If someone is undone by Trustee Hsu’s obviously - and universally - truthful statement about a state flagship’s priorities, they are probably a tad too ignorant to be applying OOS in the first place. They also need to look at their own state charter to get a bit up-to-speed on the issue.
Not exactly sure how a state university can balance OOS enrollment as the “cash cow” for the in-staters with “much needed compassion” LOL. The two are antithetical.
The UC colleges in California are near impossible for in-state students to get in due to the OSS competition. That is why thousands of California students are fleeing the state to attend college elsewhere. I wish the UC system would take the same stance as Trustee Hsu and make California students their priority. My taxpaying dollars are paying for other states/countries college students. Very maddening!
@ruth59 I hardly think the UC system should be thought of as a state system that is super welcoming to OOS students.
Again, my kid would have LOVED to have the UCs as an option to him. It’s very much pay-to-play and no, as a full pay but not rich parent with a younger kid coming up and a spouse approaching retirement age do I think it’s worth 3X+ the cost of being a high stat kid in the U of MN honors program with merit money. (and to be clear, he has not yet committed to the U and is waiting to hear from some other schools. But the U has shown him a lot of love and it’s at the top of his safer options.)
The U of MN is just somewhat coming in line with other state schools. It’s still got way lower tuition and higher OOS enrollment than UCs. I definitely don’t disagree that they should grandfather in current students on tuition and not give a huge bump to families already using the U of MN. But most schools do make some sort of tuition adjustment yearly, including to in-state students at public schools.
http://triton.news/2017/05/ucsd-cap-state-international-enrollment/
“Not exactly sure how a state university can balance OOS enrollment as the “cash cow” for the in-staters with “much needed compassion” LOL. The two are antithetical.”
Already explained previously. Have trustees who can understand how to balance a budget with significant tuition increases only on incoming freshman, as new students in the selection process have much greater ability to choose other schools. Charge a premium for OOS enrollments to maximize revenue, for example, when revenue decreases due to declining OOS enrollments, you’ve increased OOS tuition too much. Keep tuition and room&board constant or increase pegged to inflation for returning students, to avoid saddling them with unnecessary expense/debt. Yes, you can balance all these issues, it just takes qualified and competent board members and leadership who aren’t making knee-jerk comments and voting accordingly.
@illinoisx3 - hmm. Seems that a 10% increase announced for next year points to the overall success of the tuition plan. And, they seem to be showing PLENTY of compassion - to the MN legislature and the good people of MN. Anyone else is a matter of good economics. A mis-estimation followed by a simple adjustment for budgetary purposes: makes sense. But misplaced compassion will quickly get you voted out as regent. And for all the hope in the new president, her background as business school dean isn’t likely to result in a tuition freeze. She understands the tuition model perfectly well.
IMHO, Regent Hsu’s comments are refreshingly straightforward. Discussion of this sort is a necessary part of the political process. That it has apparently outraged those with no skin in that game underscores why it was so necessary to close the gap quickly, lest it continue to encourage among families outside the state their woefully-misplaced sense of entitlement.
We can revisit if net revenues drop again for a second straight year due to OOS enrollment decreases more than offsetting the tuition increases. Maybe one year was an abberation and their choices will at least regain some financial merit, though they still fail miserably on the other points.
^ Oh, definitely agree. If OOS enrollment declines cause another drop in revenues in light of the 10% increase, that’ll would be evidence of over-reaching again. It made sense to try the 15% hike because the prior year’s hike of 12.5% was absorbed quite nicely with very strong OOS/Int’l enrollment numbers for Fall 2017, particularly in CLA. Assuming next year’s 10% increase is implemented, the average hike for new students (other than CSE) would be a bit more than 11% a year since 2015/16. Once you layer in subsequent increases of 5.5% thereafter, the average hike will only be around 7% per year for a typical student (other than CSE) over the course of his/her four years. Sizable, sure, but certainly not too far off the norm for the U. After all, yearly OOS tuition had already been 5.5 - 7% for a few years, even before the new hikes were announced.
*May be impacted by proposed surcharge.
