Out-of-state flagships became even more attractive after the Great Recession of 2008, as families with financial means started to question the value of paying full freight at more obscure private colleges. In contrast to a private school like Scripps, Skidmore, Chapman, or Clark, a flagship—even if it meant moving states—seemed like a relative bargain. Sure, these families had to pay out-of-state tuition. But a price tag of, say, thirty thousand dollars a year at the University of Minnesota looked pretty reasonable compared with the fifty thousand or so that a private school such as the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts expected them to pay annually.
In some cases, high-school seniors were actively pushed to apply to out-of-state universities. Although most public universities expanded to take in more students from elsewhere, while still being able to cater to a sizable in-state student population, not all did. According to a study from 2017, a third of the nation’s flagships—all highly ranked and thus popular with out-of-staters—turned away some of their own state’s residents to make room for higher-paying students from elsewhere. For every two non-resident students who enrolled, the study found, one in-state student was shut out. That vicious cycle spins in states such as California, Illinois, and Texas. Residents apply to their local flagship. They get crowded out, and so they go to big public universities in other states which have space for them. Then students in those states get pushed aside, so they apply to public universities in other states, too.
In other cases, strong applicants were pulled across state lines by a hefty discount or a boutique academic experience, such as an honors college. One prospective student I met from Pennsylvania had initially set her sights on the University of Chicago. Despite her near-perfect stats (a 35 on the ACT, a 1510 on the SAT, thirteen Advanced Placement courses, and a 3.95 grade-point average), she was rejected after applying early decision. At the time, she didn’t have a single public university on her shortlist. Her mother did some digging and landed on the University of Mississippi as a possibility. It has an honors college and generous scholarships, including some that come with stipends for study-abroad programs and undergraduate research. “I applied to appease my mom and get an acceptance under my belt,” she told me.
It wasn’t until after she was accepted and had started the interview process for the university’s top scholarships that she seriously considered going there. She realized, “There were all these opportunities I could qualify for, and I was hearing about them before I heard I was even accepted to other schools.” Mississippi knew it was competing with much higher-ranked colleges, so it had to come in strong and early.
By April, the student had acceptance letters and financial-aid packages from Rice and Vanderbilt. Neither included the full ride and other perks that Mississippi offered her. Before making her decision, she flew to Houston with her dad to visit Rice again. It was a weekday, but the campus felt dead. They walked to a nearby park, where she made a pros-and-cons list for Rice and Mississippi. Then she broke down in tears.“The only pro I could come up with for Rice,” she recalled when we spoke recently, “is that people will know I’m smart because I go to Rice.”
With more tuition dollars coming in from out-of-state students, public universities such as Ole Miss could afford to offer discounts or even full rides to a select number of academic superstars. The University of Alabama, for example, spent $185.4 million on merit aid in 2023-24, more than twice what it allocated for need-based aid. These high-achieving students act as magnets, attracting others in their home towns who don’t mind paying an out-of-state sticker price that, to them, still seems like a steal.
When Alabama started going after out-of-staters, it focussed on two types of places, according to a team of social scientists who studied how colleges recruit. It targeted high schools in prosperous suburbs around Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles, where the university knew that getting accepted to in-state flagships was very difficult for all but the top students. It also courted applicants from bedroom communities around New York; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Boston; and eventually Chicago, where Alabama’s sticker price looked downright reasonable compared with the tuition at pricey private colleges and more expensive public options. Over time, these efforts paid off. By 2022, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, Texas, and California ranked among Alabama’s top sources of out-of-staters.
When the big public universities first went on their out-of-state recruiting spree more than twenty years ago, they had an abundance of prospective students to choose from among millennials. Then, over the past ten years, they also saw a steady increase in interest from overseas, as the number of international students enrolling in U.S. institutions grew by twenty-seven per cent, amounting to more than a million international students attending school in the U.S.
And yet those pipelines may be drying up. The class of freshmen arriving on college campuses this fall may be the last big one for years, owing in part to declining birth rates and fewer high-school graduates deciding to attend college. What’s more, the decline is not evenly distributed across the country. Only the South will see a net increase in high-school graduates, and that’s the region where out-of-state enrollment has swelled the most among public flagships. For those universities, the supply of students from elsewhere may begin to dwindle.
