stay and work in NY is genius. Problem? Top students have no respect for SUNY schools except maybe Binghamton.</p>
<p>NY state resident students get a considerable discount (over $16,000) on tuition at the contract colleges at Cornell (not SUNYs but part of Cornell’s mission as a land-grant college).</p>
<p>They are still considerably more expensive for instate students than the SUNY schools.</p>
<p>Otherwise, Cornell is a national university and I don’t think its mission is to favor NYS residents, any more than Harvard or MIT favors MA residents or Princeton, NJ residents.</p>
<p>All good points. I still think that NYS top universities should do whatever it takes to retain the smartest kids. If we are to become the beacon for start-ups - Silicon Valley east coast, then won’t it make sense to give priority to NYS students? I do understand the diversity play. Every university should do that. However, I do think they should also do more to attract local students. Imagine what it will do for rankings for SUNY/CUNY if they start attracting the brightest. Why is UC colleges among the top 100 and SUNY/CUNY is not?</p>
<p>The problem isn’t that NY kids don’t apply, the problem is that between SUNY Bing and MIT they’d rather go to MIT. Why wouldn’t they?
The UC’s are in the top 100 because from the 1950s to the 1990’s, California massively funded them and made sure they had budgets that allowed UCB (for instance) to compete with private universities. Then it cut down on public K-12 (going from one of the top secondary school systems in the country to one of the worst, in the process) then the recession hit and the budgets for the UC’s had to be cut too. Now, the universities are still in the Top100 thanks to their graduate programs and because they’re living off their reputation, so that despite less favorable conditions at the undergraduate level, they can still attract excellent students from the State - who not only get a huge discount on in-state tuition, but also get Cal Grants that make the education there fairly cheap for in-state. Therefore, excellent students + excellent researchers = excellent reputation, despite the crowded lecture halls, etc., that led many students away from the UC’s when their budget woes started (600 to a lecture hall, students who couldn’t take classes they needed to graduate and forced to stay longer and thus pay more than they should have, etc). Between Stanford and UCB, the choice may come down to cost. Same thing between Cornell CAS and SUNY Geneseo.
An added difference is that California is about 4 times bigger than NYS and, if it were a country, it’d be something like the 7th richest country in the world. Furthermore, there are not many “international-level” universities in nearby states - whereas NYS is literally surrounded with international-level universities. If you got into UCB, ASU, and Portland State, with UCB costing less, why in the world would you choose another school? And there are no private, international-level universities in Arizona, New Mexico, or Oregon (the exception being if you got into ASU Barrett, which may attractive to a Californian.) So SUNY’s may decide to create something like Barrett, meaning = invest. And being ready to attract lots of kids from outside NYS. And there’s already Geneseo - would NYS residents be willing to invest massively in Geneseo? And all of that would not remove the dozens of international-level universities in the vicinity…
An alternative to the current situation in NYS is to fund the SUNY’s massively but that would mean higher taxes for most. I thought New Yorker had decided that if there had to be higher taxes, it had to focus on pre-kindergarten (which seems smart, BTW, since you affect the “start” of it all. In an ideal world, granted, both would benefit from generous funding and the SUNYs would have no budget woes.)
Finally, universities thrive if they have national reputations. That’s why the “national liberal arts” and “national universities” categories are considered the most prestigious. It means they should attract as many students from as many regions of the nation (and world) as possible. 30% from a single state seems plenty for just one state at Cornell. I don’t see why private universities should decrease their national presence and reputation in order to favor students from the state they’re located in. If they did that, quickly, they’d stop attracting students from the entire nation and they’d become “regional universities”.
The benefits of having a top university in the state and in a specific community are plenty already - just compare towns of a similar size in the state that do have a university, and that don’t. Now, it’s normal the universities should pay their fair share (as with the dispute in Alfred) but towns with campuses tend to do much better economically than those without.
As for public universities, I still don’t see any evidence that the SUNY’s don’t primarily serve NYS students. They respect their mandate. Many OOS students come from the neighboring states, either because they find SUNY’s cheaper even at OOS cost or better for their purpose, their money will serve the NYS economy, and they may choose to settle there once they graduate, all fo which is a net positive for NYS; some are from PA, where the situation is much worst (highest in-state fees in the nation plus lousy financial aid at the publics + literally hundreds of private colleges) even though they’re lucky to have Penn State football & “lion pride” to quell the exodus to other states. At least SUNY in-state tuition has remained “reasonable”, relatively speaking, and that’s a gift to residents that shouldn’t be looked down upon since so many States have chosen to raise tuition (cf. California).</p>
<p>New York will probably never be a place where tech start ups will become prominent. I know they’re trying, like Cornell with its tech campus in NYC, but I don’t think it’ll be likely.</p>
<p>There’s just too much room in the SW with less crap weather for that to happen in the long run. Rust Belt vs Sun Belt.</p>
<p>In addition, your primary assumption (that NY colleges don’t target NY students) is false, like all colleges, they target students within their state, but there’s no “special pass” from national privates unless they want to devalue their “brand” worth.</p>
<p>wow, i love that long response. Seemed like a thesis. Kidding aside, I agree with you. I do think that NYS should invest more into its State Universities to attract and keep its best students. We are the financial capital of the world - why not the tech capital?</p>