As dad of OOS student admitted for September, I don’t blame Minnesota for trying to keep costs down for in-state students. However, my son and I researched the cost of colleges for past 2 years before applying this past Fall and over that time the Minnesota OOS tuition skyrocketed. I am not aware of any school in country that has raised OOS tuition so fast so quickly. Minnesota even gave my son a nice scholarship, but that mostly covers the tuition increases. Unfortunately, my son has now dropped MN from his list because of this.
@mwoody999 I’m not saying it isn’t a slap in the face, it likely is. I’m saying its slap in the face that is deserved. Why should the U of MN offer a cheaper OOS tuition than what the OOS tuition is in Illinois? That means UIUC is slapping Minnesota students in the face but that’s fine because they were doing it first? Minnesota tax dollars aren’t suppose to support Illinois students, they should be supporting Minnesota students.
If it really is a problem, than Illinois and Minnesota should create a reciprocity agreement. However, the fact that Minnesota has reciprocity with 3 states and Manitoba tells me that it isn’t Minnesota who is preventing an agreement from taking place. You’re trying to blame Minnesota for problems caused by our own state and that isn’t fair to the University of Minnesota, Minnesota students, or Minnesota taxpayers.
Yes, they want them to pay the OOS price. Do you really think Illinois is offering up diversity when sending students to Minn? So you think the students from MN don’t have the same academic chops as students from Illinois or Indiana? Maybe Minn just realized they weren’t getting the best benefit from offering lower tuition to OOS students who were just like MN kids.
I think California did have the same drastic change for OOS student when it cut off FA without much warning. Even work study was no longer awarded. By making the OOS students pay the full $60k+ and still taking almost 50% of students from out of state (at least at UCB and UCLA), it allows California to look after its own and offer Calgrants and blue and Gold scholarships and even allow undocumented students to have state funds. Every one of the OOS tuition checks is paying for two.
My daughter was an OOS student at a public school. The year after she started, the school basically doubled the scholarships for out of state students, but those already there were stuck with the annual amounts they had entered with. Tuition was the same for everyone, but freshmen were getting a much bigger scholarship than juniors. My other was getting the Bright Futures scholarship and it also doubled just as she was graduating and she’d used up her 120 credits. Tuition went up every year. Sort of sucked to be us.
^ for the record, wasn’t a cap enacted at 20% for all UCs and the highest it ever went was 24%?
(In addition, often this is due to per student financing not keeping up - at least for California, as I think Minnesota has been investing in it higher education).
@SwimmingDad Thank you!
“Yes, they want them to pay the OOS price. Do you really think Illinois is offering up diversity when sending students to Minn? So you think the students from MN don’t have the same academic chops as students from Illinois or Indiana? Maybe Minn just realized they weren’t getting the best benefit from offering lower tuition to OOS students who were just like MN kids.”
It’s just good old fashioned competition. State flagships want the best students, residents, non-residents, international, diversity, etc. So, they offer perks like merit awards to attract them. For non-residents, even after merit awards, the vast majority pay more than residents do. That helps the state universities subsidize resident tuition and need-based financial aid. The non-resident gets a “deal” on tuition. It’s a win for almost everyone involved. The only one who loses out is a resident student who was borderline for admission in the first place (regardless of financial, diversity or other factors), giving up a spot to a high-performing non-resident. But of course, there are dozens of other in-state universities competing for that student.
Obviously you don’t want to have the majority of your flagship school be non-resident students, because at some point your mission is not only to remain solvent but also to educate students in your own state. Based on the article in the first post in this thread, I don’t think that is a concern at Minnesota, as it’s only around 1000 students per class. The concern in the article is that they raised OOS tuition so much that net revenue dropped. Raise non-resident tuition too much, and you lose both money and diversity.
Some schools, like UIUC, are so dependent on international tuition money that the percentages of non-residents are even higher than at UMNTC. For fall 2017, I see around 17% combined non-resident/non-reciprocity and foreign students at UMNTC. At UIUC, it’s closer to 27%. I would guess most of that difference is due to Asian enrollments that UIUC recruits heavily. Yeah, that’s a lot of borderline in-state students not getting a spot in their own flagship. No one to blame but the state legislature here that keeps cutting funding, forcing higher enrollments and more international students to make up the difference. Relatively speaking, if UMNTC net revenue drops again due to OOS tuition hikes, the new president and board could simply cap the hikes for a few years to fix the mistakes of the outgoing people, not a bad situation to have!
