More B-Schools Choose Women as Deans

Story first reported from WSJ.com

Business school may still be a man's world, but institutions are looking to shake things up by placing female talent at the helm.

Eager to achieve—or at least approach—gender parity in their administrative ranks, many schools are "acting affirmatively" by picking women over similarly qualified men to fill deanship slots, says Lucy Apthorp Leske, a partner at search firm Witt/Kieffer. By doing so, schools hope to introduce more diverse opinions into their high-level decision-making. But whether these changes will make a difference long-term remains to be seen.

The dearth of women in deanships isn't unlike the current picture of women in chief executive roles—though, to be sure, it isn't quite as bleak.

Women constituted 18% of U.S. business-school deans in the 2011-2012 academic year, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, an industry group. Meanwhile, women hold just 20 CEO spots at Fortune 500 companies, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that supports women in business.

Lower down the ladder, women held nearly one-third of associate dean positions in the 2011-2012 academic year, compared with 20% a decade earlier. About one-fourth of deans used that position, overseeing curriculum or academic programs, as a launch pad to the top spot, according to a recent AACSB survey.

Schools are courting those up-and-comers aggressively. Alison Davis-Blake, dean of University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, began receiving inquiries from search firms while a senior associate dean at University of Texas, Austin's McCombs School of Business. She says she was contacted "to excess."

Some suggest that schools' eagerness to even out the ranks among deans is little more than a numbers play, since many women deans say that their gender has little impact on the way they actually lead their business schools on a day-to-day basis.

"In terms of strategic positioning and core tactical actions, I don't think those are really any different because of gender," says Ms. Davis-Blake. While some women faculty and administrators may be drawn to a particular school because there are other women at the top, she says it is likely just "on the margins."

Nevertheless, any top-tier dean—man or woman—holds sway in powerful business and policy circles. They often serve as directors of major companies, set the agenda for what tomorrow's corporate titans might learn and, in the wake of the financial crisis, are called upon to defend the very existence and value of their institutions.

Plus, having women in leadership positions can make a mark on a school's student body, a crucial asset as institutions look to close the gender gap among that population as well. (About one-third of M.B.A. students are women, according to estimates from Forté Foundation, a group that seeks to create gender parity in corporate leadership.)

The presence of women deans, just like the presence of women executives in the corporate world, "helps [students] to see the kind of things they can do and where they can go," says Linda Livingstone, dean of Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management.

The intense demand for female deans has allowed prospects to be picky, wary of being added to shortlists just to serve as token representatives, says Kenneth Kring, co-managing director of the global education practice at Korn/Ferry International. (Korn/Ferry in recent years has helped place women deans at Ross, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and University of Missouri's Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business.)

Some women turn down the position, fearing a blow to their work-life balance, since academic deanships can be just as demanding as a chief-executive role. Ms. Livingstone, who has a 16-year-old daughter, says the deanship put a "burden on [her] family as a whole" but she and her husband were "willing to align [their] lives to work that way."

Meanwhile, a handful of business schools, including those at Boston University and Wake Forest University, have turned to the corporate world—where women are even more of a rarity—to fill recent deanship openings. Both schools picked men.

Though Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business opted for a woman when it nabbed Johnson & Johnson executive Christine A. Poon for its dean in 2009, a broader shift toward tapping business executives in general could quash advancement opportunities for academic women already waiting in the wings. It may even hurt gender parity in academic leadership, since the pool of corporate candidates skews more heavily male.

