At the beginning of my freshman year, I noticed St. Thomas had relatively few out-of-state students and was more of a “suitcase campus” than I expected.
Because I was from Chicago, this concerned me because many of my new-found Minnesota friends went home for the weekends, leaving an empty feeling on campus I had not anticipated. As a sophomore this year, more of my friends have cars and houses off-campus, which also contributes to an overall sense of isolation.
The issue is why the number of out-of-state students at St. Thomas has been so low. There has not been much change in the number of out-of-state undergraduate students attending the university in the past 10 years, according to the Official Enrollment Reports Archive. During these years, only 15 percent of undergraduate freshmen have been from states other than Minnesota.
This stagnant number concerns me. The best way for St. Thomas to “win the future,” as my fellow Chicago native President Barack Obama likes to say, is to reach out to students across the country and encourage them to enroll. Attracting more students from outside Minnesota would give St. Thomas greater national recognition than it already has. More out-of-state students would also create more diversity on campus because different regions of the country would be represented.
I am often asked by other students what convinced me to enroll at St. Thomas. Many have a hard time understanding why I would ever want to leave the Windy City and come all the way to St. Thomas, or even Minnesota, for college.
The idea of experiencing college in a big city like Chicago is very enticing to a lot of my St. Thomas friends. And yes, it is true that there are many fine educational institutions in my hometown and in the surrounding metropolitan area.
So why did I decide to attend St. Thomas? Well, St. Thomas met all the criteria I was looking for in my college search. One of those criteria was that I wanted to go “away” for school, while preferably staying in the Midwest. I knew going through college as an out-of-state student could make the experience difficult in some ways, but I was up for the challenge. I felt it was important to get out of my comfort zone.
In fact, many students in my high school class were interested in attending an out-of-state college. We scattered all over the country and the world — one student went to college in Scotland and another in Canada. Coming to school here, I didn’t realize that wanting to expand my horizons and cross state lines would be considered unusual by some of my peers.
I hope one day students will not find it so strange that someone from outside the state wants to attend St. Thomas. This is a wonderful university and has much to offer its broad array of students. I encourage St. Thomas to always remain loyal to its Minnesota base but to also make it a priority to greatly increase its percentage of out-of-state students in the next decade.
Cynthia Johnson can be reached at john3175@stthomas.edu.
As an alumnus who spent four years working in the Office of Admission I think much is done to recruit out of state students. There are dedicated admissions counselors who work specifically with students from different states. For example, Wisconsin students have their own personal admissions counselor. These counselors spend weeks each fall living in hotel rooms going from high school to high school to recruit out of state students. There’s also the out of state pizza party for freshman during their first days on campus. Alumni living in different states are used to connect with prospective students. UST billboards are up in other metro areas around the country. It’s true the majority of St. Thomas students are from Minnesota and the Twin Cities metro area. I am from Minnesota, my freshman roommate was from Minnesota, and a lot of my friends on campus were from Minnesota. However, there are many people working hard to bring out of state students to campus, even if the numbers don’t reflect that.
I agree. I think UST needs to spend more time outside of just in-state and Wisconsin students. Being that I am also from Chicago, when I told my high school friends about UST, they were like “what/where the heck is that?”. How oblivious these Chicago area kids where to such a great school as UST is was somewhat alarming to me. And believe me, there are plenty of kids who go to other private schools in the Wisconsin or Illinois area that would have definitely strongly considered UST if they had known about it-I guarantee it. When I was a freshman, I had troubles with the “backpacking” on weekends deal too and that’s why I eventually bonded with all the out of state students because they were the majority that were staying on campus during the weekends. I also 100% agree that it would add to the diversity of UST and help it become nationally recognized as UST deserves to be. Because lets face it, we can continue to build all the fancy new buildings we want and continue to have some of the best academics, but if no one outside of Minnesota (or even the Midwest for that matter) knows, how can we get into the national credit that UST so obviously deserves?
Just by looking at UST IRA’s data for Fall 2006 first-year student U.S. residences outside of MN at the time of admission compared to Fall 2010, we see the number jump from 231 per year to 336 per year. That’s an average of 17.78% in 2006 & an increase to 22.12% in 2010. That 4.34% difference is even more significant when you realize the factors that prevent a lot of students from leaving their home states. I’ll point out two here. 1. Out of state students are not eligible for MN state grants. 2. The national trends (due in large part to costs of travel/transportion) in enrollment are showing that 85% of students stay within 5 hours of home. That means only 15% of students wind up going more than 5 hours away. With that in mind, & for all of the creative work St. Thomas already does to recruit this costly and hard-to-reach group, I’m pretty happy with where things sit. We’ll continue to see more out-of-state students, but they hear about UST through you (and other students) & through your stories. Through your excitement & pride in your (soon-to-be) alma mater. As a fellow out-of-stater, I hope to see more too. If you build it… (in your deeds, words, & maybe even donations to help future students pay for school as others have done before you)… they will come.
I want more Californians….
But I feel a lot of people here are out-of-staters like myself. I remember the room was packed for the dinner out-of state kids had at the beginning of this year. I think at this rate, we will be good to go :)