How Long Will the Great Student Swap Last?
For years, public universities have aggressively recruited out-of-state and international students, charging them higher tuition. But those pipelines may be drying up.
When prospective students visit the University of Alabama, they begin their tour at the Catherine and Pettus Randall Welcome Center, a gleaming white three-story Italianate-style structure with a stacked front porch. The building, which once housed a mental hospital and is on the National Register of Historic Places, opened up on campus in 2024. In the escalating contest for teen-age attention and allegiance, an admissions “welcome center”—with an auditorium for presentations to high-school students and their families and iconic spaces for Instagrammable moments—is now a must-have for universities. But Alabama’s might be the most extreme example.
Once inside, families are met with a mix between what one might find in a modern museum, and while waiting in line at Disney World to ride the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. Floor-to-ceiling screens welcome visitors, displaying the individual names of prospective students in lights. As the visitors wend their way through the halls, toward the theatre where the admissions-information session takes place, they pass a series of carefully crafted photo and video exhibits highlighting various aspects of the university and the surrounding city of Tuscaloosa. The facility’s crown jewel is the Roll Tide Room, which is wrapped entirely in monitors playing clips from Alabama football games on a continuous loop.
The point of this is to persuade teen-agers from all over the country to choose Alabama. “You have to differentiate yourself at the front door,” Matt McLendon, who oversees the school’s undergraduate-enrollment operation, told me during a campus visit. “Not all undergraduates even here now were predisposed to consider us at first.”
For much of its history, Alabama, like other flagship institutions—that is, the best known public university in a given state—focussed on attracting students from within its own borders, competing in a ground game against nearby rivals, such as Auburn University. Over the past two decades, though, the University of Alabama has transformed its student body, increasing its share of new out-of-state undergraduates from just twenty-three per cent in 2002 to sixty-five per cent in 2022, according to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
This trend is not confined to Alabama. The N.C.E.S also found that, in that same time span, the number of high-school graduates leaving their home state for a public university elsewhere has more than doubled. In 2002, about a quarter of the arriving undergraduates at the University of South Carolina came from outside the state; now roughly half of them do. In that same period, new out-of-state undergraduates at the University of Oregon increased from twenty-eight per cent to fifty-six per cent. At the University of Oklahoma, the number jumped from twenty-four per cent to forty-five per cent. The University of Wisconsin-Madison gradually raised its out-of-state enrollment cap and then totally eliminated it in 2015. Within six years, nearly half the first-year students on the Madison campus came from other states.
At the average flagship’s main campus, nearly four out of every ten undergraduates now come from another state. New Jersey kids go to Penn State instead of Rutgers; Illinois residents head off to the University of Missouri instead of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For students, going to college out of state is a chance to get away from home—and from their high-school classmates—or to experience what they perceive as “big college” life, such as Saturday tailgates and a thriving social scene centered on fraternities and sororities. But it’s the schools themselves that benefit most from this system, as they are able to charge much higher tuition for out-of-state students. Total costs for in-state students at Alabama run $34,600 this academic year; for out-of-state students, the list price is nearing sixty thousand dollars. Though the quality of the school’s football program cannot be denied, many of these students are coming from states such as Illinois, Georgia, and California, which are also known for big universities with prominent football teams, school spirit, and a vibrant Greek life. (Not to mention that at any big public university, you are still likely to encounter tens of thousands of new people who have never even heard of your high school, even if it’s in the same state.) In other words, these students are paying twice as much as they would otherwise—for a similar product.