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Out-of-State College Students Flock to North Dakota

Story first appeared on WSJ.com.
A high school senior from Connecticut took a coast-to-coast tour of 10 public universities, bearing acceptance letters from each. She fell in love in Fargo.
She is evidence of an unlikely trend: the growing allure of higher education in North Dakota. The state ranks 48th in the U.S. at attracting tourists. Its young people routinely flee for warmer or more exciting places. The private sector here, struggling to lure sufficient numbers of workers from elsewhere, is wrestling with labor shortages even amid national unemployment around 9%.
Compare numbers and percent of in- and out-of-state students.
But college students are flocking here in ever greater numbers. Out-of-state students account for about 55% of the 14,500 enrolled at North Dakota State University, as well as at similarly sized University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Nonresident students at North Dakota's 11 public colleges constitute a higher ratio than in almost every other state.
High school juniors and seniors scouring online college guides find North Dakota universities are inexpensive and well-regarded, with modest-sized classes typically taught by faculty members rather than adjuncts or graduate students.
One California resident found it online, showed it to her Dad and he was impressed. She has since graduated in May from North Dakota's Valley City State University, where her younger brother is now enrolled. For California residents, North Dakota colleges cost about $10,000 a year in tuition and fees compared to about $12,000 in the University of California system.
Many students hail from states far beyond the region. Floridians numbered 182 in 2010, up from 37 in 2000. During the same period, international enrollment rose to 1,600 from 1,125.
This isn't happening by accident. A dozen years ago, a years-long decline in the number of state high school graduates was accelerating. Faced with the prospect of closing academic departments or entire schools, university leaders instead moved to attract more students, particularly from beyond state borders.
The state poured money into improving academics. In the National Science Foundation's rankings by federal research expenditures—a key measure of prestige for research universities—North Dakota State and University of North Dakota each jumped ahead of more than 30 other institutions over the past 11 years, to the 147th and 143rd spots, respectively.
While improving its schools, North Dakota kept tuition low. In recent years, state revenues gushing from an oil boom in western North Dakota have given the state more resources to lure nonresidents.
The result: Even as the number of North Dakota high school graduates fell below 7,400 in 2010 from 9,058 in 2000, enrollment at public colleges surged, climbing 38% in the decade ended in 2010, to 48,120. Leading that growth was a 56% jump in nonresident students.
Out-of-state students who have stayed after graduation have helped reverse a decades-long population decline, with North Dakota now on the verge of breaking its 1930 record of 681,000 people.
Out-of-state students fill both classrooms and budget holes. Traditionally, states charge nonresidents tuition and fees as much as triple that charged to residents. The premium is especially tempting now as state legislatures nationwide slash outlays for higher education.
Facing a funding cut of $650 million or more, the University of California system sent a record 18% of its undergraduate admission letters for the upcoming semester to non-residents, up from 12% in 2009. One goal: to collect a $23,000 premium imposed on out-of-staters, bringing their annual tuition-and-fees to about $35,000.
Luring nonresidents is growing more crucial as the demographic dilemma North Dakota confronted years ago spreads to other states. Due to population shifts, 27 states will see declines in home-grown high-school graduates in the next five to 10 years, says a recent report from the U.S. Department of Education.
As public colleges and universities battle across state lines, there will be winners and there will be losers. Among probable winners will be academically elite public colleges such as some in California, Texas, Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina, along with colleges in tourist destinations such as Arizona and Colorado.
Touting both advantages is Vermont, the nation's top nonresident magnet. A once-private public college that offers academic cachet near wooded hills laced with ski slopes, the University of Vermont draws 75% of its freshman class from other states, even though it charges nonresidents tuition of $32,500, about $20,000 more than residents pay.
The battle could be fiercest for a type of enrollee who until now has gone largely unnoticed: the out-of-state bargain hunter. Although many public colleges have long offered out-of-state tuition below $20,000, few have advertised it, largely to avoid antagonizing state lawmakers who believe state schools should serve state residents.
But political opposition is generally waning amid the depleted budgets and declining high school grads. Caps on nonresident enrollment are loosening in many states. A recent press release from San Diego State University, touted its nonresident rate of under $16,000.
No place has proved more popular with bargain-hunting nonresidents than flat, cold, landlocked North Dakota.
