New Jersey loses so many of its collegebound students to other states that its leaders are anxious to figure out the best ways to reverse that flow.
Stockton University, which it is fair to say is not particularly well-known outside New Jersey, is using advertising slogans like “Beachfront Living and Learning” to promote itself.
The university already has a well-established campus within the Pinelands National Reserve. This month it is opening a second, surfside precinct 15 miles southeast, in Atlantic City.
The new campus’s residence hall boasts ocean views. As Robert Heinrich, Stockton’s chief enrollment-management officer, notes, “Not many institutions can promote having an ocean.”
Enrollment, he says, is growing. In the fall of 2017, the university had 1,569 freshmen, up 32 percent from the previous year. Completed applications for the fall of 2018 are up 18 percent over last year, he says. Officials have their eyes set on an overall enrollment of 10,000 by 2021, up more than 1,000 from the 2016 level.
If Stockton and the state’s other colleges could enroll many more students from New Jersey while also attracting students from elsewhere, maybe the state could escape its unenviable distinction: It has the greatest net loss of first-time college students of any state (see accompanying table).
In the fall of 2016, New Jersey saw 32,025 recent high-school graduates leave the state for college, while enrolling only 3,403 out-of-staters: a mere 7.4 percent of its new first-time freshmen. Net loss: 28,622.
Forty-three percent of first-time degree or certificate seekers who graduated from high school in the previous 12 months left New Jersey. Only the District of Columbia, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut lost greater percentages of their new freshmen.
“At Stockton, we’ve actually made curbing out-migration one of our strategic priorities,” Heinrich says. He has also just added a recruiter for out-of-state enrollments. This fall’s figure for out-of-staters is projected to be more than four times what it was in 2016 — but still only 52 students.
Out-migration, says the state’s new secretary of higher education, Zakiya Smith Ellis, “is something that comes up in almost every conversation that I have about where higher education in New Jersey is going — with the governor, legislators, college presidents.”
Thomas H. Kean, Republican minority leader in the state’s Senate, wants the state to do an inquiry into the exodus. In June the Senate unanimously approved a bill he co-sponsored with across-the-aisle colleagues. The bill, S518, which is awaiting consideration in the General Assembly, would direct Ellis’s office to conduct a study of causes and possible remedies.
State higher-education leaders like Barbara A. Lee, senior vice president for academic affairs at Rutgers University, can already identify many of the causes. They begin with geography. The state is population-rich but acreage-poor. “If New Jersey students want to be at a college even an hour or two away from home, most of those are not in New Jersey,” she says.
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Being educated in the state’s well-regarded public schools helps many graduates get accepted at selective institutions elsewhere, as does the Garden State’s relative affluence. Well-off parents tend to want their high-achieving children to attend elite colleges, and New Jersey does not have many of those. Princeton University is one of the few with any significant national and international draw.
Of the 3,403 first-time students from out of state who enrolled in New Jersey colleges in 2016, 905 went to Princeton. That year, more than 950 first-time New Jersey freshmen ventured to the nearby University of Delaware, and nearly 1,000 enrolled at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, about 200 miles away.
Geography, schooling, and affluence are well-known generators of New Jersey’s out-migration. Is a study worth the cost, then? Didn’t Bruce Springsteen explain young people’s urge to leave the state in “Born to Run,” his 1975 anthem of Jersey Shore anomie?
No one is apparently willing to let the Bard of Asbury Park have the last word on the matter.
“Data is always a good thing — that’s number one,” says Kean. “Number two, we need to get beyond the anecdotes.” He wants more details of the academic and socioeconomic characteristics of leavers, and how the out-of-state institutions they choose compare with New Jersey’s own.
Secretary Ellis agrees that those nuances could be revealing. “Students who have the ability to leave may look different from students who are place-bound,” she says.
Kean suspects that many students don’t realize they could stay at home and pay less for just as good an education, even taking into account out-of-state colleges’ financial enticements.
“I do have concerns that guidance counselors don’t have the most up-to-date information about what New Jersey’s colleges are offering,” he adds. He believes that many parents recall struggling to get the courses they needed at state colleges, but he insists that it’s different now.
State leaders wince at the costs of out-migration. The investment in elementary and secondary education, lost. For each exile who doesn’t return, capable citizens and future tax revenues, gone. Best-qualified leavers unreplaced by out-of-state peers — that’s a drain of millennial brain power.
Among positive news, says Lee, is that New Jersey institutions “are very attractive to low-income and first-generation students,” with commuters and residential students flocking to many growing campuses. The state works hard to serve them, she says, and to keep the academically gifted of all income levels in the state. All three Rutgers campuses, for example, have low-cost honors colleges and generous financial-aid packages for in-state students. Thanks to the residential honors college on the flagship New Brunswick campus, “we’ve been quite successful in keeping 1,500 highly talented students in the state,” she says.
But competition for the state’s prospective college students is fierce.
At far-flung institutions in Florida, Pennsylvania, and out West that sign up large numbers of Jerseyites, some admissions counselors appear uneasy talking about how they conduct their raids.
Others, not at all. “New Jersey is definitely one of those areas that we spend a tremendous amount of time and resources recruiting from,” says Jeff Schiffman, director of admissions at Tulane University. Although far away, in New Orleans, Tulane in 2016 found 131 of its freshman students — 7.6 percent of its entering class — in New Jersey. Some years, he says, the number approaches 200.
Tulane’s pitch is: If students have grown up in an Eastern city, New Orleans will be both familiar and refreshingly different. And if they’re Northeast Corridor suburbanites? “This is their chance to dig their teeth in and live in a big city, which they’ve been craving for a long time,” he says.
Temple University, in Philadelphia, assigns 2.5 admissions officers to New Jersey alone. In 2016, its first-time freshmen included 495 Jerseyites — 10.6 percent of the total.
Admissions officials seem sworn to note that what really brings students to their campuses is not the big-city living, the beach, or a “party school” reputation, but the academic offerings.
But sometimes, surely, it is the sun?
Yes, and no, says Kasey Urquidez, dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of Arizona. Its New Jersey first-time enrollees in 2016 numbered only 101, in a freshman class that exceeded 7,000; but those 101 keep one recruiter busy full time in New Jersey.
“Ours is a very traditional-feeling campus,” Urquidez says, in a college town with big-time sports and red-brick buildings, and sun, lots of sun. “So if we can get them on campus, that’s a huge draw” — especially if they visit during East Coast winters. All that, and Arizona’s academic offerings, of course. Rutgers’s Lee says that competing with pitches like those is no easy task for New Jersey, with its decades of financial crises and the competing needs that hobble virtually all the states, like schools, hospitals, and prisons.
Do she and fellow campus officials have remedies for Senator Kean and his colleagues, study or no study?
She laughs but says, “Well, yes, one thing that they might think about is increasing capacity at our state college and university system.” At Montclair State University and several other campuses, Stockton among them, enrollments have boomed.
But, again, she says, “we appreciate the pressures the state is facing.”
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle.
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