I read recently that applications to the University of Virginia are up 18% over this time last year. It’s no surprise. In an economic downturn, Virginia’s flagship public universities are looking mighty attractive to students and parents who might have considered going private when times were flush.
I have spoken with a number of Assembly members from Northern Virginia in the past few years who have told me that, with the exception of complaints about traffic, the most common question they hear from constituents is “why can’t my son or daughter get into UVA, Tech, JMU, William and Mary, etc?”
Parents want to know why Virginia does not cap out-of-state enrollment like North Carolina and a host of other states do.
An 18% surge in applications will ensure that their questions get more insistent when admissions decisions are made next April.
Delegate Clay Athey wants to do something about it. He is proposing legislation that would require all universities in Virginia to have at least 70% of their students in-state if they are to receive any state funds at all. And it is clear that the Univerity of Virginia, Virginia Tech and the College of William and Mary are directly in his sights.
“Virginia’s Universities should be educating Virginia’s children… When you are getting to a point that more than half of them (UVA students) are not Virginia residents, you’ve got a problem.”
Athey’s proposal will meet stiff resistance from the universities and their supporters. They have powerful arguments to make. Overall, Virginia has a superb system of higher education. Out-of-state students bring intellectual capital to the Commonwealth that often stays here upon graduation. In addition, the selectivity of Virginia’s public universities is a central reason why our flagships are rated so highly and considered “Public Ivies.” Supporters might even whisper that obtaining an extra $10,000 in tuition per out of state student makes a significant contribution to the universities’ bottom line.
But none of these arguments will convince a parent who cannot understand why their daughter who is a straight A student with good extracurriculars didn’t get into a Virginia university of her choosing.
We’ve been through this argument before and the universities’ position has always carried the day. I presume that Clay Athey’s bill will have an uphill climb this year as well.
But I also think that legislators are going to hear the voices of parents get louder and louder.
And someday a candidate might just adopt this issue as a populist plank in a run for statewide office.
Athey’s bill might get some traction in a legislature increasingly willing to inject itself–into W&M’s cross flap, into chief’s whatshisname’s VCU degree scuffle, and into other incidents of higher and lesser profile–but, hopefully, not enough. Despite protectionist, almost anti-NAFTA, emotional appeal, at the end of the day initiatives like this only weaken the brand involved. I doubt you’d find any legislator, Athey included, who would admit publicly to favoring quotas of any sort, and this is a quota bill, pure and simple. Philosophy aside, there are some practicalities. Athey’s bill will not answer the “Why didn’t my daughter get into…” question. There will always be thousands of bright kids who won’t get into some of these schools, even if quotas are laid on. Any in-state admissions threshold will be arbitrary. Why not 65%? Why not 80%? Why not all? It wouldn’t take a quantum leap of imagination to go from this line of reasoning to some domestic-international quota arrangement. Or some written-in-stone geographic distribution. Or some fealty pledge or, God forbid, some belief test. These flagship schools should resist this bill. When the brand is at stake, nothing wrong with biting the hands that feed you–BKD.
The debate about capping out-of-state enrollments at state colleges and universities has been going on for years and it is not unique to Virginia.
When I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan in the 1980s, state legislators who were miffed that U-M had approximately 40 percent out-of-state undergraduate enrollment used to make similar complaints. The criticisms usually surfaced because one of the legislators’ children–or one of the offspring of a key constituent or contributor–could not get into to U-M.
Residents of the Commonwealth who attend Virginia’s state universities and colleges benefit from the diversity provided by out-of-state and international students. The admissions requirements for these students tend to be higher than they are for Virginia residents, especially at the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, and Virginia Tech. So, the credentials of the students from outside Virginia lift the overall profile of the Virginia schools they attend and improve the schools’ national rankings. High rankings add value to the degrees held by graduates of those schools.
And of course, out-of-state students pay significantly higher tuition rates than do Virginia residents. These students view the higher tuition rates as a value because they know how good Virginia’s public system of higher education is.
Delegate Athey’s proposal may play well with some of his constituents, but he needs to clarify his casual use of statistics. The enrollment issue is most critical when it comes to undergraduates, because there is currently a demographic glut of college-bound students graduating from Virginia’s high schools. Delegate Athey states that more than half of UVA’s students are from out-of-state. To come up with that result, he must be lumping together undergraduate and graduate students; UVA’s website shows that the first-year class entering this year was split about 68 percent in-state, 32 percent out-of-state. That is actually a higher percentage of in-state students than I recall from my days as a UVA undergraduate in the 1970s.
I remind Delegate Athey that there are also state colleges and universities other than UVA, William and Mary, and Virginia Tech. When it comes to higher education, whether it’s a large research university such as Virginia Commonwealth University, or a smaller school with the atmosphere of a liberal arts college, such as the University of Mary Washington, qualified Virginia residents still have lots of choices. The community college system offers still more options.
Our higher education system has done pretty well so far without the legislature micro-managing enrollments via arbitrary quotas. Let’s leave it that way.