The state has a long tradition of spending generously on higher education. Some in the heavily Republican state have complained that it is academically socialist. To make sure no North Dakotans had to travel far to attend college, the state has 11 public colleges, including half as many four-year institutions as Minnesota—a state with eight times as many people.
In 1999, the state legislature assembled a committee of 63 leaders of government and business to debate whether to cut classes and departments. After all, North Dakota in 1999 produced fewer than 9,000 high school graduates, down from 10,740 in 1980.
In the end, however, the so-called "Roundtable" committee vowed to bolster their university system in a bid to exploit its potential as an economic development asset. All along, North Dakota's 11 public colleges had provided economic stability to up-and-down agricultural towns like Mayville and Dickinson.
In a May 2000 report, the committee laid out a plan to attract ever-greater numbers of nonresident students to North Dakota universities, and help those universities spawn private enterprise that would hire those students upon graduation. Higher education would become a primary engine in reversing the state's economic and demographic woes.
A key to attracting out-of-staters was undercutting other states on price.
The highest-priced public colleges in North Dakota—UND and NDSU—officially charge nonresident students about $17,000 in tuition and fees. That's half what nonresident students pay at many public colleges elsewhere. And it's less than some in-state rates at public colleges in places like Illinois and Pennsylvania.
But as it happens, few nonresidents at UND or NDSU pay anywhere near that rate. That's because North Dakota belongs to consortiums in which it and about 20 other states agreed to charge each other's students no more than 1.5 times in-state rates.
As others raised tuition, North Dakota held its price down. In many cases, North Dakota waived the premium, enabling out-of-staters to enroll full-year for about $7,000, lower than resident tuition in most other states.
Traffic charts of higher-education consortiums in this region show heavy student migration toward North Dakota. In a Midwest student-exchange program in 2009, North Dakota enrolled 557 students from Wisconsin, Missouri, Nebraska and three other neighboring states, while losing only 39 North Dakotans to the bunch of them.
A Western consortium of 15 states including California, Oregon and Arizona delivered 1,604 students to North Dakota in 2010, while attracting only 367 North Dakotans.
Especially productive is North Dakota's reciprocity agreement with Minnesota next door. In the school year ended in 2010, 8,381 Minnesotans studied in North Dakota, compared with 4,781 North Dakotans going the other way. Minnesotans can enroll at North Dakota State or University of North Dakota for tuition of about $7,200, compared with in-state tuition at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis of about $10,000.
For other states, competing with North Dakota on the cost of education is difficult. As other states battle budget shortfalls, oil revenues this past year enabled North Dakota to run a billion-dollar surplus, and to fund a 13.4% increase over two years in appropriations to the North Dakota university system. That followed higher-education budget boosts of 20.6% in 2009 and 13.5% in 2007.
The increases help keep tuition low while paying for improvements. As its enrollment grew by nearly 50% in the past 11 years, North Dakota State more than doubled its doctorate programs, to 44 from 18.
Its annual research expenditures have climbed to $120 million from $45 million a decade ago. In February, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education reclassified the school as a "very high research activity" institution, placing it among the nation's top 108 private and public universities.
The influx of out-of-state students to the school has benefited Fargo's economy. North Dakota research indicates that about 39% of nonresidents remain in the state at least one year after graduation. The city's population has risen to 105,000, 16% higher than in 2000, and an array of defense, medical, computer science and other firms have sprouted along the Red River corridor stretching north to Grand Forks and UND. City leaders say that its image finally is recovering from the Oscar-winning 1996 film "Fargo," which described it as "the middle of nowhere."
After graduating from North Dakota State in 2010, a Sri Lanka native started working as an engineer at Pedigree Technologies, an information-technology firm, founded by a 1997 graduate.
To recruit in other states, both UND and North Dakota State spend on advertisements in magazines and on cable channels such as Comedy Central. Each also has stationed a full-time recruiter in their largest out-of-state market, Minnesota's Twin Cities.
Increasingly their reach is extending beyond the Great Plains and Mountain West.
As a senior at Miss Porter's, the 168-year-old Connecticut boarding school, one student learned about North Dakota State during a computer search for undergraduate programs in zoology.
She chose it over nine other schools because of the beauty of its tree-lined campus and the personal attention she received from the zoology faculty during her visit. Also, she says, Downtown Fargo has the restaurants, the coffee bars, the cultural stuff she wants.
The aspiring marine veterinarian was delighted that the school helped her obtain summer internships at aquariums in Rhode Island and Florida.

