<p>NewHope, The instate kids getting into UVa are ,in general, at the top of their game. It would be rare for an instate kid to get in with a 3.7 without some hook. Even instate kids with 2300 + SAT’s can and do get waitlisted. There was a long thread this year from an irate instate parent of a 2330 kid who got waitlisted. Happens more than you think. Agree with Marsian that the most important mission of state schools is to educate the students of their state. Every state has public options. If you choose to go outside your state, expect to pay more.</p>
<p>Also, in states like Virginia, WHERE in the state you live makes a huge difference to admissions. Fairfax county GPAs generally have to be above a 4.0 for the guidance counselors to even sign off on applying to UVA. I have friends who scored over 2300 on their SATs and were in the top 10% of their classes who couldn’t get into UVA because they were quota’d out by too many kids from Fairfax county. But that’s an entirely different issue . . . (as she opens up a whole new can of worms)</p>
<p>The last two posts summarize my position (perhaps even better than I did). I agree with everyone who says the mission of state schools is to educate students of their state. That’s going to be a challenge in Virginia if UVA admits students without regard to zip code. As artemis95 points out, the University is already rejecting higher stat kids in order to serve lower stat IS kids. Opening its doors to OOS kids isn’t going to make things any easier for VA residents in central and southern Virginia.</p>
<p>A quick look at current 25th/75th percentile SAT scores for incoming UVA freshman tells the story. The top quarter of UVA’s freshman class scores at the 97th percentile (or better). Will a lot of good (but not top) central/southern Virginia kids get squeezed out by letting more Fairfax County and OOS kids in? Well sure.</p>
<p>OOS is capped. Fairfax has very many high stats kids but there are certainly high stats kids in other parts of Virginia. Just not as big a concentration. UVa uses an holistic approach. Things like GPA ,EC’s and leadership are looked at in addition to SAT’s. UVa had over 28,000 applications, about 20,000 were OOS for limited slots. There was bound to be disappointment for many OOS applicants. It is very tough for many of the instate kids who do not get in.</p>
<p>So back to the OP. Given that UVA can’t find slots for exceptional Virginia residents, why should OOS students and internationals be given preference (by paying IS rates while denying slots to IS students)? In CC terminology, why should OOS be a “hook?”</p>
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<p>Money, obviously.</p>
<p>What seems to be overlooked is making full-pay a hook for in-state residents. In CA, low-income is a hook but high income is not, so high achieving full-pays get squeezed out in favor of high achieving low-income students, and now OOS applicants. The result is a giant sucking sound of CA dollars leaving the state to educate full-pay CA students at good public and private colleges outside of CA.</p>
<p>I’ll put another twist on this. We have a son that will be a 2014 hs grad, applying fall 2013. His father (single family income) will be retiring and going to private industry January 2014. We have absolutely no idea where we will be living in fall of 2014. We may or may not be Va residents. So, my son has to apply to schools with the knowledge that he has to prepared for not having instate tuition at ANY state, also not knowing what state his parents will be in. FUN, FUN, FUN! We will look for schools, both private and public where he will qualify for merit and fin-aid, then compare offers in April, by then knowing where we will be living. He will include Va publics just in case we stay in state.</p>
<p>Do I wish we could keep Va instate tuition? You bet. Do I understand the rules upfront and am I able to help my son make informed choices about schools to apply to that will best suit his needs and our budget? Absolutely. So, while people are complaining about what’s fair about IS vs. OOS, understand there are people who are US citizens who are IS absolutely nowhere. You know this, you make plans accordingly. So what. Really, so what. My son will have plenty of options and as long as I don’t sit around making a stink about it he will enjoy the journey of visiting schools that fit the bill and choosing one that works for him. </p>
<p>There is way too much whining about what is fair and what isn’t. We have an obnoxious wealth of amazing schools available in this nation to students at almost every price point and academic ability. There is too much “but I want what’s over there, at the price they are paying!”. Know what’s available to your students, cast a wide net so there are lots of choices, make an informed decision, and once you do, stopyer*****in! No one made you pay OOS tuition, full freight at a private, or anything else.</p>
<p>FWIW, we are catching a break in that my S2 will be a forth year at UVa in 2014 and he is granted one year instate if we leave Va. Whew! My kids come from a very competitive area of the state where the acceptance rate to UVa is 25%, slightly higher then OOS. UVa does not release IS vs OOS accepted students stats (a good thing IMHO), however students from their hs are statistically at the 75th percentile. They are not overshadowed by their OOS peers when they arrive on grounds.</p>
<p>Re: #57 and [Stop</a> N.J. ‘brain drain:’ Let’s keep college students in state | NJ.com](<a href=“http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2012/04/stop_nj_brain_drains_lets_keep.html]Stop”>Stop N.J. 'brain drain:' Let's keep college students in state - nj.com)</p>
