I don’t know which is the proper forum for this post but I found the articles very though-provoking. The main point is that states cut funding after the Great Recession and that some didn’t restore funding. This has already shifted the university away from educating the bright but not necessarily well-to-do kids from the state. Then, they think about the consequences of a similar cut as a consequence of this depression, which has really left states (which must balance their budgets) cash-strapped and needing to make cuts.
One example is the University of Alabama. Like many states, Alabama cut funding for public education after the great recession. In Alabama’s case, the cut was nearly 40%.
Unlike some, it didn’t restore the cuts. The consequences: it searched for OOS and international students who would pay higher tuitions and today the majority of students at the University of Alabama are not from in-state.
The NYT article speculates on whether there would be similar cuts as a result of this recession/depression:
“If Alabama makes similar cuts next year and tuition rises once again, the state’s ratio of student tuition to public funding will have gone from 2:3 in 2008 — two dollars of student tuition for every three dollars of public funding — to 7:1, or seven dollars of student tuition for every one dollar of public funding. In other words, the privatization of a public university system in a single generation.”
About 10 years ago I remember the people running the University of California system saying they wanted to be considered a national university system rather than a state university system. That was because it expected most of its funding to come from Washington, D.C. rather than Sacramento.
Right after the Great Recession, UVa, PSU (state-supported, so like the contract colleges of Cornell), and CU were getting 2% of their total budget funded by their state.
Still, there’s a big difference between being public and private even if a public isn’t well-funded:
UVa actually receives about as much funding from VA as Cornell does from NYS, but for the same amount of money, VA gets many more kids educated at a roughly Cornell-tier school at much less tuition charged than NYS does at Cornell.
This is a very unfortunate and pernicious trend with no end in sight. Many state legislatures and voters are not interested in supporting public higher education. The formerly mighty University of California system to name one, is a mere shadow of itself from the 60’s and 70’s.
Community colleges should be helping to fill the void left, but these too are underfunded. Some of the “premier” state universities (as pointed out above) are still subject to the whims of politicians even though they receive a minuscule amount of their budgets from their home states. Many are in fact de-facto privates now.
“The formerly mighty University of California system to name one, is a mere shadow of itself from the 60’s and 70’s.”
In what way? It now has two world leading campuses instead of one (plus a bunch of other highly ranked ones). It isn’t a luxury experience like many privates, but I don’t think requiring students to live in a triple dorm is a great imposition.
In fact I think this is a much more sustainable situation than private schools that are relying on a narrow set of high income full pay families to pay for that luxury experience. That’s especially true when as noted above the cost of college in CA as a % of median income is the second lowest in the US.
My oldest daughter just graduated from the University of Arkansas. We were living in Texas when she enrolled and which has huge numbers of out-of-state Texans enrolled. I don’t know the exact number. But there were four other girls from her high school in her freshman dorm, completely by coincidence. They didn’t pick it that way. Essentially TX has not kept up with its growing population in creating residential universities so kids who don’t get into UT or A&M bounce off to OU, Arkansas and LSU.
Here in the Northwest, University of Oregon is now about 50% OOS. That number has been creeping up year by year from about 35% two decades ago while at the same time the population of Oregon has gone up by about 40%. In effect, wealthy Californians who don’t get into the UC system are slowly displacing local Oregonians.
Luckily we live across the river in WA which seems to be maintaining robust PUBLIC universities the primarily serve local students. We might be lucky with our isolation as all the surrounding border states are poorer and less populated so aren’t flooding in with lots of OOS tuition money.
@Camasite: I mean, TTech does exist (and has grown a lot). I doubt very many are commuters there considering where it is located. Also, UTD is essentially TX’s UCSD and has built quite a bit of residential housing in recent years.
Well yes. We drove the 6 hours out to Lubbock for a visit and my daughter vetoed it in about 30 minutes. UTD is a gorgeous modern campus but it isn’t where you go if you want college football and sorority row and all that sort of thing. For a state as large as TX, the number of traditional residential public universities is really lacking.
The point is, that a whole lot of TX college students who want that traditional college experience end up leaving the state if they (1) can’t get into UT or A&M or (2) can’t afford Baylor, SMU, TCU. After Texas Tech the next best option is probably Texas State in San Marcos which is nearly 40,000 so larger than Texas Tech. But my daughter liked Arkansas better and I agreed.