GOVERNORS WANT UNIVERSITIES TO PROVE PERFORMANCE BEFORE RECEIVING FINANCING

Story first appeared in Bloomberg News.

U.S. governors, who slashed higher- education budgets by $5 billion this fiscal year, say financing for public colleges and universities should be based on graduation rates, return on investment of taxpayer dollars and other performance measures.

The National Governors Association recommended that states use metrics, such as the number of degrees per $100,000 appropriated, to set higher-education policy and funding, according to a report.

Washington Governor Christine Gregoire, chair of the governors group, said education is absolutely key in putting America back to work. She added that making sure people are getting the education and training needed to compete in the global economy is one of the most important things they need to consider as governors.

Facing the fourth straight year of budget deficits, U.S. governors recommended cuts to colleges and universities that were twice as deep as to public schools.

The California State University and University of California systems, and public institutions in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where state funding was slashed almost by half, have recently raised tuition as much as 12 percent to deal with record state funding cuts.

Questions From Taxpayers

Gregoire said governors need to be prepared to answer questions from taxpayers about how colleges are performing and spending public funds.
The NGA report highlights performance measures used in Gregoire’s home state of Washington as well as performance funding initiatives in Indiana, Arkansas, Colorado and Ohio, where some public support is tied to benchmarks such as graduation rates and minority achievement.

The report on increasing accountability said higher - education institutions should be evaluated by measures including the number of undergraduate certificate and degree completions per 100 students enrolled and the number of degrees awarded compared with the number of adults in the state without postsecondary certificates.

While it is unfortunate that governors have had to reduce the budgets for higher education, they also realize they aren’t using the money as well as they could. The post-secondary system is not often accountable to the real world. Governors are recognizing they are investing in these systems. They need to make sure they are performing to the level they need them to.”

Funding Return

The NGA is focused on higher education at its meeting in Salt Lake City because governors recognize that state funding will one day return to previous levels. Current college completion rates are not sufficient to provide the graduates needed for future U.S. economic needs.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield called on governors to make education more affordable, support changes in the U.S. immigration system for highly educated workers, press for federal research funding and support entrepreneurial cultures at their state institutions.

While graduation rates need to be taken into account, governors should also be careful how much financial support they cut.

COLLEGES THROW OUT SAT SCORES…OR DO THEY?

Story first appeared in Bloomberg News.

Colleges from Bowdoin in Maine to Pitzer in California dropped the SAT entrance exam as a requirement, saying it favors the affluent, penalizes minorities and doesn’t predict academic success. What they don’t advertise is they find future students by buying names of kids who do well on the test.

Pitzer buys as many as 100,000 names a year based on test scores from the College Board, owner of the SAT, to search for applicants, even after the school became “test-optional” in the 2003-2004 year. Wake Forest University, which stopped requiring the SAT or rival ACT test for students entering in 2009, also buys names, as does Bowdoin, which made scores optional in 1969.

Students are being duped by some schools into thinking that test scores don’t matter, when they matter a great deal for marketing outreach and prestige. Test-optional colleges that buy names of high-scoring students are hypocritical.

They take a stance that looks principled but is strategic. They say ‘I’m going to show myself to be open,’ but in reality they’re completely buying into the definition of a good student that is guided by the test.

The College Board sells names to more than 1,000 colleges, using biographical information students provide when they register for the preliminary SAT and SAT exams. Students can opt out of having their names in the company’s search service. The company and its competitor, Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT Inc., both nonprofit, sell names for 33 cents apiece.