<p>From what I have seen from student postings, it seems that the “anywhere but Rutgers” attitude is extremely common among high-stats NJ students, even when Rutgers is well within affordability and offers reputable degree programs in their majors.</p>
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<p>That’s certainly what they’re trying to do in South Dakota. There’s a pretty serious labor shortage developing in the Dakotas, and an aging population after many years in which a large fraction of their own young people left to seek greener pastures elsewhere. They’re desperate for young people to fill those currently unfilled jobs and help grow their economy. So they’ve set OOS tuition at their state universities at rock-bottom rates, hoping a fraction of those who bite will decide they like the lifestyle and the local job prospects and stay after graduation. Not sure how well it’s working.</p>
<p>Minnesota is doing something similar, but for slightly different reasons. OOS tuition at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is only about $5K higher than in-state, and both are relatively low; for a Californian, for example, total COA would be slightly lower at Minnesota than at most of the UCs. The University explicitly makes the argument to the state legislature that it operates as a “talent magnet” to bring highly educated young people into the state, with most of that talent concentrated in the Twin Cities metro where most of the technical and professional jobs are and where the highest rates of high-end job growth are expected to be. A recent study ranked Minneapolis-St. Paul the 8th most highly educated metro area in the U.S. after such obvious contenders as Washington, DC, San Jose-Silicon Valley, Boston-Cambridge, Madison, Fairfield County CT, San Francisco-Oakland, and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. And that, of course, makes the Twin Cities metro an attractive place for high-tech and knowledge-industry employers to locate. A generally strong local economy also keeps a lot of Minnesotans pretty close to home, of course; as of July 2012 Minneapolis-St. Paul had the third lowest unemployment rate among metro areas with populations of 1 million or more at 5.9%, topped only by Oklahoma City (4.8%) and Washington, DC (5.6%). We also import a lot of young people from the Dakotas, Iowa, and western Wisconsin which are part of the Twin Cities’ natural hinterland; some come through the U, some come already armed with college degrees from elsewhere, but they come because job prospects are generally good, and we have lots of attractive urban amenities that you just won’t find in Fargo or Cedar Rapids or Eau Claire. So it all works out. It’s hard to say exactly how much the U’s tuition policy contributes, but as long as we keep growing our highly educated workforce, I think there will a lot of public and political support for keeping OOS tuition low.</p>
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<p>Absolutely true. Some weeks ago I ran a little comparison of where the top HS grads in New Jersey and Michigan end up. In NJ a very large fraction of them go to top private colleges and universities, mostly out of state, and a non-trivial fraction of them go to OOS publics that are perceived to be stronger than Rutgers. In contrast, Michigan sends only very tiny numbers of its HS grads to private colleges and universities, whether in-state or out-of-state; most of the top-stats Michigan HS grads end up at the University of Michigan, with a smaller batch at Michigan State, and smatterings at the rest of the state’s public and private colleges and universities. In the Fall of 2010, 234 New Jerseyans enrolled as freshmen at the University of Michigan; not a single Michigander enrolled at Rutgers. Michigan’s terms of trade were similarly lopsided with other states, even those with strong flagships; 297 Californians enrolled at the University of Michigan, while only 27 Michiganders enrolled at UC Berkeley, and 1 at UCLA. Michigan sent only 159 freshmen to the 8 Ivies combined, while New Jersey sent 1,265. Michigan sent only 51 students to top-10 LACs; New Jersey sent 300. And so on, down the line; New Jerseyans don’t just say “anywhere but Rutgers,” they vote with their feet and they’ll go just about anywhere, while Michiganders appear perfectly content with their public flagship, if they can get in. (Of the two, Michigan is the larger state in population, and produces substantially more HS grads annually). And not surprisingly, SAT CR+M scores at Michigan are about 170 points higher than Rutgers at the 25th percentile, and 140 points higher at the 75th percentile.</p>
<p>So Michigan appears to be acting both as a talent magnet and as a stopper against the brain drain. Or is it? I think there’s some concern in Michigan that the University of Michigan may be gathering up the state’s best and brightest and preparing them for export to other states. It’s not the university’s fault, exactly; it’s just educating them. But an awful lot of Michigan grads–including state residents as well as those who came as OOS students-- leave the state after college, because job prospects are better elsewhere. Many would prefer to stay in Ann Arbor, but the Ann Arbor economy, while generally strong, is just too small to absorb more than a small fraction of them. So many leave for Chicago, or the East Coast, or the West. And to some extent, once alumni networks get established that way, there’s going to be a continued pull toward out-of-state career opportunities. Wisconsin faces a similar dilemma; Madison is bigger than Ann Arbor so probably more Wisconsin grads stay, but in large part the University of Wisconsin does a terrific job of preparing its students for careers in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul. </p>
