Many thanks for that, @bclintonk! I don’t subscribe to The Chronicle, and Google took me to the old feature. 
@ucbalumnus, I see what you’re saying. I misunderstood your original point. Most PA families I know remain in state for college. They frequently go to a PASSHE school, or a private Catholic (of which there are many that offer big discounts), or community college. And MANY just suck it up and take out loans for Penn State, not realizing (or caring) there are more affordable options. That’s another reason Penn State doesn’t offer big merit awards–even to Schreyer kids. They don’t have to!
California community colleges have 2.1 million students, but not sure how many are considered freshman.
@Pizzagirl, the “analysis” is pretty much useless. I tried to make that clear in my OP. The data is interesting and deserving of a lot deeper investigation, but I still find this and the Chronicle feature a very nice visual representation. I use things like this as tools, much as I use the US News rankings.
The military service academies are not that big, though. Their enrollment may not be enough to push the student flows from many states over the 250 students that they used as a threshold to draw an arrow.
For comparison, there are about 199,000 undergraduates at UC, 418,000 (358,000 full time) at CSU, and about 1,588,000 (470,000 full time) at community colleges.
The ‘Zona schools are not that much more expensive than a CSU. Friends’ kids attended and when they applied early, they were offered a ‘scholarship’ to cover most of the OOS fees.
I agree with you, Lucie!
“Their enrollment may not be enough to push the student flows from many states over the 250 students that they used as a threshold to draw an arrow”
That 250 is so arbitrary. Will Rhode Island ever have ANY flow of 250 students to one place? Doubtful. But CA sure will. Would have been more useful if expressed as a % of the home state’s pop.
@Pizzagirl, you can get all that from the Chronicle data which is quite granular once you get into it. So, for example, you can quickly see that while only 44.3% of New Jersey freshmen enrolled at in-state colleges and universities in 2014. 84.2% of Michigan freshmen remained in-state. Quite a difference.
And you can see where they go: 28.5% of New Jerseyans leaving the state went to Pennsylvania, many to Penn State and a variety of Philadelphia-area colleges. Another 17.8% went to New York—which means that nearly half of New Jerseyans who leave are going no farther than states immediately bordering New Jersey. Another 6.2% went to Massachusetts, 4.8% to Maryland, 4.4% to Connecticut, and so on.
It’s striking how regional this migration is. Only a handful of states—New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, and DC—exported a majority of their college freshmen in 2014. In most states something like 75% to 85% stayed in-state. But regardless of the percentages leaving the state, the overwhelming majority of out-migration was to nearby states in the same region. So while relatively few Michiganders left the state for college, most who did went to nearby Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
If you bore down into the Chronicle data, you can see this regionalism prevailing at the elite college level, too. So among US News top 25 colleges and universities, those enrolling the most New Jersey freshmen in 2014 were, in order, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Columbia, while for Michigan freshmen it was Notre Dame, Northwestern, Harvard, Chicago, Yale, WUSTL, and Oberlin, reflecting a heavy Midwestern tilt.
@bclintonk, I believe that confirm’s @Pizzagirl’s analysis of several years ago.
Bclintonk and I did that together, just so no one is thinking I am claiming sole ownership.
Aha! That makes perfect sense!
“So, for example, you can quickly see that while only 44.3% of New Jersey freshmen enrolled at in-state colleges and universities in 2014. 84.2% of Michigan freshmen remained in-state. Quite a difference.”
Agreed. But here’s the first step I think is missing - what % of college bound seniors can a given state’s public universities accommodate in the first place? (Ignore desire and ignore academic requirements for now. In other words, if high school seniors were required to “fill up” their state’s public universities first before going out of state, how many of them would have to?
See, I don’t remotely have a sense whether NJ public universities could accommodate all NJ college bound seniors. There’s a difference between a state that doesn’t have a lot of seats (so students HAVE to look elsewhere), and a state that has a lot of seats but for whatever reason they are not perceived as desirable (so students WANT to look elsewhere).
Are there states who simply have tons of excess capacity - that is, have more public u spots than their state could ever fill? Likewise, how low is low - are there states who only have the capacity to educate (say) 10% of all their college bound seniors?
And somewhere you’d just love a breakdown of each state of - % of public school spots filled by own-state vs out-of-state.
“See, I don’t remotely have a sense whether NJ public universities could accommodate all NJ college bound seniors. There’s a difference between a state that doesn’t have a lot of seats (so students HAVE to look elsewhere), and a state that has a lot of seats but for whatever reason they are not perceived as desirable (so students WANT to look elsewhere).”