Reaching Out

Bowdoin, in Brunswick, Maine, was the first school to become test.
Bowdoin adopted the policy to let applicants decide whether test results accurately reflected their academic ability and potential. Since then, dozens of schools have followed suit, a trend that accelerated in the past 10 years as more colleges questioned possible biases in the tests.

That hasn’t stopped universities from using the test in other ways.
Smith College, an all-women’s school in Northampton, Massachusetts, paid the College Board about $20,000 in the past academic year for names of students with “above-average” scores.

Founded in 1871, Smith buys about 60,000 names annually, including those of 10,000 high school sophomores, which might be inconsistent with its test-optional policy.

The school stated that this is one of the very few ways to directly get at young women who they know are going to college next year, adding that this is a good way to introduce themselves.

Rankings Rise

There are about 1,600 four-year, nonprofit colleges in the U.S. and fewer than 5 percent don’t require a standardized entrance exam for admissions for their main body of students. FairTest spokesman Bob Schaeffer said the percentage of test-optional schools is “much higher.”

Almost all schools that used the College Board’s Student Search Service -- with a database of some 6.5 million student names -- before going test optional continue to use it to recruit applicants.

Another benefit to test-optional colleges of recruiting students with high test results is that it can help raise their average entrance- exam scores, a metric used in determining some national rankings and a measure of prestige. Since students who don’t test well may refrain from submitting scores, that leaves high performers, or those who can afford prep courses and pay fees to retake the test several times, to bolster a school’s average scores.

Stopped Making Sense

Between 60 percent and 80 percent of applicants to test - optional schools submit their SAT scores.

In 2004, Pitzer President Laura Trombley wrote that the SAT doesn’t really make any sense anymore. The school, one of seven institutions comprising the Claremont Colleges in California, ranked 70th in the 2002 U.S. News & World Report list of liberal arts colleges. That year, the school’s average SAT score for verbal and math combined was 1,234, according to Pitzer data. In 2004, after it went test optional, its ranking climbed to 59, while the average score rose to 1,246. By 2010, it ranked 46th, while the score reached 1,293.


Name Recognition

Pitzer, founded in 1963, buys names of students based on test scores, majors and geography, according to the college. The school doesn’t have the name recognition of some schools and needs to seek out qualified students

Buying names of students based on their test scores doesn’t run contrary to Bowdoin’s test-optional policy, said Scott Meiklejohn, the school’s dean of admissions and financial aid. He stated that if there were a convenient way to search for and reach out to 11th graders based on who is going to submit a wonderful essay, or who exhibits exceptional curiosity and motivation in the classroom, or who earns outstanding teacher recommendations, or who has shown a serious commitment to interesting activities outside the classroom..., he would use it.

The liberal arts school with about 1,750 students, received test scores from 83 percent of the most recent class of applicants.

Wake Forest University announced its test-optional policy in 2008. In a letter to faculty and staff at the time, it said that standardized testing continued to be biased against many minority students, who scored significantly lower than white students. The Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based school held a conference the following year on admissions policy and standardized testing, drawing participants from universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

The SAT has been known by various names over the course of its history, including Scholastic Aptitude Test, Scholastic Assessment Test and SAT Reasoning Test.


Wake Forest buys names of students based on test scores, self-reported grade-point average, geography and Advanced Placement performance, admissions dean Martha Allman said. It reaches out to students through mailings, the Internet and high school visits. She said that if they were only buying the names of SAT high scorers and those were the only names they were recruiting and inviting to campus, yes that would be contradictory. She added that the SAT is one of many factors.

Courtney Abernathy, who will enter Wake Forest this year as a freshman, earned a 3.9 grade-point average at her Plymouth, New Hampshire, high school. She decided against submitting her test scores to the college because her results were average, she said.