<p>So I’m not sure the fix for New Jersey is simply to get more top talent to stay in-state for college. It might be more complicated than that.</p>
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Are you sure that those are the same international students? I was a financial aid-receiving international student at a small liberal arts college once. Most of the international student body fell neatly into two categories:</p>
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<li><p>The financial aid recipients who spent their christmas breaks eating ramen noodles in desolate dorms, some of whom couldn’t even afford a second-hand laptop computer. </p></li>
<li><p>The “polished” (as you call them) full pay or nearly full pay international students from upper middle class backgrounds who got every opportunity handed to them on a silver platter.</p></li>
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<p>But the real question is why college is so expensive in the first place? We would not have a ridiculous number of threads like these if college was generally affordable, as it should be.</p>
<p>blueiguana-we were potentially going to be in a similar situation, although we knew where we were going to be moving. We checked into this with the schools the kids were considering at the time and it really depends on the school but, most of the schools took this into consideration and would allow the student to retain their residency in the state in which they graduated high school. A couple had some conditions about that, one was that they could not take a full time job in the new state. All of them said that once they started classes, their entering residency stayed with them all 4 years. Again, each school will have their own take on this but they will have a policy in place that you can check into.</p>
<p>If money is the primary issue, why can’t they have a quota of the low $x dollar seats and the remaining at the full $y price? Only instate qualify for the low cost seats, and once it’s filled, the remaining are open to anyone - IS or OOS, intl, but at full price?</p>
<p>Dad<em>of</em>3–how fast do you want that school to close it’s door? Again, EVERYONE is charged the same price to attend any school. How they pay for that differs. There are not “low cost” seats at any school, they all cost the same. Some students qualify for financial aid, either through the state or federal government or through endowments, etc. in the form of scholarships. That reduces how much the student pays out of pocket themselves, but does not reduce the cost of attendance. In-state students receive a subsidy from the state to help pay for their schooling, out of state students do not.</p>
<p>“everyone is charged the same price” sounds like semantics to me. Everyone’s FAMILY is not charged the same price. Everyone does not come out with the same amount of debt. The point is that some people get enormous unearned subsidies while others do not – it’s socialism, redistributing the wealth. “everyone is charged the same price” sounds like something that Stalin or Lenin would say.</p>
<p>Momzie–the starting tuition/fees for every student is exactly the same. It isn’t semantics because every family has different resources to pay for college, thus, their outcome is ALWAYS going to be different. Yes, some schools are going to give some kids money and not others. That is not socialism at all, it is very much capitalism because they want the kids they want and will entice them in different ways-usually through money. Heck, even our twins, if they go off to the same school, will have to pay different amounts of money to that same school, from the same family, with the same income because of grades, test scores and athletic aid.</p>
<p>If you want to talk lower income families, yes, there are federal and state grants that make college more affordable for families of lesser means. Exactly HOW is this a bad thing?</p>
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<p>It should be obvious why some people oppose this, but I will spell it out.</p>
<p>I pay a lot of Federal income tax, in part to support such grants, and on top of that I have to pay much higher tuition for my children. If you think the government is overly involved in the redistribution of wealth, this is a bad thing. It is a political question. More Republicans than Democrats would agree with my argument.</p>
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<p>Well, as someone who is fortunate enough to be in a high tax bracket and in the top 0.x% of earners, I’m gracious enough not to be bothered with the concept of extending my hand to help others up, too. I’d much rather be in my position than in the position of the person needing the hand up, and I am not so ugly as to begrudge them.</p>
<p>“there are grants from the state and the federal government that make funds available for lower income families” begs the question – where exactly does this money come from? It comes from tax dollars that people have paid into the system. The government doesn’t simply HAVE the money. It has to come from somewhere. THAT’s why it’s a bad thing. The government didn’t build the roads or the schools. They took my money to do it (and then borrowed from my children and my grandchildren and their children, etc. . . ).</p>
<p>I’m all for charity, but I’d like to be able to decide what charities I contribute to, based on their track records and the efficiency with which they use my contributions. And if I had a choice as to which charitable programs I’d like to fund, USG-funded programs would come in dead last.</p>