What is happening is some big wealthy states like TX and CA are not really keeping up with population growth in terms of providing higher education. Witness how difficult it is to get into any of the UC campuses compared to a generation ago. So the surrounding states’ universities are getting the spillover and taking advantage of it to stay in the black.
UH just needs some love. There is no reason why it shouldn’t be a top school in state, it is an urban location, has real diversity, large population, all should drive that. I can’t understand Tx people going to Arkansas or LA over U Houston unless they get more money for their stats than UH would give them, though if that were the case, they would get into TAMU.
Makes perfect sense. Just heard from one of my kids that a close friend of theirs didn’t get into our State U. Was a little shocking given this kids stats. I’d imagine he’s competing against full pay OOS and international. And given this kid is going into a competitive field ( CS) it’s likely even worse.
I think international students are also doing the math and figuring out that they will go to a major state U thru grad school and perhaps even do a Phd.
Really does make you think about the long term implications of not having solid State options for students. I’m a huge proponent of solid public U’s. There are just so many kids for whom it’s a great git.
In computing the percent of state funding you need to look at the operating budget, not the total budget. Housing and dining have always been self funded. Also the research funding should be removed as that if mostly funded by the federal government.
As a former HS teacher in Central TX who saw hundreds of kids go off to college I suspect much of it has to do with race. Outside of Houston, UH is perceived in the rest of the state as an inner-city school where they aren’t 100% “comfortable” sending their 18 year old. Also where you kid is going to have to compete against lots of super-smart Asian kids and live in “sketchy” neighborhoods full of crime.
For that reason, traditional college town schools like OU, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and LSU have more appeal.
I agree, UH is a great up and coming school, and probably competing with UT-Dallas to be the 3rd elite flagship in TX. I’m just expressing why I suspect a lot of white suburban parents don’t send their kids there and are willing to pay more to send them to an OOS public in a traditional college town setting.
I wouldn’t conflate “providing the traditional college experience” and “providing slots at public elites” with “providing higher education”.
In the case of CA, the UCs have expanded (number of campuses and slots) and UCM and UCR are also UC’s and not terribly difficult to get in to. TX has expanded a ton of branch UT’s/A&M’s/UH’s/TTechs. Granted, many are heavily commuter, but I think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect the state to provide a FBS football team and dorms for everyone beyond higher education instruction.
PurpleTitan, I think the point is that the populations of CA TX residents are growing exponentially compared to most other states, but there will not be growth of the number of state schools. It just creates a problem for residents wanting to go to a top state school while full paying OOS applicants are filling a disproportionate number of slots.
Up here, Oregon and Oregon State are full of CA kids with average credentials who couldn’t get into one of the UC schools and who didn’t want to go to Fresno State or Sacramento State. So daddy and mommy are happy to pay the OOS tution. Same thing is happening at Arizona and Arizona State which are filled with SoCal kids.
And the exact same thing is happening in TX. Sure, if your kid doesn’t get into UT or TAMU you can send them to one of the big impersonal commuter schools like UT-Arlington or UTSA, or one of the lesser state schools like Sam Houston State or Angelo State. But upper middle class kids want that college town experience so border state SEC and Big12 schools have a lot of appeal. And they heavily recruit in TX to get that OOS money.
Explosive population grown in TX and CA is causing spillover effects in the flagship universities of surrounding states. All that OOS money is helping keep them afloat in a time of shrinking budgets. But the side effect is to reduce opportunities for the home-town kids of those states.
I bet you can look at the percentage of OOS students at all the flagships of the border states surrounding TX and CA and you will see a steady upward trend of OOS students from TX and CA over the past decade or two. In every single one of them.
Actually, the HS-age population in CA isn’t growing any more. And I think there is a bit of an entitlement mentality there. You could be in a state that doesn’t even have a public that is at the level of Cal/UCLA/UCSD. Say, NYS, where taxes aren’t exactly low. Yet so many Californians seem to think that getting in to a top UC (not just a UC) is their birthright when by any reasonable metric, you would expect those 3 to be as tough to get in to as Cornell/USC/NYU on average.
Also, how are you determining that OOS get a “disproportionate” number of slots? I’m pretty certain it’s tougher for OOS to get in to a top UC than it is for an in-state applicant.
Yes, if your parents have money, you can have the “flagship college experience” at a less selective out-of-state flagship if you cannot get into your own state’s more selective flagship.
But UCR and UCM are not that hard to get into (although probably harder than UA and ASU).