More Than 400,000 Students Leave Their States for College. Here’s How They Could Carry Covid-19 With Them.

Enrolling a freshman class whose members hail from every state — and any number of foreign countries — has long been a point of pride for some institutions. But this academic year, colleges are focused on students’ hometowns for a reason that has nothing to do with the profile of the Class of 2024.

That’s because some students — more than 400,000 of them — will be traveling to campus from states that are coronavirus hot spots.

Take Florida, a Covid-19 epicenter, for example. In 2018, Florida exported more than 15,000 students to attend public and private four-year colleges in other states. Meanwhile, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which have largely brought their infection rates under control, have put 34 states and Puerto Rico on their travel-advisory list (as of August 6), which calls for people arriving in the tri-state area to quarantine for 14 days.

With student-migration patterns in the spotlight, The Chronicle analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Education to get a look at the most popular states to which first-time students travel for college. The biggest exporter of students in the fall of 2018 was California, where the governor recently rolled back reopenings in response to the virus. More than 37,000 students from the nation’s most populous state attended out-of-state colleges. About a fourth of them were split among colleges in three states: Arizona, New York, and Oregon.

New York, with its lengthy travel-advisory list, was among the top three destinations for freshmen from 10 states, including Florida and Pennsylvania. That kind of influx of students can make it difficult for colleges to support the sheer number of people who would need to self-quarantine before classes begin.

Cornell University, which had previously promised to provide quarantine housing for its students, has said it now can no longer do so. And Ithaca College, Cornell’s neighbor in Ithaca, N.Y., announced that students from states on New York’s travel-advisory list need to take classes remotely until their state is removed from the list. Ithaca officials said the college lacks the resources and the infrastructure to manage the larger number of students who would need to be quarantined.

See the map below to learn more about how many students left each state to go to college and the top three states they went to.