Interest in Colleges in the Southern U.S. is Blooming

According to an article in Axios in early July, more and more students from the Northeast are enrolling in SEC schools than ever before. Leading the way is enrollment at LSU and Tennessee, followed by Ole Miss. In two decades, 84% more students from the North attended public schools in the South, per a Wall Street Journal analysis last year. It jumped 30% from 2018 to 2022.

I am seeing that in my practice, as well. Students are suddenly asking about the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia and the University of Florida, especially.  And students are telling me that lots of older students who graduated from their high schools are already in place at these universities.

Axios is also reporting that the expectation is that students will stay in the South, contributing to the boom in population in Raleigh, Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta and Austin. The report indicates that politics, warm weather, spirit, sunshine and lower cost are fueling the interest in Southern public universities. The chaos up north, I believe, may also be a contributing factor, as universities in the South have not been plagued by disruptive protests, and as prestigious Ivy League schools like Columbia and Harvard are also seeing their accreditation threatened.

Is the University of Michigan’s move to Early Decision a response to that renewed interest? Will it be successful? One of my students recently told us that his brother, who is at Michigan, once told him that it was so cold that his water bottle froze while he was walking on campus! My experience has been that students certainly don’t transfer schools due to weather, no matter how harsh, since the devil you know ends up being preferable to the one you don’t. But the move for freshman applicants to looking down South is a different story. Only time will tell if this movement continues and if public universities up North are able to stem the tide (no pun intended, Alabama).