<p>Well, how then do you suggest the various students in Georgia should be distributed among the various state colleges?</p>
<p>It just depends on where they apply. I think there are many fine universities in GA, but there is a huge gap in who has a chance of attending them. I do think they could set up some kind of minority program that actively courts minority applicants…without being discriminatory to qualified White applicants.</p>
<p>Have you ever considered that maybe this works out for the students’ own good?</p>
<p>As universities around the country become stronger and more challenging, an underqualified student probably wouldn’t be successful at the “better” publics anyway. </p>
<p>In the instance of underprivledged students…often, these students aren’t as qualified as their AP-taking middle-class counterparts. It’s not their fault, but it’s still reality. Why should they be admitted to the “better” state school where they’ll most likely struggle and be at the bottom of the class, when they could succeed at one of the less prestigious state schools available to them?</p>
<p>I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think it’s always true that these universities are just that challenging anyway. </p>
<p>I mean, if the flagship school gets almost twenty thousand apps, that’s a lot of leg room to just cherry pick the IS students with high GPAs but don’t want to pay a ton of money as an OOS student or to go to a private uni. </p>
<p>Especially in a state like Georgia (which is like the tenth most populous state in the country), they can pick and choose which students they want. It’s not that the school is so challenging (I’ve heard plenty of stories on how UGA is pretty average unless you’re in their Honors program), they can just make themselves look better by being picky.</p>
<p>And I think placing underprivileged students at schools like UGA where the atmosphere is conducive to learning, where it’s “cool” to be smart and to want to learn and want to think, might force them to up their game. That’s why kids in gifted and honors courses do so well…because they are put in environments conducive to learning. </p>
<p>I think, on the whole, schools have gotten more competitive JUST BECAUSE there are so many more kids graduating from high school these days. Kids born in the late 80s and early 90s are coming out…and a lot of them are applying to college – the good, the mediocre, and the bad. So colleges enjoy this level of selectivity.</p>
<p>By the time I’m ready to graduate college, or shoot, graduate grad school, I wouldn’t be surprised if 3.4-3.6 is considered very competitive. Once the number of kids starts waning, so will this hyper-selectivity. </p>
<p>The school’s haven’t changed, the applicant pool has just gotten bigger.</p>
<p>TourGuide: I confess I don’t know for sure the answer to your question, but I think I can at least see a possibility- pure increases in numbers of applicants as compared to years back. Even 30-40 years ago, schools like Ohio State were huge, on the brink of being unmanageable (at U of Md at the time, for example, students would complain that they couldn’t get from one class to the next on time without having to drive across campus). At some point, I would guess, trying to accommodate so many students and programs on one campus just became impractical. The solution would be to limit the enrollments on the main campus, thus introducing selectivity, and then accommodating the “spill-over” (those who would previously have gotten in under an open admissions policy) by growing “branch” campuses and other second-tier schools within the state (many of which are former teachers’ colleges, for example). This approach would have the secondary benefit of locating access to education around the state, serving older (working) students as well.</p>
<p>barrons: I get your point, if OOS students now cover their full expenses through their tuition payments that is a more tolerable situation. However, I still think that if a merely decent private school can now charge well in excess of $30K for tuition, the OOS students at UVa and other similar schools are still getting a relative bargain which seems questionable to me, given the fact that they are also taking up what could be IS seats. At least charge what the market will bear, and you could always offer aid to only those who need it.</p>
<p>Many privates give more financial aid and “merit” $$$ which is really just a discount in tuition to attract students. Not many pay the sticker price. OTOH most state schools offer little merit money so the discounting is less.</p>
<p>“Now, again, I understand space and all that, but…what about all those students, especially IS students, that they denied.”</p>
<p>They can go to Valdosta or North Georgia or Georgia State. If you propose that they ought to get in to UGA rather than Valdosta, then you have to ask what makes UGA so special and so much better than the in-state alternatives. Is it because UGA is highly respected and prestigious? Well, what makes it that way? Would UGA continue to be highly respected and prestigious if all the kids now at Valdosta et al. went to UGA instead? Your belief that UGA is more desirable than the other state universities probably stems, in part, from the fact that not everyone gets to go there.</p>
<p>Ohio has a really nice system. The Ohio State campus in Columbus is hard to get into; you generally need to be a B+ student with quite good test scores.</p>
<p>However, there are four regional campuses of The Ohio State University (Lima Campus · Mansfield Campus · Marion Campus · Newark Campus) that are open admission to Ohio high school graduates. And if you start out at one of those and do well, you don’t even have to “apply to transfer” - you just register for classes in Columbus for the next year. They all are reasonable four-year universities on their own, but if you really want to go to Columbus, once you have shown you can take college courses successfully, you can go to Columbus.</p>
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<p>I don’t think state universities are becoming more selective just to improve their rankings or, as you put it, to “look better”. The truth of the matter is that, like it was said before in the thread, the number of college applicants is rising and there aren’t enough places in the state university systems to accomodate the growing college-bound population, thus requiring increasing selectivity. </p>
