True enough, but you hear people on here bemoaning that various states aren’t providing higher education opportunities to qualified kids when they seem to mean various states aren’t providing a 4-year live-away experience filled with dorming students in a desirable location/college town with a FBS football team to all in-state HS grads, which to me aren’t the same thing.
We probably have an oversupply of colleges and universities in this country. Lots of small private schools are closing or struggling. And a lot of public universities are not really located where they should be.
150 years ago when many of these public universities were created the country was young and much more rural. And a lot of public universities were located in rural area for political and economic development reasons. Not so much for the students, but to bring investment and economic development to different parts of each state. If we were building the system today it would be completely irrational to put public universities in many of the places where they exist today. And frankly, a of what is getting built today is in car-centric suburban areas where large tracts of empty land can be found, where there often aren’t nearby college-oriented business districts. And a lot of suburban commuter schools are also oriented more towards non-traditional students who might be older and not so into the traditional college experience.
That said, students do have a choice. And a lot of 18 year old students want that Instagram-type image of a college experience. A residential university with ivy covered buildings, traditional quads, dorms, sorority row, a social scene with college bars, shops, and pizza places nearby. And lots of social events like football and campus traditions. The newer suburban campuses that look like office parks just don’t provide that. UC-Merced might be a great school. But where is that college bar your dad or uncle used to frequent 30 years ago, and where is the sorority house that your mother or grandmother lived in? And where is the football stadium dad or grandpa remember going to games in. That kind of thing might be trivial in terms of education. But it is important to many people. To the extent that you have lots of CA college kids seeking out places like the UO in Eugene or UA in Tucson which offers all of that in spades over UC-Riverside or UC-Merced or a suburban Cal State school which don’t.
I wonder what percentage of CA high school grads are first generation college students, and what percentage are growing up with the desire to relive their parents’ college days? I don’t disagree that there are lot of kids who feel the way @Camasite describes, but I think most of the kids I talk to are more influenced by the rankings and the (debatable) perception that it will be easier to get a good job after graduating from a UC than a Cal State, than they are by the desire to follow some college-going traditions. If their choice is among Cal State San Berdardino, Oregon, Arizona, and community college, and Oregon and Arizona give them merit to lower the price, I don’t blame them for choosing Oregon or Arizona.
However, most super bright first generation kids would never even think to apply to Oregon or Arizona, so they go to community college and end up transferring to UCR in the end. Is it advantageous for the state to send them through CC to UCR? Maybe. Lots of factors to consider for the kids and the state, including the fact that very few such kids finish CC in the advertised two years. I just don’t think it’s fair to say the kids are all just too snooty to go to a Cal State. I think they are making the choices that make the most sense to them with the limited knowledge they have.
@Camasite: “Not so much for the students, but to bring investment and economic development to different parts of each state.”
Well, in a lot of cases more because some guy donated the land or because it was around the geographic center of the state. Also remember that many public flagships started out as ag schools (and were pretty small; around the Civil War, Amherst, which is not much bigger now than then, was the biggest college in the US), so it made sense to put them somewhere rural.
And sure, kids may desire whatever, but as a taxpayer, I want my taxes to go towards educating a workforce, not so much towards providing essentially luxury goods like Instagrammable campuses.
Politics were the same 150 years ago as they are today. Towns and communities competed with each other to attract investment like state universities just like they compete today to attract things like car factories. Except that it was probably even more overtly corrupt back then.
High SES parents also seem to prioritize “the residential college experience” for their kids, as evidenced by the many posts in the COVID-19 threads about how online distance education is not worth the higher tuition that they are paying for their kids’ residential college. Perhaps academic content (beyond the basic “does it have the desired major?”) is significantly less important than the experience at higher SES levels. Even prestige seems to have competition from the college experience in terms of priority.
In contrast, “fit” for lower SES students and parents is often forced to be focused on cost and academic content (though often still limited to “does it have the desired major?”).
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Add Colorado to the list. At one point, 30% of all undergrads at Boulder were Californians. Not just OOS, but from ONE state! The perpetually underfunded University of Colorado and Colorado State love Californians 
True. But schools seek out OOS and foreign students often because their own state residents AREN’T WILLING TO FUND them. So someone has to… and if locals won’t, then the school has a choice of either cutbacks or out-of-state monies. The successful ones in anti-education-funding states all chose the former.
