<p>everyone pretty much knew the California kids were there because of the skiing - and because they weren’t good enough to get into the UCs</p>
<p>I don’t know about that. They may not have had the stats to get into one of the top 3-5 UCs, but it’s not that hard to get into UCR, UCSC, or UCMerced.</p>
<p>What I’ve seen for Calif students who are OOS full payers…</p>
<p>Yes, many are affluent and they want a “full college big sports experience” that they don’t think they can get at most of the UCs - outside of Cal and UCLA which did not accept them.</p>
<p>So, for about the same price or a little bit more, they can attend other OOS flagships that offer the Big Div I Sports experience.</p>
<p>Oh if it were only so simple as “Illinois taxpayers need to pay MORE”. Illinois taxpayers in the Chicagoland area pay some of the highest total taxes period, with possible exception of NYC residents. Illinois is broke, corruption-riddled, and a financial basket-case. Its university system is low on the priority-list of legislators, and voters won’t stomach more tax increases yet.</p>
<p>Our property taxes for a $600,000 suburban house are $19,500, plus we pay 10% state/county combined sales tax, 5% state income tax, and many more state and municipal quasi-tax fees. No, I don’t want our taxes to be increased to fund UoI system.</p>
<p>Then you don’t want a publicly-funded state university system. That’s a fine choice to make, but then you can’t complain that the user fees (i.e., tuition) is high, and that state residents are only slightly preferred to out of state residents. Like in K-12 education in IL, you get what you pay for.</p>
<p>Higgins-I didn’t realize admission counts were limited for each high school. Is that an official policy? I’ve lived in Illinois for years and have never heard that mentioned. Do you know how the counts are determined?</p>
<p>Illinois has some of the worst K-12 education funding inequality in the nation. Depending on what measure you use, we’re either 46th or 48th in funding elementary schools equally. This is surely not the only problem with our K-12 system, but it’s part of the picture.</p>
<p>Our son was accepted to UIUC six years ago, spent a summer there taking a specialized course, liked the campus and the buildings, but the economics as an out of state student,made it more expensive than such schools as Carnegie Mellon, Rice, and Cornell. So in the end we could not afford the price.</p>
<p>higgins, I would also like to see where the info about limits on acceptance per school is published, as I have been teaching in IL since 1976 and never knew about this.</p>
<p>S attended from '99-'03 as an OOS student. He was given a scholarship which brought the cost to what we would have paid had he gone to our instate flagship. I never could find that scholarship mentioned anywhere on the school’s site. He loved it. </p>
<p>As a Senior he was part of a research group on world hunger, which later was turned into a book.</p>
<p>As to the limits on acceptances by high school, guidance counselors and families in the suburban Chicago high schools have long complained that such policies existed, even as UIUC denied it. I look at the excellent stats of some of the kids from my D’s high school who were NOT accepted to UIUC, and look at the 25-75% GPA and ACT numbers, and I cannot imagine that there are not quotas by high school, but I’ve never seen any official policy, and in fact I’ve heard folks from UIUC admissions vehemently deny that there are quotas.</p>
<p>Hmmm, it seems odd that colleges would have desirable scholarships that they do not advertise, since advertising the scholarships may get more desirable (to them) applicants to apply, rather than writing off the college as “too expensive because there is no chance of enough scholarship money”.</p>
<p>In California, post-secondary education funding gets squeezed out due to higher priority (in terms of political priorities that people vote for) items like K-12 education and prisons growing as a percentage of the state budget. Hence the decreasing state subsidies to post-secondary education, reflected in rapidly rising in-state tuition.</p>
<p>UIUC lists “class rank” as “important” in freshman admissions. Any selective college that places a high priority on class rank effectively limits the number of acceptances from each high school, since only so many students at a high school (relative to the size of the high school) can have an acceptable class rank.</p>
<p>I agree with what you say about such a scholarship. The letter simply stated it was for his being one of the highest OOS acceptees to LAS that year. Back in those years there were not nearly as many OOS accepted as there are now. We live in IN.</p>
