<p>Again, it is all in what we consider top tier. I have said on other posts that schools like Vassar, Wesleyan, Hopkins, GT, Haverford et al are top tier. My D had most of these on her list of choices last year and we visited a lot of them. I just don’t think of them to be mid-Atlantic, but that is just my DC centric view of the world. I consider them Northern. UVa I think of as Southern - anything south of Northern Virginia a DC person thinks is Southern. Nothing I said should be misconstrued to say that I don’t think there is a wide variety of schools which are stellar and I have been appropriately corrected - so let’s get back on point.</p>
<p>We lived in NJ. I know most high schoolers didn’t want to go to schools in NJ, and sometimes it included Princeton. Many families in NJ (CT, NY and other NE states) have the means to send their kids out of state, so it is easier for them to make that choice. A NJ kid would rather go to Penn State than Rutgers. They are not going out of state because of better schools, they are doing it just so they could be out of state.</p>
<p>this is one of the more stupid articles written by supposedly educated journalists. (Why competence in Stats is not a requirement for any of the press, I’ll never know…) </p>
<p>Take UMass, for example. While Amherst is close to the middle of the state, it is more than 100 miles from many instate towns. Thus, those students are magically part of the 58%.</p>
<p>Similar story with UVa, which is 100+ miles away from the population centers of NoVa and Norfolk and Roanoke.</p>
<p>Fun with statistics. Distances play a huge roll. “OOS” is so easy in the NE, especially when choosing among many private schools. </p>
<p>I don’t know what this means. I would expect lower achieving students to stay close to home and attend a community college, and higher achieving students would venture to an ivy no matter what the distance. Smart kids in the north east also go to Stanford and Caltech which will just about kill any distance study.</p>
<p>This story could also have the headline “States in the northeast gain the most students from other states.” Or “States in the northeast gain and also lose the most students to/from other northeast states.”</p>
<p>58% of high school graduates attend college within 100 miles of their hometown, 89% within 500 miles, and 72% stay in-state. So the headline could also be "Kids almost always go to college close to home and overwhelmingly stay in-state, especially in the northeast.</p>
<p>Or “The west has a lot of large geographic states, while the northeast has a lot of small states which are crowded with many colleges that are close to each other.”</p>
<p>Actually, the permanent big headline should be “States in the northeast have many more colleges than they have students to fill them.” That’s the long-term news. Other than the NYC area, the population growth for kids is in the West and Southwest, and the college classrooms are in the Northeast. Administrators are desperately trying to find kids to fill their seats, from other regions and other continents. Over the next generation, there are a bunch of institutions that are going to have to be repurposed.</p>
<p>In my city, the school district has been closing schools as fast as it can, which is not very fast given the community opposition it provokes. Some of that is because charter schools are replacing them, but the actual number of kids in the school system has been declining for years. The Archdiocesan school system has been much more aggressive about closing schools. I know the private schools are all bracing for a shakeout, and their leadership is acutely aware that some of them may not survive. But so far no one has closed any of the colleges those schools feed into…</p>
<p>@JHS: Actually, OH and the rest of the Midwest are getting hit hardest now. They have a bunch of privates, a huge flagship, a bunch of publics, and a declining HS population. There’s also a reason why Purdue and Illinois have seen a gigantic growth in their Chinese undergraduate student population (though IL is still a large net exporter of students; mainly because there isn’t a large public filling that tier between the flagship UofI and directionals like there is at other large Northern states like Pitt in PA, MSU in MI, MiamiU&UCincy in OH).</p>
<p>I would rather have students in my state leave to go to college then return home to contribute to society than to go to school here and leave. The trend in my state is that the more educated you are the more likely you are to leave the state. Of course, I would leave this state as well if family and work obligations hadn’t pulled me back to this pit of despair.</p>
<p>Well duh, northeastern states are the size of postage stamps. You could be a commuter student and drive a half-hr across the state line to go to school.</p>