http://www.nj.com/education/2015/12/new_england_college_trying_to_poach_nj_students.html
Nice deal. For students who have 3.0 and 1050.
We are NH residents. UNH was the least affordable school both of my boys were accepted to. They received a much more competitive package from UMass/Amherst.
I bet they get the results they want from NJ students
The University of Maine costs about $21K per year for in state students when you consider room and board. If they are matching Rutgers’ tuition, as opposed to giving instate rates, kids from NJ will pay a few thousand more than that, reflecting Rutgers’ higher tuition.
Orono is not exactly a hot spot. I find it hard to imagine choosing to go there instead of U VT, for example.
I’m wondering what effect this will have on Maine students.
University of Maine does not appear to be very competitive in admission:
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=122
It could be that it has an under-enrollment situation, so that it would just be filling otherwise unused and wasted capacity.
The biggest reason for picking it over UVM would be cost. UVM has one of the highest OOS tuition prices in the country.
What I don’t get about the Maine offer is whether an OOS student pays his home state’s tuition or if Maine has one OOS tuition price for all from the chosen states. Why should a New Hampshire person pay a NH rate while a NJ person pays a NJ rate? How is that a good deal when that student could just go to school in NJ for the same rate? If Maine wants to attract OOS students, it needs to beat the price, not match it.
The deal is that they match the price of your home-state tuition. It’s a deal for full-pay, non-merit-eligible students who are not too keen on staying in-state, but their parents say they will only pay in-state prices.
Lots of public schools have more than one tier of out-of-state list price tuition, often based on regional tuition discounting agreements. Of course, lots of schools (public and private) have a different pricing tier for every student, based on financial aid and scholarships.
As noted in reply #6, there are students who want to go to school out-of-state, but whose parents will only pay up to in-state prices, so this particular University of Maine pricing appears to be targeted to those students.
It may be worthwhile for NJ students who want to study engineering, but may have decent but not top stats for Rutgers, or top $$ for other OOS . Univ. of ME has ABET accredited engineering programs. If they have savvy marketing folks, they should be reaching out to the Asian-American community in NJ and MA (no, I’m not stereotyping - I belong to this demographic.)
Given the difference in housing costs as well, it would be interesting to see if the overall cost of attendance at Univ of ME may work out to be less than the in-state options of their neighboring New England States.
Lots of New Jersey kids just want to get out of New Jersey for college. If I’m not mistaken, New Jersey exports a higher percentage of its college-bound students than any other state. Many leave for colleges they perceive to be better than Rutgers, but some leave for colleges that are arguably not as good as Rutgers, just because they want to get away; and some will pay an out-of-state or private tuition premium to do so. If the University of Maine is available to NJ residents at the same price as Rutgers, some will choose Maine just because it’s not Rutgers and it’s not in New Jersey–even though Rutgers is arguably a better school overall (at least if you go by the US News metrics).
Maine is also somewhat less selective than Rutgers. Some NJ residents may not get into Rutgers, but may find Maine more attractive than their other in-state options if it’s available to them at the same price as Rutgers.
I wouldn’t expect overwhelming numbers of NJ resident to go for this deal, but they’ll get some. In 2010, only 11 NJ residents enrolled at the University of Maine as freshmen. That same year, 179 NJ freshmen enrolled at the University of Vermont; 237 NJ freshmen enrolled at UMass-Amherst; 140 NJ freshmen enrolled at UConn; 241 NJ freshmen enrolled at the University of Rhode Island; and 32 NJ freshmen enrolled at the University of New Hampshire. All those schools charge high OOS tuition, generally in the $30-35K range. If the University of Maine can just siphon off some of that business by undercutting the other New England public flagships on OOS tuition, it will be a win for them.
Anyone remember Roseanne Rosannadanna from SNL?
" All those schools charge high OOS tuition, generally in the $30-35K range. If the University of Maine can just siphon off some of that business by undercutting the other New England public flagships on OOS tuition, it will be a win for them."
But wouldn’t a better marketing scheme be to just charge less than those schools to OOS students?
I just don’t get why it is good marketing to charge PA residents $17000k and MA residents $10,000 and NJ residents $12000 (guessing at the rates) If I were a PA resident, I’d think “I’m not paying more just because I live in PA. I’d pay it to Penn State because it is a better school than Rutgers or NH, but I’m not paying that for Maine, especially when someone from MA gets to pay less.” (I’m just using it as an example, not that Penn St is better than Rutgers or NH, just that the thinking might be that).
I understand the cost difference for instate versus OOS, but I can’t get my head around a cost difference for an OOS student from PA versus NJ. That just seems very unfair with no basis. It doesn’t cost less to educate a student from NJ, there is no requirement for higher scores or grades. Unlike Alabama, Maine isn’t going for the best and brightest. It seems to be a marketing plan to fill seats, so why should the price be different if you are from Pittsburgh or Concord?
And for high-achieving college graduates, a degree from UMO won’t be any less valuable in the northeast than that of any other northeastern public university (and some privates). I know a guy who is a UMO alumnus, did well and went on to a highly regarded law school in the south, and then began his professional career with a prestigious corporate law firm in New York City.
