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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Continued Agitation Around Capping Out-of-State Students

A cap has potential costs
There continues to be news media discussion of the rise in the proportion of out-of-state and foreign students at UC who pay considerably more tuition than in-staters.  If some cap is imposed and those dollars are lost, it is unclear what would make up for them - other than raising tuition generally for in-state students.

Seems like this could be a topic for the November Regents meeting.  However, its agenda is not yet available.

From the LA Times:

...An unprecedented 20% of this year's freshman class across the system's nine undergraduate campuses are from outside California. That’s up from 6% in 2009 and 5.3% in 2004. At UCLA and UC Berkeley, that enrollment figure is about 30% of freshmen.  University officials insist that the growth in nonresidents has been accomplished mainly by increasing sizes of the incoming freshman classes. And they note that top public universities in other states enroll much higher percentages of nonresidents than UC does. But families of top-tier California high schoolers turned away from their first-choice campuses have their doubts. As do state lawmakers.  At an August confirmation hearing for UC regents, state Sen. Jean Fuller (R-Bakersfield) was among those who pressed the issue. In a recent interview, Fuller said that although she appreciated the diversity that students from other states and nations bring to UC, the same goal might be more easily accomplished by boosting recruitment in the Central Valley.  UC must not forget that "the university's job is to educate Californians first, the California taxpayers who pay for it," Fuller said.  Amid mounting pressure, (UC prez) Napolitano recently said that the university would work to determine the optimum percentage for out-of-state enrollment and that the numbers at Berkeley and UCLA "may be at about as maximum as they can be." ...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-outofstate-column-20141022-story.html

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