Insanely high property taxes in much of the desirable parts of the Northeast, among other things, are accelerating the natural economic and demographic factors favoring outmigration. If the SALT limitations survive until 2025, I bet we will see even more pressure. Anecdotally, people tell me that many middle- and upper-middle class folks in places like suburban metro NYC are looking to pull the escape lever when and if they can.
In Illinois the kids are leaving in droves. Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, New Orleans, Texas, Tennessee, Michigan, Iowa Wisconsin are states I hear a lot about. University of Illinois is finally having free tuition for families making under $65,000 like Michigan is doing but won’t help kids in the middle class. Full tuition at Alabama is hard to pass up for many.
Davidson announced both its lowest acceptance and highest yield ever this year.
Of course, Steph Curry may be more responsible than the weather!! :)>-
I just question how long Alabama can keep doing this and why? Is it to beef up their engineering program to move it up the ranks? I personally would go for the football, food and weather… In that order… Ha.
@Knowsstuff – I suspect it’s a human capital-based economic development play for the stay. They hope a certain % of transplants will stay and help grow the state’s economy. But at some point it’s not sustainable, and it does take away college seats from home state taxpayers. . .
Alabama and South Carolina are becoming VERY popular in my neck of northern NJ, replacing schools like Penn State, Delaware, Maryland, URI, and UMass as the preferred large out-of-state schools. I also think Georgia is going to be a popular choice in the not too distant future.
Our kids still stick with VA and north for the most part. NC is getting more popular. There were a couple who went to AL in S17 class; both hated it and are going to PA schools this year. Neither had a free ride, though. That would be tough to give up. Although it seems i’m the only one not the least bit enticed by Southern weather!
It depends on if you mean the non elite of the southern states. Duke, Emory, Rice, Vandy, Gtech , even Tulane and UNC don’t have any trouble getting quality students to apply and enroll. You guys make it seem as if these schools need northern students because these students are “higher” quality, and that’s not the case. Duke and Rice have very large portions of the respective states students, and no-one would question the quality of Duke or their students.
Duke got more students from a combo of NY and NJ in 2014 than they did from NC according to the Chronicle map. Approximately 85% of students are from out of state. I’m sure Duke could fill their seats with talented in-state students but that’s true of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT as well. In fact, Duke apparently has a lower percentage of in-state students than Harvard has from Massachusetts, a state with 3 1/2 million fewer residents.
I think one of the real reasons for the flow from the NE toward the South and the Midwest is that those regions tend to have larger, more robust state systems and lots of underutilized LACs. Smart, involved kids from states like MA, NY and NJ have a hard time getting accepted into the top LACs in the region and are finding that there are great school in the South where their odds of acceptance are much, much better.
@Sue22. The parents I speak to weekly tell me it’s about the merit,not the school. Since their classmates before them had the same merit and they like their school experience it’s hard to pass up.
@Knowsstuff, yes that too. Most of the more competitive NE colleges don’t offer merit. The two leagues that attract the strongest students, the Ivy and NESCAC, give neither merit nor athletic scholarships.
That said, full pay families in the NE are finding it to their advantage to go outside the traditional hunting grounds. For instance, Union College in NY and Furman in SC have almost identical SAT 50% ranges, but Furman’s acceptance rate is 30 percentage points higher.
Alabama isn’t “taking seats away” from instate. The strategy was to super-grow the school, which it did. That allowed all these OOS students to attend, while not shutting out instate. The school quickly grew from about 16k undergrads to over 30k. That means that instate isn’t shut out. It’s built well over 50 new buildings during this growth period, including over 1M sq ft of state-of-the-art STEM academic space.
Attention hasn’t been limited to STEM; everything is getting attention. Bama is building a new and expansive Performing Arts Center on 300 acres of purchased land, which includes a historic dome that is being incorporated. The College of Music, an all Steinway school, has recently completed a major expansion.
That said, the rising instate tuition has caused some complaints so Bama has further expanded merit awards for instate students. Now someone with an ACT as modest as 21 and 3.5+ gpa gets a 20% reduction in tuition.
Frankly, the state of Alabama with its small population (about 6M) can’t provide enough students to adequately support its larger publics: UAlabama, Auburn, UAH, UAB, USA, A&M which also have CoE colleges.
Obviously, part of the strategy was to grow the UA College of Engineering with strong students, which has been accomplished…going from a couple thousand to 6000 undergrads. Roughly 60% of the CoE is attending on large scholarships. And as many CoE schools experience, freshman year is a weeding year. Bama allows anyone who wants to try Eng’g to try, however, if they can’t pass muster, they move onto a better fit path. The freedom to “try engineering” has also been a plus since many OOS students are denied access to their own states’ CoE schools. The incoming frosh class has an avg ACT 30. That said, I imagine that after frosh year, the average ACT of a COE student is around a 32 after all the weeding takes place.
As for the idea that everyone attends Bama for free…most instate and OOS students at Bama are full pay or near-full pay. I know it surprises people, but there are a whole bunch of OOS students paying full freight. Many families justify the expense because it allows their OOS child to attend a big flagship (likely shut out of their own) and get the full college experience. There are over 1000 Calif students at Bama. There are even more Illinois and Texas students at Bama. These are students who want the big rah rah football experience, but are shut out of UT, TAMU, UCLA and UCB.
My kid #1 mostly bypassed applying to Northeastern LACs b/c she was worried they’d be filled with too many wealthy, prep school kids. She felt like LACs in other parts of the country are more down to earth.
That said, she only visited one NE LAC and actually really liked it but didn’t end up applying. The reality is she was chasing merit and there are few options in the Northeast for that, as someone else said. (She did get a really nice offer from Mt. Holyoke.)
@chercheur ironic. Since a lot of Texas families are miffed with TAMU and their new program to pack the kids into engineering like sardines while not providing for more faculty and currently not having the room for all of the students. I’m from an Aggie family and we currently have three engineering students. My TAMU sibling and I both said we would never pay $$$ for engineering at TAMU. TAMU just wants your OOS $$.
Here is Tulane’s distribution of geographic provenance in its freshman class, with a full 30.7% from the northeast: https://admission.tulane.edu/apply/getting-into-tulane
^Wild. There are almost as many kids coming to Tulane from the Northeast as from the entire south, including Louisiana.
@carachel2 I don’t have the number in front of me at the moment, but the percentage of OOS at TAMU is tiny - one of the smallest OOS populations we looked at. It’s not the OOS kids crowding the university 
I would never pay OOS for TAMU for engineering. The number of kids who get enough $$ to get in-state tuition is lottery like. They want warm bodies and the $$. Bigger is not better.
North, south, east, west … it really doesn’t matter. The students will follow the merit money, and I think they’re smart for doing so! Getting through undergrad with little or no debt gives them the freedom to attend grad school or start saving/investing at an early age.
I know DOZENS of kids who are at school in the south because they can no longer get into the traditional northeastern schools that their parents went to…