^ Highly doubt that any bold new plan by the incoming pres. is going to include a freeze on OOS tuition. LOL.
I even more higherly doubt it;-) But if net revenue drops even more this fall, it would be a detriment to the bottom line and/or their stated goal of increasing non-resident enrollments if they keep hiking OOS tuition as they have been. According to the article, their goal was to increase OOS enrollment by roughly 10% this fall even with another 10% tuition bump, so it will be impressive if they succeed.
@illinoisx3 - agreed. One thing about last year (Fall 2018 admission) is that they really reeled in the scholarship monies. National used to be full tuition differential back in the days of depressed OOS, as you know. When tuition started increasing, they switched it to an even $10,000. Then, beginning last year they started dividing that up further into smaller amounts. Not sure it worked. Perhaps they reverse course on that and offer more. It also appeared that they are/were prioritizing OOS’ers over in-staters for things like scholarship and Honors, but that’s just an anecdotal observation and may not be accurate.
That originally seemed like a good strategy to me, even though it was detrimental to my own pocket book. For the first year, the top $10K national scholarship just about offset the OOS tuition difference, but the OOS hikes for returning students cut into that for years 2-4. Maybe I’m wrong and most families do take into account total costs over 4 years including anticipated increases and don’t just compare 1st year costs.
Do they publish numbers of merit scholarship amounts awarded for OOS, even if only for those attending? I was thinking they possibly offered more total merit money and that was another reason net revenues dropped despite a 15% tuition increase the previous year.
They don’t publish merit scholarship numbers at all, to my knowledge. The reason OOS enrollments declined is that OOS application numbers are back to what they were a few years ago. You can see that by examining total enrollments over the past few years. The variation, for the most part, is due to OOS applications.
I have to chuckle. Just today, we received a nice little mailer addressed to my 11th grader OOS son about the UM. Just last year, we went through the process with my daughter who is currently attending OSU on a full-tuition scholarship. At the time, we were very interested in the Carlson School of Business (amazing school) and she was one of the few who got accepted to the wonderful program. Having said that, the lack of scholarship money along with the financial unknowns made us run the other way.
I remember having this discussion last year about the same thing. @JBStillFlying got a little apprehensive about all my comments about the tuition increases the U was planning and how it will affect future enrollment. The results are in and people voted and will continue to vote with their wallets. These increases are ridiculous. I get the fact that at one point or another UM was a much more affordable school, but the fact that a lot of their current OOS are getting priced out seems pretty unethical to me.
Getting kids from other states is very positive in order to create a diverse student body and it is great for the local economy It is hard enough to get kids from warmer climates to come to the midwest and for sure MN. Some state schools do a better job in attracting top OOS students. It seems that UM is turning their backs on these students. Well, the numbers speak for themselves. Kids are choosing to go somewhere else. Eventually, UM will have to increase these scholarships in order to be able to get these kids back. As for us, we get to play the game again this fall, but knowing what we know, UM is not in the plans. But thank you for thinking of us with your beautiful mailer.
@Setter4life - won’t deny that a significant OOS enrollment decline didn’t seem to be in the cards, esp. given the prior year numbers despite a significant increase that year too (10 or 12% at the time - can’t remember). Nevertheless, they are plowing ahead with a more “modest” increase of 10%. Perhaps that works better than 15%. Hindsight is 100% accurate.
But seriously, had they not increased OOS tuition even a smidgen last year, the ultimate decision to attend OSU on full tuition would have still been a no-brainer for your family, not only given the overall university and business school rankings relative to UMN, but also given your perspective regarding good in-state flagships you’ve provided on other threads. Are you an OH resident, by chance? If so, then your point of view underscores exactly what Regent Hsu has been saying - so thanks for posting your update. My D was offered full tuition at Carlson two years ago and had she not gotten into a top private she very likely would have attended. One simply can’t beat “excellent” and “free”.