FWIW, my S with above average stats but certainly not stellar stats was offered packages at Delaware and Syracuse that brought the COA to a little more than Rutgers would have cost us.
My hometown NJ paper lists lots of college info on the local kids. Dean’s list for local at UDel was amazing. Even Clemson had about 20 for small county in pop.Meanwhile only handful at old big Midwest schools.
@CrazymamaB - That’s what I see here in my area of NJ. Kids get better offers out of state that are sometimes less than NJ state schools, sometimes on par but seem to offer a nicer environment/more for the tuition. NJ has a lot of great high schools, offering fairly advanced curriculum and lots of opportunities. I wonder if that actually serves to bounce a lot of kids out of state-sometimes I get the impression our high schools are much harder than our colleges. But that’s all anecdotal.
@bclintonk, OH doesn’t have a second P5 conference AAU research U, but it does have a bunch of local publics who between them provide as much to keep kids in-state as a Pitt or MSU.
For instance, UCincy has it’s co-op program and is highly thought of in design, theatre, and I believe music. Miami has the charm and cachet that makes people designate it a public Ivy. Ohio U has the honors tutorial college. And I believe Akron and Toledo stand out in various engineering specialties.
That makes PA the anomaly, but with PA, did you count the million or so branch-PSU’s (and the few branch-Pitt’s)? It’s possible that the goal of making it to the main campus keeps PA people in-state.
@barrons, the Chronicle data show the University of Michigan continuing to draw more NJ freshmen than any Southern flagship, 288 in 2014, compared to 217 at South Carolina, 142 at Alabama, 112 at UVA, 113 at Clemson, 44 at UNC Chapel Hill, 44 at Florida, 28 at Tennessee, 26 at Georgia, 21 at Ole’ Miss, 18 at LSU. Indiana drew a respectable 159 and Ohio State 134, but it’s true that Purdue (88), UIUC (80) and Wisconsin (63) didn’t make particularly strong showings, The Wisconsin figure is surprising to me because they’ve traditionally prided themselves on how many “coasties” they draw, but the data don’t bear that out; most of their OOS students come from neighboring Minnesota and Illinois. Michigan State drew as many from NJ as Wisconsin did in 2014.
The overall pattern for NJ, though, is actually quite similar to other states: most NJ students who leave the state get no farther than immediately neighboring states like Pennsylvania (9,046 in 2014), New York (5.648), and Delaware (1,134), or elsewhere in the Boston-Washington corridor (MA 1,984, CT 1,394, RI 874,MD 1,523, DC 811) , extended a bit into Virginia (1,382). The numbers heading to the South or Midwest are quite small in comparison.
BTW, @bclintonk, UIC is actually IL’s second-best public research U (IL’s UCincy, you could say), if you want to compare with MSU. But in any case, yes, IL doesn’t have an MSU.
Fair enough, @ PurpleTitan. I actually have a soft spot for UIC because I know a number of people who went there and were deeply appreciative of the opportunities UIC opened up for them. But it’s still seen as primarily an urban commuter school which limits its appeal as a “destination” college among those who want to “go away to college.”
The average student travels less than 100 mi from home to college. It’s easier to do that, but still go out of state, from CT/NJ than from Nebraska or the middle of MI. MI or NE comprise much bigger regions (in square miles) than CT, NJ, MA and MD put together. So is simple geography more significant than the quality (or structure) of the state university system in driving up export rates?
I know it’s not possible but I wish these analyses could be done based on population centers and not state boundaries. State boundaries are pretty arbitrary. For most people in Chicagoland, for example, UW-Madison is closer than UIUC.
@tk21769, most people in NE live on its eastern edge, but I get the gist of what you’re saying.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that a number of high achieving students in Ohio choose Miami or Cincy over OSU, because of Co-op or preference for small town Miami, or sometimes, merit. Our flagship also admits students to local campuses to “prove themselves” before being able to transfer to main campus, IDK how those campuses fit in the #s.
@ucbalumnus I think the point you made above re CA and IL may be generally true for states with more competitive flagship campuses, i.e. students who can’t get into Berkeley, or Michigan, etc., at least for their preferred major, leaving to go to an out of state flagship that’s easier to get into.
In the case of California, IIRC, the out of state tuition at some nearby flagships isn’t that far off in state for California, and for better students merit aid may close the gap fully.
