I wonder what the undergrad numbers are for Bama. Is tha twhat you have there @ucbalumnus ?
According to https://www.ua.edu/about/quickfacts
40.1% come from Alabama
56.7% come from elsewhere in the United States
…includes grad and professional students. And is it odd that only 3.2% are international students? Seems low, esp when including grad students.
The OOS student population skews to nearby southern states, according to a site I can’t link to on CC.
Georgia 10.4%
Florida 5.2%
Texas 4.9%
Tennessee 4.4%
Virginia 2.2%
North Carolina 1.8%
As full pay parents, yes we would be willing to pay for most (not all) of the USNWR top 20 schools over our top 50 state flagship, which would be full ride based on our student’s stats.
We definitely wouldn’t pay for any private school below the top 20. Just not worth it in our opinion, as compared to the state flagship for free.
@dropbox77177 A fully determined top 20 isn’t a real thing. There are many top 20s depending on the ranking used, the schools types being used and importantly the majors being considered.
You have some like hpysm that show up in most. However the other elites and top tier are probably more reflected in the new Forbes ranking. I think they consider any school in the top 100 to be in that top tier. but that’s flawed as well. As I read through the names the top 50 + they are all spectacular. If you then look at other rankings and majors you can get a good feel of the top tier for you.
In the end, I agree it’s a tough call to pass up a top flagship like a UM UNC UF UVA or UT UCs etc and pay for the other options. Unless it’s the HPYSM group. Or if you have the wherewithal to make a purely non financial decision.
Which is almost all states, except for a few that had increases in such things as oil and gas money (e.g. ND, WY). Voter demands like lower taxes and more prisons (due to increased sentencing / “three strikes” laws in reaction to the crime wave that peaked in 1991) means that something had to be defunded to balance the state government budget.
Generational priorities may also have something to do with it – the large baby boom generation is mostly past the age where they have kids in high school and college. That the baby boom was predominantly white while the current generation of high school students is just barely majority white adds a racial/ethnic angle to the generational conflict.
Of course, the result of defunding the state universities is that the state universities can only afford to enroll so many subsidized in-state students, or reduce the subsidy (in-state tuition discount and/or in-state financial aid) for each of them. If they have empty seats, they go looking for out-of-state students who do not get subsidies, or pay more than the cost of educating them (a contrast to the past, when some state universities charged out-of-state students less than the cost of educating them in order to attract them to the state for school and then potentially stay and contribute to the state economy afterward).
CA has not defunded its state universities by any stretch, the latest budget calls for UCs general fund to increase by 7%, CSUs by 9% and C/Cs by 1%, with dollars per student also increasing.
Looking at historical tuition levels, many state universities in many states show a trend of stable tuition for a while, then a rapid rise during economic downturns. The latter tends to lead to defunding as states’ tax revenues fall while various vsocial welfare costs increase. But funding often is only partially restored after the economy turns up again.