Showing posts with label ACT scores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ACT scores. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Flagship Universities Are Enrolling More Out-of-State Students: That May Be A Good Thing

 Aaron Klein, writing for Brookings Mountain West, reported recently that public flagship universities admit more out-of-state students now than they did twenty years ago.

Klein's research revealed that the share of out-of-state students at the states' premier universities went up an average of 55 percent between 2002 and 2022.  At some flagship universities, 20 percent of their students are non-residents.

What accounts for this trend? Klein posits that the flagships are enrolling more out-of-state students because they can charge those students a higher tuition rate. Indeed that partly explains the phenomenon.

 He also points out that most out-of-state students must take out higher student-loan amounts to pay out-of-state tuition. Thus, the flagships' tendency to enroll more outer-state students who pay higher tuition prices contributes to rising levels of student debt.

Also, Klein notes, many in-state students who are pushed out of their flagship universities to make room for more out-of-state students may elect to enroll at less-prestigious regional universities, which Klein points out, may lower their lifetime earnings.  If so, that is unfortunate.

Nevertheless, generating more tuition revenue isn't the only reason that flagship universities are recruiting out-of-state students. As Klein observed, recruiting students is a zero-sum game.  Fewer students are going to college than just a few years ago, and universities across the U.S. desperately compete to attract enough students to keep their enrollments up. 

Thus, flagship schools are luring more out-of-state students because they need them to maintain optimum enrollment levels.  They particularly want to attract out-of-state students with impressive GPAs and ACT/SAT scores.

To attract these students, the flagships frequently offer generous scholarships to out-of-state students. In fact, high academic achievers might be able to attend an out-of-state flagship for less money than if they had enrolled at a school in their home state.

I recently talked to a man whose granddaughter had a perfect ACT score and a stellar academic record at a prestigious high school. She received no scholarship offers from Louisiana State University but got a beautiful offer to enroll at Auburn University in Alabama.

For this student, going to school in Alabama was cheaper than attending LSU. Thus, she enrolled at Auburn.

This is my point. Students with impressive academic records and dazzling standardized test scores should apply for admission to flagship universities outside their home state. They may find that studying at an out-of-state flagship is cheaper than attending an in-state school.

In addition, there can be enormous intangible benefits to enrolling at a college outside one's home state. I'll give my own experience as an example.

I grew up in rural Oklahoma and got a bachelor's degree from Oklahoma State University in the small Oklahoma town of Stillwater. Later, I went to graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin.

Not only did I receive an excellent education at UT, but I also immersed myself in Austin's music scene. I was introduced to the history and literature of the South and the Southwest. I even discovered new cuisines: Tex-Mex, Czech kolaches, and Texas barbecue.

My Texas educational experience opened up opportunities I would have never had if I had stayed in the state where I grew up.  I shudder to think what my life would have been if I had not gone to Texas.

Attending college is the first opportunity most young people have to begin exploring the world. My advice is to leave your home state to get your college degree--especially if you can get a scholarship that makes an out-of-state university affordable.





Monday, November 16, 2020

Dead man walking: The small liberal arts colleges are in a death spiral

 Experts say that the Americans most at risk of dying from the coronavirus are elderly people with serious underlying health problems such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Something similar might be said about America's colleges. The schools most at risk of closing due to the COVID pandemic are small, private liberal-arts colleges that had severe financial problems even before the coronavirus forced most of them to close their campuses last spring. These are the little schools that were struggling with budget deficits and declining enrollments.

Common Application, an organization that processes a standard application form primarily for liberal arts schools, confirms this view.  So far this year, Common App received 8 percent fewer enrollment applications from first-year students than at the same time last year (as reported by Inside Higher Ed).

But some colleges suffered steeper declines than others. Colleges and universities in the Northeast and the Midwest, where the small liberal arts colleges are concentrated, suffered a 14 percent drop in applications. 

And small colleges lost more ground than big ones. First-year college applications were down the most among schools with fewer than one thousand students.  They also are seeing a 14 percent decline.

If next year's entering class drops by a corresponding rate, then a small college of 1000 students will enroll only 860 students, which would be an existential catastrophe.

But enrollments probably won't drop that much. Why? Because many colleges are lowering their standards to attract less qualified students---students who might have been rejected a few years ago.

Presently, a majority of colleges and universities do not require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.  They say they took this measure to offer more enrollment opportunities to first-generation and minority students.  

But I think they are lying. I think the colleges are abandoning standardized test scores to attract students who don't do well on those tests. By doing away with the ACT and SAT, the colleges can obscure that they are scraping the bottom of the academic barrel to get enough tuition-paying students to pay the light bill. 

Also, by giving applicants the option of not submitting a standardized test score, only people with good scores will provide them.  And this will cause the colleges' average test scores to go up--making them look better in the US News and World Report rankings.

In a way, American colleges in the age of  COVID are like the German Wehrmacht during World War II.  When the war began, Germany had plenty of healthy, young Aryan soldiers with blue eyes and blond hair--men who just couldn't wait to get their legs blown off in the service of the Thousand Year Reich.

But as the war wore on, millions of those ideal soldiers were killed in North Africa, the Western Front, or Russia.  The Soviets captured about three million Germans soldiers (mostly men but some women) and allowed them to starve to death.

By the time the Russians got to the suburbs of Berlin in 1945, most of those poster-perfect German soldiers were gone, and the Gestapo was rounding up young boys and old men to man the barricades.

Likewise, many small liberal arts colleges are willing to enroll just about anyone who can pay their tuition bill--whether or not the applicants are qualified under the admissions standards of yesteryear.  

Unfortunately, many of these unqualified students are taking out student loans that they will never pay off.  

In my view, many of these struggling little colleges should close their doors rather than stagger on for a few more years by signing up students who take out student loans for an educational experience that will do them very little good. 

Hey little guy, how would you like to get a bachelor's degree in gender studies?