At UW CA is the new Coastie source.
https://registrar.wisc.edu/enrollments_by_state_swf.htm
@bluewater2015, we saw from @bclintonk 's data that MI residents don’t leave to study OOS at a high rate compared to other states. If anything, MI is on the low side.
…
@PurpleTitan Interesting. In looking at percent of applicants accepted on US News, I see that Michigan is actually double that of Berkeley (32% vs.16%), and UCLA is only slightly higher than Berkeley (18%). And the other public I often hear mentioned in the same group, Virginia, looks a lot more (29%) like Michigan than Berkeley or UCLA.
So maybe CA is in a class of its own in terms of push to study OOS due to difficulty of getting into the two flagships.
My hunch is geography plays some role, but less than your question suggests. New York State’s population is heavily concentrated “downstate” in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County, with the result that there are more New Yorkers living within 50 miles of New Jersey than there are New Jerseyans in total. Yet about 3/4 of NY freshmen stay in-state, and New Jersey sends about 5 times as many freshmen to NY as NY sends to NJ. It’s largely one-way trade across that open border. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in Pennsylvania. PA’s population is densest in its eastern portions, especially in and around Philadelphia but also on up through Easton, Allentown-Bethlehem, Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, etc., all quite near the NJ border. Yet NJ exports more than 18 times as many college freshmen to PA as PA exports to NJ. Same with Delaware, the third state that borders NJ, and even smaller than NJ in geographic expanse… NJ sends 25 times as many freshmen to Delaware as Delaware sends to NJ. So I’d say it’s mostly about college quality, availability, and perceived value. But some if it may also be cultural. As other posters have noted, sending your kid out-of-state for college is just a time-honored tradition in NJ, more so than in some other states. In short, one reason the in-state options aren’t better in NJ may be that there’s just not much demand for it.
As for MI and NE, it might be misleading to look at sheer geographic size. No one lives in the middle of those states. Michigan’s population is heavily clustered in its southeastern corner, near Ohio, and in its southwestern corner, near Indiana and Illinois. Michigan is actually a modest net exporter of students to Ohio and Indiana, with the largest number of Ohio-bound students landing no farther than the University of Toledo, right on the border which offers in-state tuition to residents of Michigan counties along the border. But Illinois–roughly the same as Michigan in land area–sends more than twice as many freshmen to Michigan as Michigan sends back. (Don’t be fooled by Michigan’s total square miles; over 40% of it is the surface of the Great Lakes, with zero permanent residents). And Minnesota, which far exceeds Michigan or Wisconsin in land area, exports students at a far higher rate than either of its smaller neighbors. Similarly, Nebraska’s population is heavily concentrated along its eastern edge, near Iowa and Missouri; functionally, it’s actually quite a small and compact state in terms of where the people are.
http://universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrollment-glance
http://www.calstate.edu/as/stat_reports/2015-2016/fnse01.htm
http://datamart.cccco.edu/Students/Enrollment_Status.aspx
In 2015, new frosh enrollment in California public colleges and universities:
Campus/system # new frosh % of 4Y frosh % of all frosh
UCB 5,550 5.1% 1.4%
UCLA 5,679 5.3% 1.5%
UC (all) 41,571 38.8% 11.0%
CSU (all) 65,606 61.2% 17.4%
UC+CSU 107,177 100% 28.4%
CA CCs 270,842 71.6%
UC+CSU+CCs 378,019 100%
Note that the above does not include private schools in California.
For the California community colleges, http://datamart.cccco.edu/Students/Enrollment_Status.aspx indicates that there were 270,842 new students in fall 2015, although not all of them were intending to transfer to a four year school.
@bluewater2015, as @bclintonk observed, the attractiveness of the institutions just below the flagship may do more to keep students in-state. MI has MSU. VA has W&M & VTech (as well as VCU and GMU, etc.) that are attractive in various niches. As I noted, OH also has a bunch of publics outside OSU that are attractive to many in-staters in various ways.
CA is exceptional in part because it’s so populous. CA produces almost 4 times as many HS grads as MI and almost 5 times as many HS grads as VA.
So if you think only Cal and UCLA can do, those 2 can take in a smaller percentage of in-state HS grads than either UMich or UVa of their in-state HS grads .
Even Cal, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UCI, & UCD all added together have about 147K undergrads. That’s a little over twice what UMich & MSU have (67K) and a little less than 3 times what UVa+W&M+VTech have (53K). Yet note how many more HS grads CA produces.
The chart from th OP shows nine different arrows trying to get out of Illinois. That seems about right.