Abernathy said she wasn’t bothered that some classmates may have been recruited when the school bought their names. She stated that it does get Wake Forest’s name to students who score high, and gives people like her who didn’t score high a fair chance to get accepted.

The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, dropped the standardized test requirement beginning with the class that entered in 2006. It stopped buying names about eight years ago because it was no longer cost effective. Instead, the school spent the money to help pay for travel and add staff to recruit applicants outside of New England and low-income and minority students.

The Trouble With Public Colleges
by Pat Regnier
Story from CNNMoney.com

Record applications. Soaring tuition. Tighter budgets. State U. may no longer be as great a deal or as easy a backup as it once was. Parents and kids, time to rethink your strategy.

At the 50,000-student University of Florida, only 50 or so undergrads major in geology. It's not exactly an easy subject.

But Michael Perfit, the department's chairman, says that thousands of UF's liberal arts undergrads fulfill their science requirement with geology -- and they do a lot more than sort rocks. Students learn about the patterns of the oceans, groundwater systems, and long-term changes in the earth's atmosphere. Pretty key things in this era of climate change, especially in a coastal wetlands state like Florida.

But Perfit's department may soon be unable to offer so many courses to non-majors. UF fears severe state budget cuts in May and has warned that it may have to lay off half the geology faculty.

The religion department is on the block for big cuts too. Ditto for lots of little things, like library journal subscriptions and a student art gallery. Peter Laumann, a UF senior active in a student group protesting the cuts, says some of his instructors have asked students to stop submitting papers by e-mail. That way the university doesn't spend money printing them for grading.

Great public universities like Florida have long been both the financial and academic safety plan for high-performing college-bound seniors and their parents. But now, just when families most need low-cost college student loans for high-quality schools, State U. is under intense financial pressure.

Arizona State University is proposing a temporary $1,200 annual surcharge to get it through the recession. The University of Washington is bracing for a 26% cut in state money, bringing funding back to where it was a decade ago. Meanwhile, families searching for a bargain have deluged some of the better public schools with applications, making them even more selective. And tuitions across the country continue their steep rise.

Don't get the wrong idea: Public colleges, especially the flagship "University of" campuses, are still among the best deals in higher ed. Their average resident tuition of $6,600, or even the $17,500 charged to nonresidents, still pales in comparison to the average $25,000 at the privates.

But these schools are facing a major fiscal crunch -- and the challenges won't end when the recession does. If you want to make sure your child gets into a great school, and that you can afford to pay the bill when she does, you're going to have to rethink your game plan.

The Schools' Hard Knocks

Public higher ed varies dramatically by state. But at least one of these stories is probably unfolding where you live.

Less money for learning. Even before the recession, money was tight on many campuses. From 2000 to 2008, state aid to public colleges nationwide fell from $7,800 a student to just over $7,000, according to the group State Higher Education Executive Officers. (That number is inflation-adjusted for the rising price of running a college.)

The drop looks worse if you consider what happened for the competition. Top private universities, propped up by high tuitions, big endowments, and donations, were poaching some of the best faculty from flagship public schools, says Kathleen Sell, former chief budget officer for the University of Wisconsin system. Now top private schools spend almost twice as much per student on instruction as top publics.

At Florida, president Bernard Machen worries about a high student-to-faculty ratio and whether his students are challenged in class and learning to think critically. "We have some evidence that our kids are not," says Machen.

Tuition (still) rising.

At the University of Washington, students may see 14% hikes for each of the next two years. Most of a $620 in-state hike at State University of New York campuses won't even go to students' education -- it will help the state balance its budget. "The state gave us big cuts, and then said, yes, you can raise tuition, and then took back 80% of that tuition increase," says president Shirley Strum Kenny of SUNY at Stony Brook. That means a large chunk of private student loans are going directly to the state.

In those states (as well as in Florida), tuition increases will come from a low base -- SUNY will still cost only about $5,000. But many other publics have already cracked five digits for in-state tuition.

