Are you losing your state university? Illinois has

The big business of education is forever altering the state university systems around the country. They have become vessels of profit and enrichment for some, and are steadily distancing themselves from the citizenry of the home state.

Hiding behind diversity and internationalism, universities have moved to out of state students and ultimately the international student. Left out are the in-state students looking for a reasonable cost of a college education from their own state university.

Why does college cost so much? Why does a professor who gave a lecture to a 200 seat hall ten years ago cost so much more to dispense the same knowledge today? Most of college-dispensed knowledge is static. Math, language, economics, literature, etc change little from decade to decade. Except for the sciences, essentially the base product remains the same.

So why does college cost so much? Part of the answer is that in-state slots are fewer and fewer, by design. Those who do not get the tuition break for in-state residence must go elsewhere at higher costs. The result being that a student who couldn’t get into his state university A now pays out of state tuition to state university B. The student who resides in-state B and couldn’t get into his university now becomes an out of state student at university A. The money game is easy to see. Both universities, A and B, get more money.

For most state schools, subsidies, as a percentage of the operating budget, have been cut since the 1970s. These schools rely on out-of-staters to stay afloat.

Why are the universities in such financial extremis? Could it have something to do with tenure, inflated salaries for professors with low hours of classroom instruction, and a federal govenment that makes huge student loans easy to obtain? We have outstanding student loans of over a trillion dollars. This keeps the bloated system going.

And the dirty little secret is that the domestic pool of students is stagnant or declining as the demographics of the country change. Blacks and Hispanics make up an increasing percentage of those under 18. In fact, by 2019 half of the children 18 and under will be minorities as defined by the USG. Except for Asians, they are not attending college in the same numbers as non-Hispanic whites. Many universities and colleges must look outside the country to survive. We have 800,000 foreign students in the US with 25% of them coming from China.

It's a tricky numbers game at University of Illinois. State funding for the public school has shrunk year after year as Illinois' own budget gets tighter and tighter. The state's largest school got an appropriation of $667.5 million this year (of which Illinois still owes $456 million), down from $804 million in 2002. The school's operating budget is $5.4 billion.

"About 44.7 percent of Illinois residents who were offered admission to this fall's freshman class decided to attend, down from 45.8 percent last year. It's the lowest percentage in at least 10 years — and possibly ever.

"The number who took us up on our acceptance decreased slightly," Wise told trustees at their board meeting Thursday at the Urbana-Champaign campus. "The No. 1 reason students don't come is because of money." Meanwhile, there were more international applicants than ever before, and a larger percentage of those admitted decided to attend — 27.7 percent, compared with 22.2 percent last year. The number of foreign undergraduates has more than quadrupled in the past decade and now totals 4,990 students. Nearly 80 percent of the U. of I.'s international enrollees come from China, India and South Korea, and more than half — about 2,600 — come from China alone.

In fact, the U. of I. has more international students overall than any other public university in the country, according to a survey by the Institute of International Education. Including graduate students, there are more than 9,400 international students at U. of I. this fall, university data show.

"The percentage of U. of I. freshmen who are from foreign countries is near the top among Big Ten schools, trailing only Purdue University, according to 2011 data from the U.S. Department of Education."

“Which makes me wonder, if China’s GDP per capita is on average MUCH LOWER than the USA, how did they manage to afford the tuition and board?”

China sends over their cream of the crop students, often from the rich oligarchy families, or some are subsidized by the China State. Probably some are also serving the function of spies, particularly in the Sciences. Up at UIC (Univ. of IL at Chicago) the twin sister of UIUC (Univ. of IL Champaign/Urbana) there are huge amounts of Chinese students, as the UIC campus is only about a 15 minute drive from Chinatown. I might add UIC also has a large population of Muzzie/Pali students on campus.

“Yes, colleges love the out of state & international students because they often pay the full tuition price and get no financial aid. But the flip side is that, without these students, tuition prices for in-state students would be even higher.”

What evidence is there that this is true? At the University of California, the ability to ATTRACT foreign students was proffered as the explanation for exponential tuition rate increases in the 1990s.

And when you give a slot to a foreigner, it doesn’t “increase slots for others because (the foreign students) pay more money” — it deprives a Californian of his slot at UCLA.

“Most universities these days are seeing a decrease in the student population. So, there likely ARE open slots at state universities, maybe just not in the top tier ones.”

Not true at the University of California. Enrollment continues to increase every year, and thousands of QUALIFIED California residents are turned away from the flagship campuses of UCLA, Berkeley, San Diego and Santa Barbara and steered toward the campuses increasingly reserved for Californians (Riverside and Santa Cruz) so the slots at UCLA can be reserved for top-dollar foreigners.

“Except for the elite schools, the bottom third of the college/university students today should not be there.”

Nonsense. The University of California has high standards of admission across the board. If you meet them between GPA and test scores, you are perfectly qualified to attend; and you should be admitted to the campus of your choice before a resident from another state or another country.

I’ve had it up to here with the “Foreign kids are smarter and study more, so they DESERVE to be admitted to American universities more than Americans.” No, they are study prisoners who’ve come out of a freakazoid study system that we should not import to our shores. We’ve managed to lead the world in science and technology for two hundred years without it, thanks.

What other country in the world penalizes its own kids for achieving less than what foreigners say we should be achieving to be admitted to OUR OWN schools?

The “for-profit” state university mentality has taken away California kids’ right to an education at the schools our parents and grandparents BUILT AND PAID FOR. BY CALIFORNIANS, FOR CALIFORNIANS.

RE: When I went to state u. thirty years ago, tuition was about a thousand dollars a year. The tenured associate professors were making $25000. There’s part of the difference.

According to this INFLATION CALCULATOR:

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1000&year1=1984&year2=2014

$1,000 thirty years ago has the same buying power as $2,293 in 2014.

A salary of $25,000 thirty years ago would be $57,000 today.

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