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Destinations of Admitted Out-of-State Students: A Case of One Institution

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Abstract

In recent years many public colleges have attempted to attract and enroll high-achieving and diverse out-of-state students. Understanding why admitted out-of-state students choose to accept or decline their offers of admission has become an important part of these institutions’ efforts to achieve their enrollment goals. In this study, out-of-state students admitted to a public research university over a period of 5 years are tracked using the National Student Clearinghouse database to establish their destination institutions. The dependent variable reflects the type of institution chosen by these students, i.e. private or public, in-state or out-of-state, 4-year or 2-year. The baseline group is composed of those out-of-state students who chose to enroll at the study institution. Mixed multinomial models are estimated using the R mlogit package. Findings indicate that the type of institution these students choose is associated with their high school performance and their parents’ educational attainment and income, as well as with the financial aid they were offered by the study institution.

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Notes

  1. Hillman (2012) suggests that in some cases use of merit aid to attract high achieving out-of-state students might outweigh the financial benefits of higher tuition revenue. “Eventually, institutions that aid students from unfunded sources will approach economic inefficiencies that are neither politically nor financially sustainable” (ibid, p. 228). Higher education policy experts also suggest that the demand from well-qualified out-of-state students is modest, which might lead public universities to attract students from abroad (Bound et al. 2016).

  2. Out-of-state students who pay in-state tuition are excluded from the study.

  3. One should note, that the indicator of income from the admissions questionnaire used here should be considered with caution, since as shown by Olivas (1986; cited by Gonyea 2005), some students tend to overestimate actual income.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Drew Clark and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions to the previous drafts of this manuscript.

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  1. Office of Institutional Research, Auburn University, 203 Samford Hall, Auburn, AL, 36849-5111, USA

    Iryna Y. Johnson

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Johnson, I.Y. Destinations of Admitted Out-of-State Students: A Case of One Institution. Res High Educ 60, 315–337 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9516-0

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