The New Out-of-State Recruit

Julie Park on what's driving white upper-middle class kids to schools like Alabama

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From an Etsy Review: “We ordered these for my daughter’s college announcement party!”

Writing and thinking about #Rushtok has led me down so many rabbit holes. It makes sense, of course — the phenomenon is a manifestation of so many currents in contemporary American life today, of so many ideologies defending and reforming themselves. When I first started reposting the TikToks on Instagram, I started getting a lot of questions about why so many of the girls seemed to be from out-of-state. Sure, they seem to come from money. But why not go to their own big state school with their own big football game? Why pay out-of-state tuition for approximately the same experience?

Maybe these students want to distinguish themselves, or get away from everyone they grew up with, get the hell out of the state. All of that makes sense. But it’s a lot more complex than that, too — and the repercussions of schools like Alabama actively recruiting these (majority white) out-of-state upper-middle class students will have longstanding consequences.

Julie J. Park is an associate professor of education at the University of Maryland and the co-director of the College Admissions Futures Collaborative. She emailed me earlier this month to talk about the admissions dynamics she sees playing out in #Rushtok, and just reading some of her initial stats and observations in that first email felt finding a bunch of puzzle pieces that had been hidden under a rug. THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON.

Whether you’re distant from college, have kids going through college, or just think it’s important to think about how privilege and opportunity consolidate….you’re going to be thinking about this interview for days.

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I want to start with some specifics about University of Alabama admissions and then we can zoom out a bit and then zoom back in. In the newsletter on RushTok, I gestured towards a New York Times article that laid out Alabama’s new (national) recruiting strategy. I was most interested in the way that the cluster of ideologies that make up “Bama” (particularly as a college experience) appeals to young people (and their families), but your recent article in The Hill argues that this move also highlights much larger shifts in public education and its societal role. 

How is this strategy spreading to other institutions (or how has it spread from other institutions to Bama) and what student populations does it serve (and disserve)? [The stat that only 9% of 4349 recruiter high school visits were within the state, for instance, is wild to me]

More and more institutions are following Bama by courting out-of-state students who can pay higher, nonresident tuition. When I was growing up in Ohio, people would say that you could get into Ohio State if you had a pulse. Now it’s very different. I live in the suburbs outside of DC, and people talk about OSU as a destination school, which is really weird to me.

At UMD where I teach, I often get undergrads from the suburbs of Boston and New Jersey. Like the spread of Bama, the fact that people in DC are taking about OSU is no mistake. The OSU strategic plan is to hit 33% out-of-state enrollment, and that isn’t going to happen without some hustle. Schools follow the Bama formula of hiring recruiters and sending them to rich, predominantly White high schools. They also shower these students with merit $, diverting funds from need-based aid. (Then they wonder why they lack diversity!) The playbook works, but not always: see West Virginia U as an example. Bama takes it to the next level: they have totally thrown their in-state population under the bus. In Ohio and other states, 33% is the sweet spot where schools can enroll more nonresidents but not raise the ire of the state legislature too much. 

So #1, state flagships have poured tons of money into developing pipelines from affluent out-of-state high schools. They want feeder schools so that it’s normal for kids from say Long Island to apply to OSU, Wisconsin, Bama, Vermont, etc. Sometimes recruiters will make 2-3 visits a year to a private high school in another state to build the relationship. Another move is joining Common App (and requiring no supplemental essays) to make it easy to apply. Of course you have to spend money to make money. Schools will give out “merit” scholarships that lower the cost of nonresident tuition substantially. So until the feeder pipeline is established, nonresidents won’t be paying as much, kind of like how Lyft and Uber initially deflated their prices so people would get addicted. In turn, many Black, Brown, and low-income students who could have benefited from the resources of the state flagship (including the big alumni networks) get routed to regional state campuses, which can be great but are historically under-resourced. 

#2 — in some ways, the rise of crossing state lines to attend another big state university is a weird amalgamation of rising economic inequality combined with the anxiety of the upper middle-class (UMC). So the rich are getting richer, and I would guess that there is a greater concentration of wealth in certain high schools. So you have more UMC people wanting UMC dreams and adventures for their kids. At the same time, the UMC feels insecure and crunched. $80,000-90,000/year for private college = serious sticker shock. However, out-of-state tuition at OSU is “only” (ha!) 36K which is steep, but more palatable than 60K+ at most privates. State flagships know that families, even relatively affluent ones, are price sensitive. 