Since 1997, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has increased in-state tuition at an annual rate of over 9%, in part to keep up with the faculty arms race as state aid per student fell. Annual tuition and mandatory fees have hit about $12,000. Room and board will put you at $20,000. Disclosure: This writer went to Illinois (and loved it) when it was cheap, with no need for alternative student loans. That probably wouldn't have been possible at today's rates.

Tighter admissions. There's a bumper crop of college-bound seniors these days, and now the economy has even more of them looking at publics. Binghamton University, a top campus in the SUNY system, had 34,000 applications for 2,800 spots -- a record for the school -- and accepted just 32%.

In California the admissions crunch has reached beyond the coveted Berkeley and UCLA campuses and into the Cal State schools, usually a safe bet for any resident in the top third of his or her high school class. This year San Jos State was forced by budget cuts to turn away more than 4,000 qualified applicants.

It used to be that just a handful of publics -- the likes of Berkeley, Virginia, and Michigan (the fastest growing Michigan college is Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan) -- counted as selective, says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. But these days the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has an acceptance rate of just 52%, down from 82% in 1995. Florida, Texas at Austin, and UC-San Diego are even tougher.

Nassirian reckons that any state school that rejects 30% or more of its applicants is excluding kids who can do the work. Machen at Florida agrees. "We could take another whole cohort from our applicant pool and not significantly diminish the quality of our student body," he says.

Why the Crunch Will Continue

There is a basic supply-and-demand problem. The demand is self-explanatory: Despite the squeeze, the best state colleges still offer terrific academics (and often a great football team to boot). They give students the chance to rub shoulders with faculty and researchers on par or close to those at the Ivies, where the great minds are gated off from all but about 10% of a largely privileged, high-caliber applicant pool.

Stony Brook, for example, boasts the anthropologist Richard Leakey and the Grammy-winning Emerson String Quartet among its faculty. A kid has to study hard to go to a Stony Brook, a UC-San Diego, or a Wisconsin, but she doesn't necessarily need a full-blown résumé at 17. Not quite yet.

The supply of rigorous research schools isn't keeping up. Campuses can jam the dorms with more students, but that's a mixed blessing if it means kids have to rely on adjunct professors and giant classes to make the numbers work. "Quantity has been maintained at the expense of quality," says UC-Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield, speaking of the University of California system.

To make up for tight public funding, schools have brought in more private money. But research and philanthropy dollars come with strings, so they don't usually mean smaller language labs and more poetry professors. That leaves colleges leaning ever more upon tuition, which is now 36% of public colleges' revenue vs. 31% a decade ago, according to data from the state higher-ed officers.

Many advocates of state-supported colleges point to an ideological shift. When returning GIs and then the baby boomers piled into colleges, Americans thought of higher ed as a public good. Now it is mostly considered an individual benefit. The personal return on education certainly is large. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz calculate that college grads earn 60% more than those who stop at high school.

"It isn't every asset where you get [that return] without having a Madoff problem," says Goldin. Given the value of what colleges sell, it makes sense that legislators pressed for money would ask the customers to pay more. At least if you see education as nothing but a product.

And the legislatures are pressed for money, especially now. Most states have to balance their budgets every year, and revenue is in the tank. Few politicians want to raise taxes. Meanwhile, the ever-growing cost of health-care programs like Medicaid is swallowing up budgets.

Politically, it doesn't help that the students at the best state schools can look like a subsidized elite. Low-income students are underrepresented on many name-brand campuses. According to the Education Trust, only 22% of undergrads at flagship universities receive Pell Grants (available to low- and moderate-income families) vs. 35% at all colleges.

The past decade has been especially hard for less affluent people trying to get a college education. The regional and community colleges that serve many of them are hurting too, and need-based financial aid hasn't kept pace with tuition. The cost of a public college, even after aid, now eats up 33% of a lower-middle-income family's earnings, compared with 23% 10 years ago, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCPPHE). For upper-middle-class families, that figure has gone from 12% to 16%.