<p>At least Wisconsin has a state budget that is balanced and no massive debt. UW’s funding took a hit but but was up 15% this year. Next year looks decent too. Our retirement funds are fine too. Plus UW has a much larger endowment and research fund.</p>
<p>My son was accepted to UIUC. He kept getting multiple stackable merit scholarships, along with various honors titles, spread out over many weeks. This seemed like a rather strange approach to me, not unlike standing in a small shop in a Third World country – if you don’t buy, yet don’t immediately walk out of the shop, the owner keeps going to the back to find you better and better stuff in hopes of making the sale (at the lowest possible cost to himself).</p>
<p>We also got a ton of 4-color junk mail, most of it with very little useful content. They should gut their mailing and brochure budget and put it into something more useful!</p>
<p>Not so very many, though. In 2010, a total of 71 kids from Illinois enrolled as freshmen at Alabama. Not trivial, but far fewer than Illinois sends to other Big Ten schools.</p>
<p>Still, only 52% of UIUC freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class. Compare that to 95% at Michigan. So it’s not as if UIUC is just cherry-picking the top 10% from each HS. (And yet Michigan doesn’t export many college students, probably in part because the next 20% or so have a fairly attractive in-state option in Michigan State which gets a much smaller share of the top 10%-ers but plenty of solid B+ students; it’s less clear in Illinois what the next rung down from UIUC is).</p>
<p>I wonder if it’s something more pernicious. There was a big scandal at UIUC recently when it came to light that state legislators were pulling strings to get favored constituents admitted to UIUC, and the admissions office was playing ball with them. Maybe the unacknowledged quota wasn’t for the top 10% at each HS, but for a certain number of the politically well connected in each legislative district. That would explain why highly qualified applicants from certain schools might be rejected in favor of less qualified applicants from other parts of the state. Sort of a classic Illinois political scam, “honest graft” as the Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkitt once described it. Or just an aggressive form of constituent service.</p>
<p>I wasn’t comparing to Big 10 schools (and certainly not comparing to the numbers attending an entire conference. And… how many schools are now in the “big 10”??? lol). The Big 10 schools are typically geographically closer and more likely going to include athletic recruits and legacy ties.</p>
<p>That said, your data is old. This fall, 160 frosh were from Illinois. That’s more than a 100% increase over your outdated data.</p>
<p>bc–I would not be bragging on that UM claim. From the COHE this week</p>
<p>"That same year, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor reported a similar proportion of high-ranking freshmen: 92 percent. Yet Michigan also reported that nearly all its students—96 percent—had submitted a class rank. Why was that? Last week the university could not explain how it got its number. Two sources with knowledge of Michigan’s process say the university has long estimated the figure.</p>
<p>Re: in-state admissions at UIUC: admissions are rolling admits, so the earlier you apply to any of the Illinois universities, the better your overall chances. Secondly, Illinois admissions treat all schools equally: an “A” from an inner-city school is equivalent of an “A” from a selective-enrollment college prep HS, so scores are paramount for ranking candidates. Third, there’s an informal quota from the academic “powerhouse” HSs who have many seniors who’ve both the grades and scores to exceed UiUC’s “average accepted student profile”. </p>
<p>Average ACT at New Trier HS (suburban posh HS w/many academically-motivated students w/college grad parents, etc) is at ACT 28+, which should qualify half their students - yet only 80 out of 1000+ grads enrolled at UIUC this year. Many Illinois parents/kids are happy to get into UIUC, and I’m sure there were many unhappy parents of strong New Trier students who were upset that their kid didn’t get in. This is one example of one HS, but I’m aware of similar situations at other schools. Seems as if there’s a cap on admissions from each of those strong HSs. Meanwhile, the inner-city Chicago public HS B+ URM student, with a lower ACT, has a much stronger chance of admission.</p>
<p>And if you’re politically connected and motivated enough, your kid would somehow get admitted to UIUC, until the scandal broke several years ago. Same problem occurred with admissions shenanigans at Chicago’s handful of selective-enrollment college prep HSs, where certain folks are able to “jump the cue”. It’s actually harder for a white upper-middle class girl to get into Chicago’s Northside Prep HS than probably a top 20 LAC.</p>