<p>^^ Arcadia’s right, I think. Princeton Review shows Colgate 71% out-of-state.</p>
<p>“In-state v. out-of-state” means something very different for publics than it does for privates, insofar as the former are supported in part by legislative appropriations and chartered (or in some cases, created directly by the state constitution) for the purpose of educating residents of the state. So to some extent we’re comparing apples and oranges here. But it’s noteworthy that among the publics there’s a big difference between schools like Michigan, Wisconsin, William & Mary, Georgia Tech, and Virginia on the one hand–all around 30% OOS; and the UCs, UIUC, U Texas, and U Florida at the other end of the scale, all with a tiny fraction of OOS students, in many cases under legislative mandates or university admissions policies that favor in-state and disfavor OOS applicants. </p>
<p>There’s also a surprisingly large variance among the privates. I’d never have guessed that Stanford is nearly half in-state, or that Rice is over half in-state. </p>
<p>The size of the state population has something to do with it—DC, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine all have tiny populations. But since in-state-v.-out-of-state doesn’t mean as much for privates as for publics, I think a more instructive measure might be how much of its student body a school draws from outside its own immediate region. It’s not so surprising that only 2% of Georgetown students come from the District (2007 population 588,292); but there may be many more from DC’s Maryland and Virginia suburbs, who don’t show up here, and even more from the larger Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area. </p>
<p>Or consider a school like Haverford, for example, which can legitimately report that only 11% of its students come from Pennsylvania. But according to Haverford’s own website, another 37% come from other Mid-Atlantic states, so that roughly half of its student body comes from its own region. Add in another 16% from New England and you’ve got nearly two-thirds of the Haverford student body coming from the Northeast, suggesting that it’s really much more a “regional” school than the out-of-state figure alone might seem to imply.</p>