By: Jared Colston
With overall numbers of high school graduates projected to decline nationally, higher education professionals fear this “demographic cliff” will result in a postsecondary “enrollment cliff.” Policy debates at the state level often invoke concerns around brain drain of their home state prospective college-goers, while postsecondary institutions look to attract out-of-state students to shore up their enrollment yields.
These conflicts, between retaining in-state talent and serving local tax bases versus attracting out-of-state students who potentially will pay a higher tuition premium and generate more revenue for the institution, have led to state-wide policies encouraging in-state recruitment and disincentivizing out-of-state enrollment. Despite this, public institutions, especially moderately to highly selective institutions, still seek to increase out-of-state enrollment to cover budget shortfalls.
Higher education research, especially in the last decade, however, suggests proximity to an institution plays a major role in a prospective students’ college choice or even decision to enroll at all. A study by the SSTAR Lab’s Nick Hillman and colleagues suggests, among broadly accessible institutions, more than 80% of students attend an institution within 50 miles of their home address.
To understand if student migration is truly a crisis for state higher education practitioners and policymakers, we must first answer the question: How often do college freshman leave their home state for college?
Though there are not national publicly available student-level data to examine local student migration trends, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provides biennial enrollment data for first-time, full-time freshman students with their state of origin and the institution in which they have enrolled. The SSTAR Lab compiled these data from 2004–2022 to show a dashboard of in-migration and out-migration by state to see where students attend.
Using this dashboard, we can examine the in- and out-migration of students from Wisconsin.
In 2022, there were 36,135 first-time, full-time freshman students from Wisconsin who stayed in Wisconsin for college. Among those Wisconsin residents who left the state, they primarily attended college in neighboring states, with 28.7% (2,756 freshman) attending in Minnesota. This rate is down from a decade ago in 2012, when 35.6% (3,464 freshman) of all out-of-state Wisconsin residents attended in Minnesota. In 2022, after Minnesota, those Wisconsin residents who left the state primarily went to Illinois (8%) or Iowa (7.7%).
This dashboard also allows us to see where Wisconsin’s out-of-state students came from. Clicking the “In-Migration” button at the top right changes the migration direction, we see 21.6% (3,570) of out-of-state students at Wisconsin institutions came from Minnesota, compared to 12% (4,351) from Illinois and 5.6% (219) from Iowa. Again, we see distance plays a role with most out-of-state students coming from neighboring states.
We hope this dashboard clarifies the migration patterns of college freshman and highlights the importance of considering geography when thinking of higher education policy and practice. This tool can also be used by researchers looking to examine the distance students migrate over time, possibly in light of a policy change like increased or decreased financial aid.
To learn more about how geography plays a role in our work as a lab, please read our earlier report on mapping rural college locations and explore another interactive webpage on rurality and college access.