Non‐resident enrollment and non‐resident tuition at land grant colleges and universities

Abstract

Universities around the United States are seeking ways to attract students to their institutions. One possible strategy is to compete for out‐of‐state students. Since an early 1970s examination of the determinants of student migration by Tuckman, there have been several subsequent studies that have either further developed the methodology of the studies or taken some different perspective on the problem. This paper differs from the existing literature in two ways. First, it focuses exclusively on land‐grant institutions. Second, it uses panel data rather than just time‐series or cross‐sectional data. Evidence regarding the impact of historical Black college/university status and regional variations are presented as well. The evidence indicates that quality has more influence on student migration than price, indicates that historical Black college/universities attract fewer out‐of‐state students than other land grant institutions and indicates that there are non‐specific regional differences in land grant institutions’ abilities to attract migrant students.

Keywords:

• land grant
• student migration
• tuition

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editor and an anonymous referee who made several useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The paper was greatly improved as a result.

Notes

1. Rizzo and Ehrenberg (2004, p. 307) describe flagship universities as ‘primarily Research I and II institutions’ that are ‘the most selective and largest public institutions in each state’.

2. The same could be said regarding Native American institutions but the data are not available in such a way as to easily address the Native American question. IPEDS data on these institutions are aggregated before reporting; therefore, Native‐American‐serving land grant institutions are not included in this study.