Why state schools are enrolling more out-of-state students

Public universities are slowly enrolling more out-of-state and international students to benefit from higher tuition costs. How does that affect slots available to in-state students?

From New America:

"For generations, public colleges and universities provided a low-cost higher education to students in their home states," explains the report's author, Stephen Burd. "Those that distributed institutional financial aid mostly gave it to students with the greatest financial need. As a result of these policies, these institutions offered students from low- and moderate-income families a gateway to the middle class."

But over the last 20 years, state disinvestment and institutional status-seeking have worked together, hand in hand, to encourage public colleges and universities, to adopt the enrollment management tactics of their private-college counterparts. For many of these schools, that has meant using their institutional aid dollars strategically in order to lure affluent out-of-state students to their campuses in order to climb up the rankings and increase their revenue.

MPR News' Tom Crann looked at how this shift changes the role of a state's big public university.