California High-School Graduates Increasingly Reject State’s Public Colleges

The share of California’s high-school graduates who are enrolling at the state’s public universities dropped by one-fifth from 2007 to 2010, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California. The decline, the report says, results from state budget cuts for higher education as well as enrollment caps and tuition increases at the California State University and University of California systems. Many of those students are choosing to enroll at colleges in other states or at California’s private colleges, some of which are citing the systems’ troubles in aggressive recruiting efforts. A small proportion of California students are not enrolling anywhere.