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I am just waiting for the public of Utah to wake up to the way it gives away OOS waivers to kids that don't even bring the stats, and also examine why it is building housing that isn't even needed, in order to force freshman to live on campus. Frankly I don't think they will ever force the latter scenario on instate kids, but my point is, the public really are not aware how this stuff is working unless they have kids there or they work there. If they need OOS kids because they cannot fill their own seats, then don't be building. Utah needs to be like Colorado, for sure love the full freight OOS. Ditch the waivers. Utah is not a state that enjoys funding education, period, so how they pull it off is amazing to me.
Really, covid is going to create this microscope that will expose all sorts of issues in many state schools.
@Sybylla: Well, Utah (unlike most American states these days) actually has a fertility rate that’s close to replacement level (most American states now range from below to well below) so maybe they’re planning for the future.
And they may be thinking long-term in granting in-state residency easily as the U of U is in a major city, so a decent percentage of the OOS kids who go there for school may stay there, contributing to the economic vitality of UT.
I believe that’s partially a reason why German unis are tuition-free.
It’s not a bad economic strategy.
The poster may not have meant it this way, but if this hypothetical CA student wants a school that will “just take anyone”, I don’t think it’s W&M.
I came to the thread to add that W&M receives less than 11% of their funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia, but does have a 1 billion dollar endowment which is decent for a public school of 6,000 students. 65% of students are in-state.
@3SailAway, I meant W&M for in-state applicants, where it isn’t extremely difficult to get in to (easier than Cal and UCLA, for instance).
They don’t want a more selective school. They want the name brand school without having to do the hard work of earning it as would be the case with Berkeley or UCLA.
The dynamics in Virginia in terms of instate acceptances are different than California. W & M is not an easy admission, even for instate kids. It also appeals to kids that want a smaller college experience than they get at a typical large flagship… It is nothing like Cal or UCLA, in terms of either size or how admissions works. And it does not have an engineering school.
Utah is also a member of WUE and probably sends as many students out of state to attend school as it receives. Most of the OOS students attending Utah are probably from other western WUE states and are already paying reduced OOS tution. So it probably doesn’t make that much difference that they are generous or lax with their in-state qualification criteria.
I don’t know for sure, but this also might also be some kind of Mormon perk designed to help Mormon kids in surrounding states come to Utah for college and then maybe stay. They can’t all afford or qualify to attend BYU. So Mormon kids from surrounding states might be subtly recruited to attend Utah universities. Just a wild theory on my part. But it would’t surprise me.
Regarding the UC GPA discussion several posts back, @Gumbymom publishes this data for prospective UC students:
BYU has a lower list price than University of Utah.
https://enrollment.byu.edu/financialaid/cost-of-attendance
https://financialaid.utah.edu/tuition-and-fees/cost-of-attendance.php
BYU $20k LDS, $26k non-LDS
Utah $26k resident, $47k non-resident ($31k WUE)
BYU has two other campuses in Hawaii and Idaho for LDS students who do not get admitted to the Utah campus.
The U of U is not a fall back school for BYU rejects LOL.
I don’t know one way or the other. But:
Utah SAT range: 1130-1350 with 67% acceptance rate
BYU SAT range: 1190-1420 with 64% acceptance rate
So on paper, BYU is slightly more selective.
I know that the Mormon Church is fairly well embedded into all branches of government in Utah. I’m just wondering out loud if Utah’s exceedingly generous residency requirements for college is any kind of attempt to bring Mormons from other states back to Utah for college. I would be curious to know what percentage of OOS students going to Utah and the public schools in the state are Mormons.
“And they may be thinking long-term in granting in-state residency easily as the U of U is in a major city, so a decent percentage of the OOS kids who go there for school may stay there, contributing to the economic vitality of UT.”
This is the actual answer about why Utah offers residency so easily. It wants to grow in terms of population and economy and reckons a lot of students will stay when they realize how high the standard of living is. And there’s a religious background to think about as well, remember that Mormons go on missions to recruit new church members, and the state has the same attitude to recruiting new residents. They don’t need to be Mormon, though if they stay they might marry a Mormon.
And there is absolutely not a balance in terms of WUE, in fact Utah has the highest percentage of students staying instate of any state in the country (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/08/these-states-are-terrible-at-hanging-on-to-their-college-bound-students/%3foutputType=amp) because it has such low tuition (and perhaps because families have a lot of kid to educate).