Public colleges and universities in most states are under increased financial stress as they strain to compete with other institutions while state appropriations fail to keep up with increases in both inflation and student enrollment. As a result, universities have turned to other revenue sources to raise additional funds. One commonly targeted source is out-of-state students, particularly in Northeastern and Midwestern states with declining populations of recent high school graduates. But prior research has found that trying to enroll more out-of-state students can reduce the number of in-state students attending selective public universities, and this crowding-out effect particularly impacts minority and low-income students.
I have long been interested in studying how colleges use their revenue, so I began sketching out a paper looking at whether public universities appeared to use additional revenue from out-of-state students to improve affordability for in-state students. Since I am particularly interested in prices faced by students from lower-income families, I was also concerned that any potential increase in amenities driven by out-of-state students could actually make college less affordable for in-state students.
I started working on this project back in the spring of 2015 and enjoyed two and a half conference rejections (one paper submission was rejected into a poster presentation), two journal rejections, and a grant application rejection during the first two years. But after getting helpful feedback from the journal reviewers (unfortunately, most conference reviewers provide little feedback and most grant applications are rejected with no feedback), I made improvements and finally got the paper accepted for publication.
The resulting article, just published in Teachers College Record (and is available for free for a limited time upon signing up as a visitor), includes the following research questions:
(1) Do the listed cost of attendance and components such as tuition and fees and housing expenses for in-state students change when nonresident enrollment increases?
(2) Does the net price of attendance (both overall and by family income bracket) for in-state students change when nonresident enrollment increases?
(3) Do the above relationships differ by institutional selectivity?
After years of working on this paper and multiple iterations, I am pleased to report…null findings. (Seriously, though, I am glad that higher education journals seem to be willing to publish null findings, as long as the estimates are precisely located around zero without huge confidence intervals.) These findings suggest two things about the relationship between nonresident enrollment and prices faced by in-state students. First, it does not look like nonresident tuition revenue is being used to bring down in-state tuition prices. Second, it also does not appear that in-state students are paying more for room and board after more out-of-state students enroll, suggesting that any amenities demanded by wealthier out-of-state students may be modest in nature.
I am always happy to take any questions on the article or to share a copy if there are issues accessing it. I am also happy to chat about the process of getting research published in academic journals, since that is often a long and winding road!
Robert Kelchen 