Also top Winners/Losers:
A few casual observations:
In California, there are students whose academic credentials could get them admitted to the flagships of Oregon and Arizona, but would only get them into a less selective (and probably mainly-commuter) CSU in California, because the UCs and CPSLO are too selective. If their parents are willing to pay, they may prefer the flagship experience over the commuter school experience.
Wouldn’t be surprised if similar patterns applied to other movements, like Maryland to West Virginia, Texas to various, various to Alabama, etc…
I think the ultra-competitiveness of the UCs - especially its flagships (LA, Cal, SD, Davis) - stems at least in part from them being such a popular destination for international students, especially Chinese who in the past 15 years have flooded into US colleges. Virtually every Chinese student I’ve met whose is applying to US universities is applying to one or several UCs.
I don’t think it’s just because of California’s size relative to its campus. Cal’s acceptance rate was 26% in 2000, 17.5% today, LA dropped from 28.5 to 18. That’s considerably more than can be explained by pop growth.
Virginia seems to get a great number of students due to its flagship universities, but I am surprised that New Hampshire is getting a bunch of students. And that states like North Carolina and Florida are not more prominent
@shawnspencer I don’t think UNC accepts many OOS students - same for UT-A and Michigan. So that could be why there aren’t more coming in.
Florida could be due to its large population? It seems like heavily populated states with a couple of good flagships don’t have space for their state’s good students, thus many from FL, CA, TX, NY (the 4 biggest states by pop if I recal correctly) leave for other states.
I see our experience and that of families we know reflected in these stats and in @insanedreamer 's observations.
We live in NY (a big exporter) and D goes to school in MA, where the largest group of OOS students is from NY.
Hardly any of her HS friends went to SUNYs–the relatively low USNWR rankings especially compared to schools like PSU are a factor.
At a SUNY Stony Brook orientation we met incoming NJ students who were very vocal about their dislike for Rutgers.
Although the attractiveness or unattractiveness of various state colleges is part of the reason for the migration, there’s also another factor – the number of seats available at the state universities in each state.
New Jersey, for example, doesn’t have the capacity to serve all its own students in its state university system. There just aren’t enough places. So exporting students is a necessity. It would be a necessity even if every kid in the state loved Rutgers.
Right, it’s both supply and demand.
Most states have only one flagship. So MD has one flagship and WV has one flagship even though MD has over 3 times the population of WV. And UMD has only a few thousand more undergrads than WVU.
Thus UMD’s entrance requirements are higher than WVU’s and WVU’s OOS costs may be more reasonable as well (because they don’t have enough in-state kids to take every spot even if they were open admissions, which WVU is close to).
So an inflow of students to WV publics should not be a surprise.
I have 2 kids, both grad instate SUNY. And I work with a local scholarship group that keeps me close to local high school students. I have no data to support it but it seems that the shear number of SUNY campus’ 64 ish…lead to the impression of mediocrity in many students and parents. I know of students who would not consider one of the larger SUNY university centers…“flagship like” SB, Buff, Albany, Bing…but would go to Ohio state, Illinois, UCONN, PSU etc. And due to the name cache, or “exotic” lol nature of going away.
Can you blame them? =))
I just wrote this on the SUNY free tuition thread, but it seems relevant here, too. So I am cutting and pasting:
There are 64 SUNYs, 62 of them providing undergraduate education. If one pours through them, one will find some amazing programs. Some of the colleges are pretty hot, too. Look at Fashion Institute of Technology or College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Consider the programs at NYS College of Agriculture and Life Science at Cornell or the similarly placed Industrial and Labor Relations. SUNY community colleges have a mandate to offer degrees leading to good paying jobs. I was amazed when I compared the richness of SUNY CC programs with those in neighboring states.
I think people tend to paint the huge system with one brush.
North Carolina limits (via state law I think) the number of OOS students to their state supported U’s. Think they can’t go over 17 or 18%. Would be interested to know if there’s been much discussion to upping that for financial reasons.
Interesting article.
I am not surprised to see the northern New England states receiving more simply because those states just do not have a surplus of HS students. CA might have a surplus and needs to ship them out as was stated previously. I know ME allows in-state tuition for MA residents now. Maybe for all states also. It was because they risked not attracting enough students to fill the classrooms. It is a great deal. I wish NH and VT offered that. My son might have considered them. The OOS cost is just too much for us to pay for what they offer. UV or UNH just does not have the cache as a UCLA, etc.
Actually, New Jersey can be quite a nice place to live. I lived in three different parts of the state – for 19 years total – and left only because my husband had a good job opportunity elsewhere. I was sorry to go.
But yes, if we had stayed, both our kids probably would have gone out of state to college.
The WUE program is attractive to California residents who don’t want to go to an impacted, commuter CSU. Arizona State, ASU and NAU all grab a lot of Californians.
Regarding California students going to WA, AZ and OR, it’s not necessarily students who are going to the flagships in those states but also students taking advantage of the Western Undergraduate Exchange for a break in tuition. For example, Northern Arizona University, which is not a flagship, actively targets CA students: http://go.nau.edu/
Teenagers are somewhat vulnerable to lots of messages which may or may not have anything to do with educational quality.
I am always amazed at the amount of love I hear about U Vermont-- especially among prep school kids who can’t get into Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury or Amherst- and parents who happily pay out of state rates to send their kids there. Kids visit and get excited about the vegan restaurants and aging hippies smoking marijuana outside the Banana Republic a block from campus- even when they come from places which have Banana Republics of their own, and lots of aging hippies to boot. But the mountains are beautiful and who cares how much it costs when little Johnny or Suzie want to go to college in a “cool place”?
No, Rutgers isn’t charming. Many of the SUNY’s aren’t charming. But i don’t think kids are “rejecting” them because of academic quality, amount of research/grants/international collaboration going on with faculty, etc. If their parents can afford to pay out of state, they want a vibe which is not what they grew up with. I get that. But these decisions are rarely about academics.
The NCES data:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_309.10.asp
I think it’s useful to see the numbers, Knowing that California had 388,315 first time state residents that enrolled in a post secondary institutions, puts the number of students migrating into and out of the state into context.
I’m not surprised about West Virginia. WVU is an afternoon’s drive from Pittsburgh metro area. The football game between Pitt and WVU is called the “backyard brawl”. A friend’s child goes to WVU (she is a PA resident) and pays less for out of state tuition than she would pay at Penn State for in state tuition…
University of Maine has a great offer, actually. Everyone on CC talks about the low tuition at Alabama, but overlooks the U of Maine Orono offer, which is a great state too. (Scenery, ocean, fresh air, food, national park etc etc etc.)
U of Maine matches flagship tuition across the country-- https://go.umaine.edu/apply/scholarships/flagship-match/