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There’s always the majestic elephant…
Taxpayers of all states should realize that only a small percentage of their tax dollars support the university system.
Georgia and it’s citizens should be thankful for all the OOS students willing to pay for GT. It’s that revenue, not tax dollars, that helps keep in-state tuition down. UGA will never attract much OOS interest. It’s a rather ordinary school, no better than neighboring flagships or in-state options, whereas GT is a world class institution.
To see how much the state appropriations impact GT’s budget, lets take a closer look at GT’s budget.
http://www.budgets.gatech.edu/File?F=13
We’ll use table 6, and look at the General Operating Budget (GOB). This includes all colleges, interdisciplinary research organizations, facilities operations and maintenance, student support and administrative support functions. It doesn’t include federally funded research, and other items that’s not related to “Resident Instruction”. Any additional revenue from OOS students would fall into the “Student Tuition” bucket.
2016 Revenue
Student Tuition: $359.9M (53%)
State Appropriations: $219.7M (32.3%)
Indirect Cost Recoveries: $50.2M (7.4%)
Other General: $49.6M (7.3%)
Total GOB: $679.4M
As you can see, while student tuition makes up the largest % of revenue, state appropriations still make a significant portion of the budget. It’s something of a “trick” to inflate your budget with Research Funding (that has little to do with undergraduate instruction) to make your budget larger, and hence the state appropriations appear “lower”.
State appropriations also doesn’t cover other ways the state is supporting GT, including directly funding programs, facilities construction and research. Much of which would show up under “Sponsored Operations” (such as state funded research) or not at all in the budget.
While state appropriations have been trending lower, it’s still a significant portion of the budget.
Using US News, UGA is currently ranked as the 21’st best public university (and 61 overall), only 14 states (counting GA with GT) have a higher ranked public university (California has 6, which simply isn’t fair!). UGA is much higher ranked than Auburn, Alabama, South Carolina (USC), UT-K and FSU (I had to take a swipe at FSU…it’s the Gator in me).
^ That state appropriation represents just 1% of the entire state budget. As I said, the university system is a very small part of anyone’s taxes.
And, as you should know, rankings are BS nitpicking. All of those schools are comparable to each other and to UGA.
Only 1%? Georgia has to fund more than just GT. 
Overall, 19% of the state budget is going to higher education (24% to K-12 education, 21+% to Medicaid, etc.). As health care and entitlement spending continues to increase, the % to higher education will decrease (which leads to higher tuition rates).
UGA is actually a very good school with a lovely campus - just not for engineering.