By Nick Shelly
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
In Maryland, two out of every 10 public university students are from out of state. Alexis Scudder is among that 20 percent. Scudder is a Pennsylvania resident and a freshman at Towson University.
“I knew about Towson because I have family members who live near the school,” Scudder said. “My high school also used to compete here in marching band competitions.”
Towson was Scudder’s top-choice school. “The campus was beautiful and I really liked the proximity to Baltimore,” she said.
Scudder bucked the national trend: About 80 percent of first-time students who enroll at public U.S. universities are from in state. The main reason being that tuition can often be double for out-of-state students.
[infogram id=”1bcee399-910a-4738-8a10-c74c69a4731a” prefix=”KHY” format=”interactive” title=”Finding 1″]
Scudder never really considered going to an in-state school. The main reason being that her second choice, Temple University, cost about the same as Towson’s out-of-state tuition after she was offered scholarships at Towson.
Gwen Hawk, a graduating high school senior and a resident of Maryland, chose Towson, the only university she strongly considered attending.
“I’ve known about it my whole life and several of my closest friends go there,” said Hawk.
Hawk didn’t want to go into debt for college, and Towson seemed very affordable compared to the other colleges that she had considered.
[infogram id=”4c38db2a-8500-4764-8bc1-c3f2c313b36c” prefix=”NTt” format=”interactive” title=”Finding 2″]
An analysis of enrollment data found that Towson gets 79 percent of its students from in-state, 8 percent from New Jersey, 4 percent from New York, 4 percent from Pennsylvania and the remaining 5 percent from other states. For those out-of-state students, the choice to come to Towson likely means paying a lot more: Though public universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania’s in-state tuition costs an average of about 25 percent more than Maryland’s in-state tuition, going away still is more expensive than staying home.
[infogram id=”6297e822-69ee-44c1-9bbd-31ae63b2df0e” prefix=”MXR” format=”interactive” title=”Finding 3″]
The University System of Maryland requires that its institutions have no fewer than 70 percent in-state students, said Jennifer Ziegenfus, associate director of recruitment at Towson University. “None of the schools have met that 30 percent but if they ever did, they would need to make adjustments to guarantee at least 70 percent are in-state. TU does not currently have a goal of in-state versus out-of-state but we are certainly open to a larger population of out-of-state since we have room to grow in this area. Out-of-state students offer a diverse perspective from a lot of angles.”
Ziegenfus said that despite the fact that out-of-state students bring in more money and diversity to the college campus, the university markets to both in-state and out-of-state student prospects equally.
[infogram id=”c5f7ce92-4314-4c25-8185-fe22febbcb93″ prefix=”fYQ” format=”interactive” title=”Finding 4″]
Thirty-four percent of Maryland public universities’ tuition revenue comes from out-of-state students while only 20 percent of its students are from out-of-state. This is not a surprise given that out-of-state tuition in Maryland is 2.22 times higher than in-state tuition.
“There are no specific initiatives from the president other than to meet the overall enrollment goals of the university,” Ziegenfus said. “We do not have a specific out-of-state versus in-state goal.”
Most public colleges, however, do look to create a diverse campus and would like to gather students from all around the country to do so.
It might be assumed that there would be more students in the universities where the tuition price for out-of-state was lower, but that’s not always the case.
In some states, as the price of out-of-state tuition goes up so does the number of students.
In Maryland, in-state tuition is on average about $1,200 less than the instate tuition of the surrounding states, and yet it has an average of 2 percent less in-state students than those surrounding states.
“Towson was my top school since it had my major and was close to home,” Hawk said. “It seemed like the logical choice.”