What's driving the push for out-of-state students? To understand why public universities are increasingly resorting to out-of-state students, it’s necessary to consider broader trends in financing public higher education across the nation.
The financial crisis and the recession have contributed to tight state budgets have cut back spending on services across the board, and higher education funding has consistently been on the chopping block. But state funding has been on the decline for much longer than the recent dip in the economy.
Last year
The New York Times reported that states have been engaged in a “25-year withdrawal from higher education. During and immediately after the last few recessions, states slashed financing for colleges. Then when the economy recovered, most states never fully restored the money that had been cut. The recent recession has amplified the problem.”
According to a report from the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University, state appropriations for colleges fell by 7.6 percent in 2011-12, the largest annual decline in at least five decades.
“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,” Ronald G. Ehrenberg, the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, told the
Times.
Maintaining the mission The basic irony that underlies the findings of Curs and Jaquette’s study is that the out-of-state population of a public universities are sought out primarily to control costs for in-state students. But when the quest for this revenue source goes too far, it causes the institution to veer from its public mission as qualified residents lose slots.
Daniel Fogel, then president of the University of Vermont,
told Inside Higher Ed, "There is the risk of subtly and not so subtly undermining the public mission. Then you are like a private university that isn't at the top of the pecking order, looking for the sweet spot of the kids who are qualified to come and can pay all or most of the cost, and that's a pretty market-driven agenda."
Some observers are more sanguine, and have argued that tighter budgets do not necessarily have to come at the expense of maintaining diversity.
Stanley Henderson, Vice Chancellor for enrollment management and student life at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and a former AACRAO president, told AACRAO Connect: "Access to America's colleges and universities will be one of the great challenges that we face in the next 10 years because without a fully representative student body, academic excellence cannot be maintained. If a university values a diverse student body, it needs to make that a priority."
"At the University of Michigan-Dearborn we have seen an increase of more than 50% in African-American undergraduates in the last eight years--in spite of a state-passed ban on affirmative action. We created an Opportunity Scholarship program targeted to all students in low socio-economic school districts--acceptable under the affirmative action ban, but still reaching underrepresented students. Where there's a value, there's a way."