This isn’t at all unusual in states with tuition reciprocity. Minnesota and Wisconsin have a tuition reciprocity agreement under which at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin residents pay $10,415 in tuition and fees, Minnesota residents pay $13,382 (the same as in-state tuition at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities), and residents of all other states pay full OOS tuition of $29,665. The fact that Minnesota residents pay less doesn’t deter thousands of residents of Illinois and other states from coming to Wisconsin and paying full OOS rates. Meanwhile, Minnesota has a somewhat broader tuition reciprocity agreement with Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, and the Canadian province of Manitoba under which residents of those jurisdictions pay Minnesota’s in-state tuition rate to attend the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and residents of all other states pay OOS tuition and fees of $22,260.
North Dakota has a four-tiered structure: at the University of North Dakota, in-state students pay $$7,965, Minnesota residents pay $8,750, and residents of an additional 21 states and 2 Canadian provinces with which North Dakota has “special agreements” pay $11,239, while residents of the remaining 27 states pay full OOS tuition of $18,889.
So the concept has been around a long time, and it doesn’t generate the kind of opposition you describe. The only difference is that in Maine’s case it’s a unilateral offer, not part of a reciprocity agreement. But to the OOS beneficiary of reduced OOS tuition, it still looks like a benefit, and a very substantial one; no one finds it objectionable that the resident of some other state is getting an even steeper discount. That’s the functional equivalent of saying, “I won’t attend Brand X College because I got a merit scholarship of only $15K, and that’s not fair because Suzy over there got $25K.”
^ But it is not a unilateral offer, since it appears that U of ME is still charging a higher OOS rate to non-New England states. So they are still charging a lot to the out of state students from say, TX or CA .
My guess is that a high-stats but needy applicant to UMO from Texas or California might get a generous $$ offer. Perhaps not enough to make UMO equal to Texas or California in-state tuition rates.
Reciprocity usually means the students from state A get a deal at state B, but that State B students also get one at state A. Benefits both. In the western exchange, WUE, the residents from the other states all pay the same which is based on the instate tuition at the school attended, not based on the state the student lives in. The students from Montana and Utah pay the same at NM if they are accepted.
Is this a reciprocity deal, that the students from Maine can go to Penn state? If so, that’s different than just saying ‘here’s the tuition, but we’re going to charge those from PA more than those from NJ.’
Would assume that a merit scholarship to Suzy was based on Suzy being more attractive to Brand X college, but if just arbitrary, then If I were the students who got the lesser amount, then yes, I’d not go to Brand X because the school didn’t give me as good a deal.
Of course it’s not a reciprocity deal. That much is obvious. It’s a unilateral offer by the University of Maine to give steep discounts from its normal OOS tuition to residents of certain other states. But I still maintain that to a resident of Pennsylvania who is getting a steep discount, it’s going to look like a pretty attractive deal even if an applicant from some other state is getting an even steeper discount. What someone else is paying is not my problem. I want to know what my options are, and how much they will cost. If yesterday the University of Maine was not on my list because OOS tuition made it prohibitively expensive, and today the University of Maine is on my list because it’s offering a tuition discount that makes it competitive with my in-state flagship, that’s a game-changer. Why should I care what it costs someone else? It’s in the nature of the business that schools are going to offer tuition discounts to certain groups of students—whether we call them need-based aid, or merit scholarships, or athletic scholarships, or tuition reciprocity, or unilateral “most favored state” offers as in Maine’s case—and that these are not going to apply across the board. Why tie yourself up in knots over the “fairness” of that? I submit that most people don’t. For most people, it’s a straight value proposition: will this school give me an educational experience I want at a price that I can afford?
And that’s just as true for Minnesotans deciding whether to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison at a reciprocity tuition rate as it is for a resident of Pennsylvania deciding whether to attend the University of Maine at a preferential OOS tuition rate unilaterally offered by the University of Maine to residents of certain states. The Minnesota resident really doesn’t give a hoot about what’s on the other side of that reciprocity deal; all that matters is that the tuition discount offered by Wisconsin makes UW-Madison an affordable alternative to UMN-Twin Cities. Whether someone else is getting an even better deal is just not relevant.
I started a thread on this topic in the Financial Aid & Scholarships forum a few days ago, and one thing I think a lot of people aren’t understanding is that this new policy seems directly aimed at picking off:
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Borderline students of nearby states. Think of the kids who wanted to go to State College but didn’t have the stats and were offered the 2+2 program at Penn State. Choosing between that or University of Maine (four years at another state’s flagship) for a similar price might be very appealing to a kid/family that already budgeted for Penn State.
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Students desperate for a change of scenery. NJ seems the obvious example, but there are probably a fair number of kids with the stats to attend Rutgers or any number of schools who’d consider Maine as a valid alternative.
In the end, the students will have to visit and see how UMaine compares to their own flagships, what the commute is like, etc. I can picture a LOT of students having a much greater appreciation for their own flagships after such a visit, but I still think it’s an interesting experiment.
Here’s the university press release announcing the program: https://umaine.edu/news/blog/2015/11/30/flagship-match-program-allows-out-of-state-students-to-pay-their-equivalent-in-state-tuition-and-fees/
I’m not sure where they’re getting that $11,366 number for Penn State, however. The price is $17,502 for in-state students! http://admissions.psu.edu/costs-aid/tuition/