I’ve heard this story from my undergrads. They had good grades, good test scores, and were accepted at a lot of schools. Still, they didn’t qualify for need-based aid, and rightfully so. UMD was the most affordable place besides their in-state options, especially with a “merit” scholarship thrown in. 

A #3 contributing factor is population growth; this dynamic is more prevalent in some states than others. We are basically at the peak of high school graduates, and that’s partially why kids in northern VA who would have gotten into UVA, Virginia Tech, etc. 10-20 years ago can’t bank on getting in. So they have to broaden their search, and other state flagships are out there waiting for them. However, it’s not just population growth. If these schools scaled back seats for nonresidents, they could accommodate more residents. It’s a weird game of musical chairs, for states to basically be swapping each other’s affluent, predominantly White student populations. Of course, they say they can’t because they need to make the money to make up for state budget cuts from 2008, but that’s somewhat debatable. 

This insight on what’s happening with out-of-state recruitment is part of your larger research as the co-director of the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative — can you talk more about CAF Co-Lab and how/why you first got involved? 

So first a shout out to the team that has done the most extensive work on out-of-state recruitment: Ozan Jaquette (UCLA), Karina Salazar (University of Arizona), and Crystal Han (UCLA). They had the brilliant idea to collect information on high school visits through web-scraping admissions websites, you can read more here. 

The College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative, aka CAF Co-Lab, started because we got a big chunk of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the widespread adoption of test-optional admissions during the pandemic, as well as inequality in college applications. We have a few projects looking at the impact of testing policy on admissions trends for racially minoritized groups, how institutions are responding to test-optional/test free policies, and inequality in non-standardized parts of college applications (e.g., extracurricular activities). 

I became interested in out-of-state recruitment when I worked with the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights to conduct equity audits of several state flagship institutions. It was both troubling and fascinating to see how tax-payer subsidized, public land-grant (the fed gov’t gave states $$$ from selling land mostly seized from Indigenous communities to start institutions that would serve the needs of the state) institutions, were courting the rich. 

A lot of my interest in admissions comes from observing the world around me, and now I’m interested as a parent. I remember seeing a SAT prep book at a really early age (at church, of all places), which led me to study SAT/ACT prep in Asian American communities years later. That work led to me consulting on the SFFA v. Harvard case on the side of Harvard. Now as a parent, I’m interested in trying to build a more sane and equitable system. I’m very concerned about the trickle-down effects of competitive admissions on childhood and adolescence.  

We’ve been talking a bit over email about the ties between Greek life involvement (and attraction to Greek life as part of the desire for the “college experience) and how it relates to enrollment trends. You told me a story about how Greek life at Vanderbilt has changed over the last 20 years that made me feel like there was a literal light bulb going off over my head. Can you repeat it here and how you see it connecting to larger trends when it comes to equity efforts at some of these more prestigious schools?

So I went to Vanderbilt, which in the early 2000s was heavily Greek. About half of women were in sororities and Greek life was very dominant, very White. Vandy was also a lot less selective back then; 50% got in when I applied in the late 90s. Over time, Vandy poured a lot of $ into trying to become more selective and it worked, only 5.6% were admitted last cycle (very surreal). Over the same time, the student body became somewhat more racially diverse. Greek life participation went down somewhat, and an "abolish Greek life" movement started (also very surreal to me as an alum). 

From about 2005-2020-ish as some schools became more rejective (due to population growth + their own efforts), students who would have previously gone to a place like Vandy and rushed needed to consider other options. Places like UA were/are aggressively recruiting them with “merit” $, recruiters at rich high schools, etc. A friend who's a Dartmouth alum (another big Greek scene) told me that a fellow alum's kid goes to UA and is on #RushTok. So it's like, “Can't go to your dad's alma mater? Try UA!”

As some schools are aggressively rejective, places like UA are welcoming them with open arms and “merit” $, which results in Greek life getting smaller at places like Vandy but booming at others. Also, the growth overlaps with other factors you mentioned, like kids looking for a "big college" experience out of the pandemic, as well as the out-of-state recruitment trend: How UA is recruiting nationwide + some kids can’t get into their own state flagship because it’s trying to enroll kids from other states (the irony). So there’s overlap in the type of demographic that will pursue Greek life (White, affluent) and the type of out-of-state student that state flagships are recruiting.

You noted that Greek life has tripled at UA since 2004, which is around when Vanderbilt started trying to become more selective. It’s funny how BamaRush spreads this myth that Greek life has always ruled UA, when it’s more dominant now than it was in the past. (Kind of like how Vandy started investing all of these new “traditions” around 2004 to boost marketing, haha.) 

