These top colleges are embracing OOS students so that they can pay the bills (since OOS students pay more than twice as much as ISS). I’m in Virginia, and our flagship, UVA, gets only about 10% of its budget from the state of Virginia. Adjusted for inflation. That’s a 50% drop (per student adjusted for inflation) since 1990. Ouch.
That’s one reason. Another is that OOS students typically have better stats than ISS, so they raise a school’s academic profile. For example, the 25-75% SAT numbers at UCLA for freshmen entering in Fall 2016 were as follows:
1790 - 2200 In-state
2060 - 2270 Domestic OOS
2100 - 2260 International
http://www.admission.ucla.edu/Prospect/Adm_fr/Frosh_Prof16.htm
The cited table also suggests that OOS students aren’t really the core issue with UCLA admissions. For Fall 2016, UCLA enrolled 937 Domestic OOS freshmen and 739 international freshmen, for a total of 1,676 non-Californian freshmen. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we drop that number to zero (an obviously extreme measure that no one is seriously considering).
OK, so in that case UCLA could have admitted 1,676 more Californians, right? No, it’s actually better than that, because UCLA’s yield for California residents was only 47%. UCLA could have actually admitted 3,566 more Californians, because only about 47% of them would have actually enrolled.
In other words, if UCLA had eliminated all non-Californian admissions for entering freshmen in Fall 2016, they could have made another 3,566 Californians happy. And that may sound great, but look at the table again – UCLA rejected 48,525 Californians for freshman admission in Fall 2016. So yes, we’ve reduced the number of rejected California residents, but by a mere 7.3% – from 48,525 to 44,959.
Is that going to make everyone happy ?
When we toured W&M and UVa last summer, they stated they cap the OOS due to some 2013 law. I could swear they said 10% (but I could certainly be wrong). It’s become a bit of a joke that all these colleges are forcing in-state kids to pay out-of-state tuition, while sucking up tax payer funds. The cost of college has become astronomical: adding out of state tuition just adds insult to injury.
The Virginia Legislature considered a bill this year that would have capped OOS students at 30%. It looks like it passed the House but not the Senate, so did not take effect.
In California, every in-state applicant who meets UC criteria is offered a spot at a UC campus. The problem is that UC can’t guarantee (or even provide reasonable assurance) that every qualified in-state applicant will get admitted to their specific campus of choice (or even their second or third choice).
UCLA, for example, had 6,546 freshman slots for Fall 2016 – and 58,931 Californian applicants for those slots (this is not including OOS applicants). It’s true that the UC system doesn’t have a good solution for that imbalance. But neither does anyone else. UCLA already has one of the largest enrollments in the state, and they are already crowded; the campus simply doesn’t have the room to absorb tens of thousands of additional students.
The bottom line is that many qualified Californian applicants don’t get accepted at their dream UC campus; they may get accepted at, say, UC Riverside or UC Merced instead. That’s admittedly not ideal, but it is not the same thing as “forcing” in-state kids to pay high tuition at an out-of-state school.