<p>That is happening not so much because of population growth (which has actually slowed down compared to the 50s, 60s and 70s), but rather, because, as the economy expands and society gets wealthier, the percentage of the population that graduates from high school increases. Moreover, as the economy gets more knowledge-intensive and traditional manufacturing jobs are outsourced to developing countries, there is also a growing demand for skilled labor requiring at least some post-secondary education, thus making a college degree increasingly attractive to a certain section of the population who, in the past, would probably have settled instead for a high-paying blue-collar job right after high school. </p>
<p>Moreover, before admitting an applicant, universities must be satisfied that he/she has the necessary skills to be successful in his/her chosen field of study and graduate. There’s no point really in admitting a candidate that, judging from his/her GPA, school record and test scores, is likely to fail all his/her college classes and drop out.</p>
<p>Ohio State was actually planning on tightening up their admissions in the early 60s when many of the other Big Ten universities were doing the same. Unfortunate, in 1962, Jim Rhodes was elected governor and remained so for 20 years. He forced Ohio State to maintain open admissions through a combination of his political populism and personal psychology (he flunked out of Ohio State his freshman year). When he left office in 1982, only Minnesota , among Big Ten schools, still had open admissions.</p>
<p>The policy was a disaster on numerous fronts. Kids were accepted into Ohio State who had no business being at a flagship, research university and were quickly flunked out. Studies have shown that had they been channeled into a university more in line with their abilities (and where the faculty didn’t consider their presence to be a policy mistake) they would have been far more likely to ultimately graduate. Faculty recruitment became increasingly difficult, and top Ohio high school students increasingly left the state for other public universities.</p>
<p>The idea that, in a state with 13 public four year universities, the system’s flagship university and only AAU member school would be forced to maintain open admissions was a horrible idea.</p>
<p>The flagship state U’s can offer an education to more students if they have a high 4-yr graduation rate. Every year graduating seniors make space for freshman. Being selective is one way to achieve the higher grad rates and makes better use of the state’s limited educational resources.</p>
<p>Anybody forsee a situation in which the only undergrad offered at a flagship will be the junior and senior years? The first 2 years would be spent at community colleges or satellite campuses (like the ones Ohio State has scattered around Ohio). It would allow a university to drastically increase the number alumni it produces. It might also help attract better professors–the professors I know at huge universities really hate teaching those big lecture classes. On the other hand, those big lecture classes are probably where the universities make the most money.</p>
<p>Most good students want the four year experience. I would never have looked at anything else.</p>
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<p>Well, consider this analogy. Does everybody in the state have the “right” to get a job working for the state government? I don’t think so. The government hires the “best” of whoever applies to a particular job opening (however you want to define “best”). But those jobs, like state university slots, are funded by the taxpayers. I can’t just show up to my state capitol building and demand a job there just because I’m a taxpayer. I have to apply to get such a job. If only one job is available, and 100 people apply and hence 99 of them do not get an offer, and I happen to be one of those 99, then that’s too bad for me. </p>
<p>The upshot is that just because some program is funded by the taxpayers does not necessarily mean that every taxpayer will enjoy access to that program. </p>
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<p>Then let me proffer this example. Many of the top state schools are extremely selective when it comes to PhD programs. Take Berkeley as an example. It is frightfully difficult to get admitted into most Berkeley PhD programs. They also provide no preference to state residents that I am aware of. In fact, there are some years in which some Berkeley PhD programs will not matriculate a single California resident. That’s right - not a single one. Instead, every single new PhD student in that program in those years will be OOS or (especially for science, math, or engineering) from a foreign country. Yet, last time I checked, Berkeley’s PhD programs were “public” in the sense that they took California taxpayer money. The same could be said for the PhD programs of Michigan, UCLA, Illinois, and other top state schools. They all take state taxpayer money while providing little (usually no) preference to state residents. </p>
<p>But think about what would happen if this wasn’t the case. Take the PhD mathematics programs at Berkeley and Michigan. These are 2 of the best math PhD programs in the world; some would argue that they are the best. What if Berkeley/Michigan was forced to admit, or provide strong preference, to California/Michigan state residents for its PhD programs? I think we can all agree that the quality of those programs would decline precipitously, for the simple reason that most of the best future mathematicians in the world do not come from California or Michigan. Let’s face it - many (probably most) of the best mathematicians in the world are foreigners. By enacting a policy to reserve math PhD slots to state residents, Berkeley and Michigan would be severely hurting themselves in the competition to bring in the very best math students of the world, and surely the top private math departments like HYPSMC, Chicago, etc. would be very very happy to snap them up. Furthermore, it would also mean that the top math professors would also not want to take positions at Berkeley or Michigan, because professors want to be where the world’s top PhD students are so that they can collaborate, coauthor and therefore advance their own research and professional standing. </p>