Given these pressures, states are likely to require higher-income families, at least, to pay more. One idea, called high tuition/high aid, is intended to get more dollars out of families who can spare them and direct more aid to those who can't. Skeptics wonder if states will live up to the "high aid" part of the bargain. (And even with aid, tuition sticker shock could keep many qualified students away.)

In Wisconsin, the main Madison campus has proposed an explicit income test: By 2012, families earning more than $80,000 would pay a $1,000 annual tuition surcharge.

What's a Parent to Do?

How you respond to these changes depends on how long you have before your child heads off to school.

If your child is young. The toughest problem is figuring out what the tab will look like more than a decade down the road. "We ought to be able to tell you, if you have a 6-year-old, how much it will cost to send him to a state university," says Patrick Callan of NCPPHE. "In reality, who knows?" Tuition increases don't move along any kind of predictable path.

A potential hedge against this uncertainty is a state prepaid-tuition program. In most of them, the value of your investment in a prepaid will grow along with average in-state costs, and you'll get that return even if your kid ultimately goes to Notre Dame.

Trouble is, most states don't offer prepaid. And if yours does, you still need to research the plan carefully. Most charge a premium above the value of current tuition, which lowers your return, says Joseph Hurley of Savingforcollege.com. And with the stock market in the tank, some prepaids are financially weak. You are safest if the plan's obligations are guaranteed by the state or the public university system.

In states without a prepaid plan, the only answer to unpredictable tuition is to build as big a savings cushion as you can in a conventional 529 savings plan. At a minimum, assume tuition costs will grow at about 7% a year, the average for resident tuition over the past decade.

If you have a kid in high school. State schools can no longer be considered "safe" schools. Over the coming years the demographic crunch will ease, but some top publics want to shrink their enrollments to improve their educational experience. (And maybe their rankings.) So encourage your child to take the hard science course with honors credits. If a course offers college credit, even better -- it will be easier to graduate within four years.

At application time, high school counselors and college consultants advise casting a wide net beyond your state schools. After financial aid offers come in, a private school or an out-of-state public might be within reach, says private admission consultant Bari Norman.

This could be an especially good time to look across state lines. Tuition and fees alone at some public Big 10 schools run $20,000 to $25,000 for out-of-state students. That's high, but it compares with around $35,000 for Boston University, in roughly the same ballpark in terms of prestige. And Minnesota and the SUNYs have nonresident prices that are competitive with resident tuitions in expensive states like Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Nonresidents traditionally have a harder time getting into flagship campuses, but Nassirian at the registrars association says this year standards might be a little more forgiving. The schools need the higher tuitions the nonresidents pay. (If so, that also makes admissions a bit tougher in-state, an extra squeeze on families with more limited resources.)

Big is what publics do best, and some bright kids aren't self-directed enough to find their way on a 30,000-plus campus. That will be especially true in this era of budget cuts.

So kick the tires when you visit the campus. Key questions to ask admissions officials (and any student you can buttonhole): Are the big lectures getting bigger? Has the college cut back on student advisers? Is it getting harder to get into essential courses and graduate in four years? Is the university relying more on part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants? And how is life for graduate teaching assistants? At Big State U., graduate TAs will always carry a lot of the teaching load, but you'll want to know if those apprentice professors are under even more pressure now.

Finally, you can be reassuring as the fat and thin envelopes roll in. If your child goes to her second-choice college and does well, says Sell, most flagships are quite open to transfer students. Besides, as hard as this may be to see at age 17, life doesn't really turn on being a Longhorn, Badger, or Gator.

"The real difference in America is not between people who go to Florida and those who go to Central Florida," says Callan at the education policy center. "It's between those who go to college and finish and those who don't." In these tough economic times, you can remind your child how lucky she is to be on the right side of that line.