An Argument From a Minnesota Professor

There is an interesting article today in the Chronicle of Higher Education from a University of Minnesota professor. He makes an interesting point about land grant schools, namely that they have strayed too far away from their public mission. He says that land grant schools were founded to benefit the people in the state and educate them, but most now rely on large out of state populations to boost their rankings and their money intake.

While he makes some interesting points, I have to take issue with a couple things. Mostly, I'm just not sure that funding from the state is particularly tied to the number of in-state students a university has. For example, my school, University of Michigan, has kept roughly the same proportion of in-state students since time out of mind, but state funding has declined precipitously. So, accepting out of state students might just be an insurance policy against flagging state support, not a cause thereof.

Illinois Going more Out-of-State

A look into the statistics provided by the University of Illinois Student Enrollment Office shows that new Freshman were almost 90% in-state in Fall 2006, but in Fall 2009, they were just over 80%. This is broadly in line with what many state schools are doing, largely as an effort to increase prestige and tuition revenue.