<p>As a case in point, consider Shing-Tung Yau. Yau is arguably the most prominent graduate in the history of the Berkeley math PhD program, having earned his Berkeley PhD in 1971 and then going on to win the Fields Medal in 1982 and the National Medal of Science in 1997. But Yau was not a California state resident when he was admitted to Berkeley. In fact, he wasn’t even an American citizen. He was a citizen of Hong Kong. So does that mean that Berkeley should never have admitted Yau in the first place, because he would be “stealing” a spot that could have gone to somebody from California?</p>
<p>The real question this raises is why should undergrad and PhD admissions at state schools be run so differently? For example, why do undergrad admissions provide state preference, but PhD admissions do not? From a logical consistency standpoint, they should either both provide preference, or both provide non-preference.</p>
<p>Actually, I don’t agree. There is some obligation of a state university to educate its own citizens for the underlying bachelor’s degree. Those residents’ (parents’) tax dollars did provide the bulk of the funding for the institution. As importantly, there is a reasonable logical basis to maintain at least a reasonably bright cadre of students in-state, where they were raised and even more likely where they will stay if the attend school in their home state. </p>
<p>As important, however, can be the role of the good or excellent state university in attracting even better students to that state. If someone from Pennsylvania goes to Virginia, or someone from Kentucky to Michigan, that student may remain in his or her adopted state because of job opportunities, marriage, or other affinities. </p>
<p>Thus, you assist in keeping a core of good students in state and attract a group of better students from out of state. This effect would arguably be correlative with the strength of your state’s best public university, although is certainly not fully consequential, and would exist to a lesser extent with lesser campuses. Similarly, the very best publics would presumably have the strongest effect: keeping the better students in state, attracting yet better ones.</p>
<p>This seems like an appropriate and balanced role, and could be achieved with an OOS rate of 20-30% It is odd to me that any fair to middling student, unless echoing parental experience, feels an “entitlement” to be in Austin, not Arlington; Madison and not Eau Claire; or Berkely and not Davis. Resources are not infinite and competition for admissions is not malevolent, but well within the American tradition.</p>
<p>For graduate school, however, the state university’s mission shifts a bit. While still a tool for some of the demographic and taxpayer-driven ends, the quality of its graduate programs, its research role and productivity, its standing within the academy, and many more purely academic functions come into play. In addition, geographic factors among its legally emancipated admission pool are far less relevant. More reasoned self-selection occurs. By this time, a state univeristy should be in the business of fulfilling that mission, not some quota, and should be able to get the best and the brightest, even if Wisconsin’s flag flies game days from a porch in Atlanta.</p>
<p>As a side note, for those who are irked by AA and quotas and preferences, is there a greater quota at work in America than the one that let’s those qualified up to 60, 70, or 80% of the entering class at a flagship university attend simply because of a demographic criterion having nothing at all to do with merit or quality, excluding 90%, by state action, of all others who have to prove they are brighter, more skilled, and more able than those favored simply to be permittted to compete with them? Put in that context, the argument is yet more profound.</p>
<p>“Those residents’ (parents’) tax dollars did provide the bulk of the funding for the institution…”</p>
<p>Redcrimblue, I am not sure that is true in this day and age. At the University of Michigan, the state contributes only 7.6% of the university’s operating budget. Even if you remove hospital and research spending from the budget and focus purely on instructional costs, the state still contributes a mere 25%of the university’s costs. And the University of Michigan is not unique. I believe that at the University of Virginia, state funding contributes even less toward the operating costs of the university. The fact thatg over 65% of the undergraduate students at those universities come from their respective states is more than sufficient if you ask me.</p>
<p>sakky, I think your analogies are inappropriate in this case. In the case of state employees, of course your are (ideally) going to try to hire the best people available, because you are paying the employees to render a service TO YOU. State governments (or any business) do not exist for the purpose of serving the employees, it’s the other way around. Graduate programs have a similar aspect, although less direct; presumably, research programs (and grad students to man them) are funded in anticipation of some kind of pay-off from that project, even if it is only for advancing the knowledge base in some area. And, of course, grtaduate students are also needed to help educate undergraduates.
By contrast, undergraduate programs exist more AS A SERVICE TO THE STUDENT. Granted, down the road it is felt that these students will contribute back to society, but there is no mandatory direct linkage there: we do not demand or expect undergraduates (while they are undergraduates) to render services or be net contributors to society, THEY ARE NET CONSUMERS OR TAKERS who are there essentially for their own benefit. The Universities are the service providers to them, and if they go too far in neglecting their out-of-state population then it is certainly fair to argue that they may not be doing their job.</p>
<p>To answer the OP’s question, I’m reminded of a quote from “The Simpson’s”:</p>
<p>“Treating people as equals, when they are clearly not equal is called what, class?..Communism!”</p>
<p>ChemGrad, your quote may be right, but how does it answer the OP’s question? Throughout this string I don’t recall anyone suggesting that unequal people should in all cases be treated equally. The question is really one of correct and fair public policy, considering the degree to which a state-funded and -affiliated institution owes its first obligation to the residents of that state. I don’t think the answer is an easy one, but I would think that to the extent you favor in-state applicants you can still clearly acknowledge that you are sacrificing something in terms of quality, there need be no argument implied that everybody is really “equal” ( if I am understanding you).</p>