LOS ANGELES » While her classmates agonize over which college to attend, high school senior Samantha Morgan is passing on offers from Cal State campuses in Long Beach and San Jose. She is leaving California to avoid overcrowded classes and other state budget problems.
She can afford it because of a little-known program that offers discounts at public colleges and universities to students from 15 states, including Hawaii.
Morgan is taking advantage of the Western Undergraduate Exchange to enroll at Northern Arizona University this fall.
Under the interstate agreement, she will pay $12,700 a year in tuition, compared with $20,800 for other out-of-staters at the Flagstaff campus. Her bill will be double California State University’s nearly $6,000 a year, but she wants to graduate in four years and avoid delays budget cuts are causing at California public universities.
"It definitely made a difference in where I was going to go," said Morgan, who attends high school in Long Beach. "It just made the decision easier."
She is part of a growing although still relatively small cadre of students in the program, which sets tuition at no more than 150 percent of in-state rates and saves undergraduates on average $7,700 a year. The arrangement is possible because even in tough economic times, some campuses in other states have more space at their universities and are happy to take in neighbors at less than full freight.
In all, 150 public colleges — some two-year, some four-year — take part, including the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Last fall, 29,077 students took advantage of the tuition discount, up from about 22,100 four years before, in states from North Dakota to Hawaii.
(According to the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, the program’s umbrella organization, tens of thousands of students from Hawaii have attended undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in other Western states through WICHE’s Student Exchange Program, saving millions of dollars thanks to reduced tuition rates. In the Western Undergraduate Exchange, Hawaii students and their families have saved $148 million since 1988, when the program was founded, the organization’s website says. In the last five years, Hawaii savings from the Western Undergraduate Exchange have topped $60.1 million, the group says.)
California "is a huge winner" in the program because it exports so many more young people than it receives, said Margo Colalancia, director of student exchanges at the nonprofit Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education in Boulder, Colo., which runs the program. "This is a real relief valve for the state now."
For Californians the most popular destinations are Northern Arizona University, the University of Nevada at Reno, UH-Manoa, Southern Oregon University and New Mexico State University. In California, 10 of the 23 Cal States have joined, with the Humboldt and Chico campuses attracting the most out-of-staters. The University of California doesn’t participate — no surprise, since it has been pushing to add nonresident students, who pay $23,000 a year more than California residents.
"It is a valuable model at a time when some states like California are short on room at public campuses but have a lot of students, while other states have room and not enough students. In some ways it helps the nation educate more people and potentially at a lower cost," said Jerome A. Lucido, executive director of the USC Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice.
SOME campuses limit the number of lower-paying students they accept, treating it as a scholarship for top students from other states. Some allow these students into only certain majors and departments. The University of Arizona in Tucson, for example, opens up only mining engineering.
Some research-oriented campuses, such as the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Washington, haven’t joined because, like UC, they already attract full-fare nonresidents.
Colalancia acknowledged that the Western Undergraduate Exchange remains somewhat unknown to many high school counselors and families. Its small staff has modest funds for marketing, which are shared with separate programs for graduate and health professional education, she said.
Still, more efforts are in the works for staff to attend college fairs and to launch a social media campaign. A selling point is that students receive the discount regardless of family income.
"It’s a great secret that a lot of people don’t know about," said Becky Marchant, a counselor at Brea Olinda High school in California who is talking it up with her students. Marchant’s daughter turned down San Francisco State, fearing overcrowding there, and is part of the program as a freshman at Northern Arizona.