In terms of how all of this connects to efforts to advance equity, it’s kind of a mixed bag. During the 2005-2020 period, you did see some “selective” institutions sort-of try to diversify. Under neoliberal norms, some level of racial and economic diversity (but not too much!) has become associated with prestige. So there is a little less room for the type of student who used to be very common at Vandy, but now goes to UA — above average academics, White, wealthy. At the same time, let’s not kid ourselves. Wealth and privilege are still  entrenched at Vandy and other name-brand schools. If legacy admissions goes away writ-large, that might open up some more movement towards places like UA, but those spots will mostly be replaced with other affluent students.

I’ve talked a bit about how Greek organizations, like many of the institutions where they originated and thrived, were founded to reproduce whiteness and existing racial hierarchies. Wrapping back around to our first question, what are the implications of all of this out-of-state recruitment funneling into the Greek system, particularly in the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision on Affirmative Action? 

Something that concerns me at places like UA is that Greek life doesn't just mean White kids clustering together, it's affluent White students clustering together. When you layer economic divides on top of racial boundaries, those boundaries become harder to cross. (Race on Campus has more on how historically White Greek life affects campus racial dynamics) All of the additional out-of-state recruitment makes things worse, because you're bringing more affluent White students to campus instead of having more economic diversity within your White student population. Then with the SCOTUS decision, you don’t even have race-conscious admissions as a counteracting force. 

Even at places with less Greek life than UA, the higher presence of out-of-state (mostly White/affluent) students doesn't bode well for racial dynamics, especially post-SCOTUS, b/c you're widening the divides between students. Likely, we will see environments where most White students are affluent, and more Black and Brown students are from lower-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. So racial divides will be exacerbated by economic divides, with fewer students who can help bridge the gaps. In prior years, middle-class Black students really served as a “bridge group” between lower-SES (both White and BIPOC) and upper-SES students. Middle and upper-income Black students have extra high rates of mixing with students of other races, definitely higher than upper-SES White students (the type that often go Greek). With the major restriction of race-conscious admissions, we’re going to have fewer students who can bridge these racial/economic divides. 

Then if you have a lot of White kids joining Greek life on campuses that are becoming less diverse — well that’s a big issue. Greek life often works as a bubble that shields students from having to engage with some of the broader diversity of the campus. We know that this negative effect is somewhat blunted at more diverse campuses, and stronger at campuses with less diversity where Greek life tends to be a more dominant force (e.g., UA). Will you see historically White Greek life grow at campuses post-SCOTUS? It’s possible. 

What’s a flawed (or imprecise) belief or understanding about how admissions works (or how it should work) that you bump up against again and again? Why does it persist, and how would you correct it? 

One flawed belief is the idea highly selective/rejective institutions enroll the “best and brightest” students, when for the most part, they enroll a “fairly bright, traditionally high-achieving kids with the economic means to afford the opportunities that made them competitive, who have the money to pay for college. So behind every student’s individual achievement is a village — and for many kids, that village has a lot more money, opportunity, and privilege than others.

I would love to see people be more open about how most students aren’t at an elite college because of their own efforts, but because of a combination of effort, opportunity, and privilege, with privilege having both individual and structural-level dimensions. Of course it’s awkward to draw attention to how structural forces have facilitated your success, but it’s also necessary to pull back the curtain on the forces that enabled your success. I may work hard (sometimes), but I’m also a second generation Ph.D. whose parents were able to come here b/c of immigration policy that favored highly educated individuals. We were able to move to an area with strong public schools, with lots of parent volunteers (really, a brigade of stay-at-home moms) who ran our extracurricular activities. I grew up with a stay-at-home mom who drove me to said activities. And so on. 

We need to make structural opportunity work better for everyone, including major investment in the institutions that educate the most students (minority serving institutions, regional comprehensive state schools, community colleges). States need to reinvest in higher education as a public good, and tie funding commitments to expanding in-state access, which was done in California (which now caps out-of-state enrollment at 18% in the UC system) and New York. I’d like to see institutions really scrutinize whether policies facilitate equity or not, and be honest about the cost of their choices versus trying to rationalize them. Many institutions justify out-of-state recruitment by saying that nonresident $$$ supports financial aid for low-income students, but they’re still making choices that prioritize affluent students. ●

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Julie Park is the author of Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data — which is filled with insights like these. You can learn more about the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative here.

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