Public colleges chase out-of-state students, and tuition

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Over three generations, the Michael family forged a deep bond with the University of California, dating back nearly 50 years to when Jay Dee Michael Sr. was the university system's vice president and chief lobbyist.

Family members proudly displayed degrees from the campuses in Los Angeles, Davis, Berkeley and Santa Barbara. And when Michael died last year, his family asked that memorial donations go to a UC Davis institute. Recently, though, the relationship has soured, a victim of the economic forces buffeting public universities.

Jay Dee Michael Jr. said he might never feel the same again after his son was rejected from several UC campuses.

"I have blue and gold running through my blood," Michael told a state Assembly hearing here in March. "But I can tell you that when I get calls now from UC Davis, as an alum, I'm not giving a dime."

A state audit in March reinforced what many California parents already suspected: On a constant hunt for more revenue, the prestigious University of California system gave favorable admissions treatment to thousands of higher-paying out-of-state and foreign students, to the detriment of Californians.

As a result, admissions to the system have become a bipartisan political issue in California, where the Legislature recently moved to link university funding to enrolling additional California residents.

But at its core, the discontent in California, which is also developing in other states, reflects a broader, fundamental breakdown in the traditional operation of the public university. And it highlights troubling questions about affordability and access, much of the impetus behind the announcement by Hillary Clinton on Wednesday that she was embracing a large part of Bernie Sanders' proposal to provide free tuition at in-state public colleges.

Since the 2008 recession, states have reduced spending on public higher education by 17 percent, while tuition has risen by 33 percent, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The University of California system relied on state money for almost a quarter of its budget as recently as 2002, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now, that figure is 9 percent, after $1 billion in cuts.

Students who once could afford high-quality educations at their state public universities now pay nearly twice what they used to pay, part of the driving force behind a $1.27 trillion student debt bill.

According to the College Board, the average cost of attending a four-year public university, including room and board, increased from $11,655 in 2000 to $19,548 in 2015, in inflation-adjusted dollars. In the City University of New York system, tuition at four-year colleges is now $6,330, having increased by $300 each year since 2011, when it was $4,830.

Clinton's proposal — which would use federal funds to make in-state public tuition free for students with family incomes of up to $125,000 — would also require states to pay matching dollars. Public higher education advocates generally agree that a federal effort to reverse the long disinvestment by states is overdue.

"What Sanders figured out — it's not the $65,000 cost of attendance at some of our pricier privates driving the debt bubble, but rather the disinvestment and privatization of public higher ed," said Barmak Nassirian, the director of federal relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

In California, nonresident enrollment has been about 15.5 percent on UC campuses overall, but as high as 29 percent at the marquee campus, Berkeley. Yet California's out-of-state enrollment is low compared with flagship universities in a number of other states. On Monday, Berkeley announced that it had offered admission to 14,400 high school students for this fall, including 1,000 more California residents than last year.

Defending her university system after the audit's release in March, President Janet Napolitano wrote that because of budget cuts, nearly every state in the nation had been forced to make a "Hobson's choice, and they all have reached the same decision: Open doors to out-of-state students to keep the doors open for in-state students."

Napolitano reeled off a list of more than a dozen big public universities whose out-of-state enrollment exceeds California's. Some, like the University of Alabama, where the student body of 37,000 is more than 50 percent nonresident, have resorted to aggressive marketing aimed at luring out-of-staters, including distributing million of dollars in merit aid to nonresidents, much of it to high-achieving students from affluent families, not only improving its bottom line but also raising average test scores, metrics used by commercial ratings groups to rank colleges.

But it is a ratings and financial game, some worry, that means university student bodies will increasingly become alienated from their state's population.

"It seems like all the incentives are going after wealthy students and leaving the low-income students in the dust," said Stephen Burd, a senior policy analyst with the New America Foundation who has studied the increased use of merit aid to attract nonresident students.

A study soon to be published study found that as out-of-state enrollment increases, universities admit fewer minority and low-income students.

"When you grow the share of out-of-state students, you're making the student body richer, more white and Asian and less black and Latino," said one of the study's co-authors, Ozan Jaquette, an assistant professor of education at UCLA.

‘Shifting the culture’

Elliot Spillers, from Pelham, Alabama, was student body president at the University of Alabama last year — the first black student in 40 years to have held that position. He said he doubted he would have been elected if the student body, which is mostly white, had been homegrown. The university's enrollment is now more than half out-of-staters.

"It's definitely shifting the culture here on campus, which is a positive thing," Spillers said, echoing the views of many students.

Others see a less positive side to the change.

Of the out-of-state undergraduates at Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus, more than 3,000 receive merit aid in the form of free or discounted tuition — an average of $19,000 per student. In 2015, the university gave $100 million in merit aid.

Burd, of the New America Foundation, wonders if that money could be better used to help needy students, particularly in a state with a poverty rate among the highest in the country. In essence, he said, some colleges have adopted the enrollment tactics of private colleges to increase revenues and enhance prestige.

Devin Thompson of St. Paul, Minnesota, had a near-perfect SAT score and realized he could save $200,000 over four years by not attending a private college in Virginia and instead accepting the free tuition offered by Alabama, automatic to anyone with his record. The son of college professors, he will be attending this fall.

By enrolling Thompson, Alabama will elevate its average SAT score, one of the metrics used in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. That, in turn, education experts say, will attract other affluent students, many of whom will get smaller merit packages from Alabama — just enough to make the college enticing compared with its peers.

Meanwhile, the number of entering freshmen from Alabama high schools has declined steadily, from 3,122 in 2009 to 2,458 in 2015, records show. University officials say the acceptance rate for those students — 63 percent — has remained the same.

About half a mile away and just across the railroad tracks from the University of Alabama's manicured campus sits the mostly black Central High School.

Few Central High students attend the University of Alabama. Ernestine Tucker, a Tuscaloosa school board member, wonders whether the university is working hard enough to recruit them.

"You would think their first priority would be the local students," Tucker said.