Right- that was what I was speculating with Texas. Our two flagships cannot accommodate everyone but when you add Texas Tech, Texas State, UNT, UTArlington, UT Dallas, etc. we can accommodate everyone. But most upper middle class kids would rather go to OU, Alabama, OSU, or Arkansas who are generous with OOS merit dollars than attend anything beside UT and A&M. This isn’t indicative of a funding problem so much as a brand appeal issue for the other schools. They have all made big strides in twenty years but still have a way to go.
An upper middle class kid who can get into
Arkansas can get into Texas Tech. Lubbock is farther away from Dallas than Fayetteville. Cost for reasonable stats is roughly the same. Fayetteville has better scenery too.
This.
Especially for New Jersey.
@Pizzagirl, I don’t think there’s any way of measuring the capacity of a state’s public universities, but I don’t get the sense that many students are being forced out-of-state by lack of capacity. Take New Jersey as an example, More than half of New Jersey freshmen leave the state, but thinking back to my own undergrad days at Michigan, I knew quite a few people from New Jersey and to a person they couldn’t wait to get out of New Jersey. As far as I know, that’s still true. If more wanted to stay, it would be reflected in New Jersey’s public universities becoming more selective, but the public flagship, Rutgers-New Brunswick, has a 60% acceptance rate and middle 50% SAT scores of 1110-1340 (compared to, e.g., UVA which has a 29.8% admit rate and middle 50% SAT scores of 1250-1460). So it’s pretty apparent that many or most of the top students in NJ are opting out of the state’s public universities entirely.
And assuming Rutgers-New Brunswick is filling itself to the capacity it considers optimal (if not, they’d simply admit more or fewer students), that still means about 40% of applicants aren’t being accepted. Presumably these students end up at less selective in-state publics like Montclair State (middle 50% SAT scores 870-1090), or they opt for an in-state private, or they go out-of-state, either public or private, presumably because they view these as more attractive alternatives based on quality, price, value, and all the intangibles that make one school more attractive than another. So it’s a little hard to see how anyone is being squeezed out of New Jersey public universities by lack of capacity. It’s just that New Jersey’s public universities don’t present an attractive value proposition to a majority of the state’s college-bound students and their parents, relative to private and out-of-state public alternatives… If demand for spaces in New Jersey’s public universities increased, it seems likely they’d ramp up capacity to meet that demand. It’s also worth noting that, comparing the NY Times data with Chronicle data, it looks like nearly 2/3 of New Jerseyans who leave the state enroll in private colleges and universities. So maybe if NJ had more attractive private choices (beyond Princeton, where only a tiny handful of New Jerseyans will be accepted), the state would lose fewer of its college freshmen. That is, if there are capacity and quality issues, it may be just as much on the private side as on the public. But it’s a market, and in the long run, capacity will adjust to demand. In the main, I think 18-year-old New Jerseyans just want to get out of Dodge.
Perhaps not from the outside, but the state universities themselves presumably know how many students they can accommodate in terms of instructor and facility capacity. Money-based capacity also matters, in that in-state students cost money, while out-of-state students may pay their way or subsidize the school. In many cases, capacity of various majors, particularly popular ones like nursing and CS, must also be noted.
Such capacity constraints have to be considered when a campus determines how many students it can admit (based on expected yield), including within buckets of majors and in-state / out-of-state. That in turn result in admission thresholds being set.
@ucbalumnus, I agree with all that, but I think that means you have to assume (at least for flagships) that capacity = enrollment. If they have unused capacity, they’ll just admit more to bring enrollment into line with capacity. If they enroll more than capacity, they’ll need to adjust their admissions in subsequent rounds to bring enrollment back into line. There may be small year-to-year deviations from optimal enrollment, e.g., if there’s an unexpected surge in yield one year, but I think most public flagships do a pretty good job of meeting their enrollment targets, plus or minus a little, generally within an acceptable range.
There could be chronic excess capacity at schools or in programs for which there is little demand. Over time that should be addressed by paring back capacity, which is a harder thing for most colleges to do. But at the flagship in any reasonably large state, changes in demand are more likely to be reflected in selectivity than in overall enrollment. It may be a different story at less selective schools, further down in the pecking order of perceived desirability.
Yes, one would assume that extra capacity (on the campus level) only exists at campuses which admit at the baseline of college readiness, however defined (though different states may have different definitions), since more selective campuses change admission thresholds in order to enroll right at capacity. In some states, this may only apply to just a few of the many state university campuses; in others, it may apply to most or all of them.
“Only a handful of states—New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, and DC—exported a majority of their college freshmen in 2014.”
Not surprising that the most geographically tiny states export the most; many kids want to go away from home for college. In a big state, it’s possible to do that while still staying in-state.