Hopefully this link works. I copied it from Apple News.
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This is the direct link, but it requires a WSJ subscription:
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Brutal timing too…right in the heat of application season. And it’s not only because of the sports, tuition and fun, we all know that.
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I believe this should be a gift (free) link to the direct source:
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Last time this came up, someone else linked this post, which seems like useful context:
One of the interesting things about that chart is it shows every region has more kids leaving that region in 2022 than in 2010 (you can see this looking down the diagonal lines).
This in turn helps explain how the most “national” schools in, say, New England or the Mid Atlantic are experiencing increases in applications even as more kids in those regions are looking elsewhere for college. All that is being offset, and more, by more kids in other regions also looking outside their regions for college.
Of course the “losers” in all this are the more regional and local colleges without such a national draw. In many states, many of those sorts of colleges have experienced net enrollment declines.
In that sense, it should probably be less, “Sorry, Harvard,” and more, “Sorry, Penn State Hazelton”:
But I suspect that would not go over as well.
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No, there has been a clear trend of some regions (South and Southeast) experiencing an increase in applications vs. others (Northeast), it has accelerated especially after Covid
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You can see what I was referring to in this chart:
This is not applications, though, this is enrollments.
And again, both applications and enrollments very much depend on what sort of college you are talking about. See the article about Pennsylvania I added to get an idea of how different parts of the PA state system have headed in different directions over this recent period.
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Of course my daughter picked a public southern school which costs significantly more than in state, even with merit (I don’t think there is a merit scholarship high enough for that). And off campus housing is expensive since they keep building more luxury apartment complexes. But she’s in heaven.
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Back when I was growing up in a good college-prep Upper Midwest school district, there were already kids who were heading to the South, Southwest, or Southern California for college. But these were usually students on the wealthier side who were doing it for lifestyle reasons. These were the days when like a UCLA or USC was not actually a particularly hard admit.
Now I agree there are certain Southern colleges (although not so much in Southern California) that are, among other things, aggressively marketing themselves on affordability to kids from high schools like my old one. So that is indeed a change.
But I don’t think the lifestyle kids have really gone anywhere, and indeed I could see that in the feederish HS our S24 used. It was very familiar in the sense there were some kids who were clearly seeking out such colleges not for affordability but for lifestyle.
Which I personally do not have a problem with. These are almost invariably very good colleges, and if their family could comfortably afford it, why not?
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By the way, another thing I would agree with is that there is range of public colleges that have become increasingly popular OOS, many flagship-level but not on the older short lists of the most popular OOS colleges.
I think there are some colleges like this all over–Pitt, for example, is bucking the trend in PA as discussed in that article in no small part thanks to this effect. But I would agree there are probably more such colleges in the South (coast to coast really). And I think South Carolina, discussed in the WSJ article, is in fact a good example.
I also think that while affordability is part of it, so in fact is just that many of these colleges are in fact “leveling up,” putting resources into faculty, facilities, special programs, and so on. So at least for the population of kids that can practically look nationally, their options just keep getting better.
But not in a way where it is, say, actually getting easier to get into Harvard or whatever, because no one wants to go Harvard anymore. That’s obviously not happening.
But for sure if for whatever reason you don’t prefer your own in-state options, the list of competitive OOS options just keeps growing. Which is great, at least for that population of students.
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I can say without doubt this article accurately reflects what I have seen since the pandemic, at least within my work. I live in a mostly liberal, suburban area outisde a major metro area. The local districts are well funded and my students are generally ORM. Southern schools are very hot right now.
The strategy of offering great scholarships to kids in my area over the last decade has paid off for these colleges.
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My daughter went south to college, although to a small LAC. As she was starting to look at schools, the Covid measures were in strict effect still in the PNW and the schools in the south were back to normal, very tempting for D23 who spent most of high school during Covid.
As a parent Texas wasn’t super attractive to me, but I do like the idea that my Communications and Art major kid may be able to find a job and afford a home someday there. Much harder where we live.
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Another indicator - look at which forums on CC are the most active 
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As a southerner with a kid at one of the schools highlighted in the article, I think the trend is wonderful! My son has made great friends from New Jersey, Massachusetts, NY, and Connecticut, to name a few. I agree with the article that an influx of bright northern students provides an economic boost to the south, and also I think it is great for the southerners to expand their connections to other geographical areas.
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Which is fascinating as immediately after Dobbs, there were plenty of parent posters on cc saying anywhere but Red states for college.
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Thank you for posting this article. I really enjoyed reading it. I am from Washington State and go to the University of Florida so I resonate with it quite a lot. I have really enjoyed getting to meet people from all over! And it’s totally true. Tuition here is so much cheaper than even in state at UW for me. It’s a total win. It’s cheaper and a signficantly better education. Highly recommend everyone at least take a look at the schools here when making their lists.
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I don’t want to speak for other posters, but in my circles these conversations started turning to questions like what shield laws they had in their home state.
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So glad you are having a great experience! We are from Florida and my son turned down UF for several reasons, but one of them was he just wanted to go out of state and meet more students from all over. It’s wonderful that there are so many options for students to find fit.
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Me too! It really feels to me like many kids of the current generation have a very expansive sense of their potential communities. Like, it can include kids around the world, certainly around the country, and so on. Obviously a lot of that is happening online, and that is cool, but I think actually visiting, even better actually living in, other places is really a natural outgrowth of that, and will help them all with networking, maximizing life options, and so on in the future.
I think there is a temptation sometimes in certain circles to treat all this as a zero sum game (and by all this, I mean college in general, not just this moving around of kids going to college). But as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about things like network economics, to me it just seems obvious that college-related networking is getting stronger generally, nationally and indeed internationally, and that is not a zero sum effect.
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Our daughter chose Auburn (great merit money and terrific niche program she wanted to study). She loved it. I was stunned how much so.
Her close friends were from Chicago, New York, Tennessee, and California. And even a few from Alabama.
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