What does the “A” in “UA” stand for? The answer used to be easy. It isn’t anymore.
Increasingly, the “A” does not stand for Alabama.
Specifically, the “A” does not stand for many Alabamians’ access and admission to The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
If this trend continues, by 2025 Alabamians could be a small fraction of a UA student body dominated by out-of-staters — a story of access denied during what appears to be a desperate quest to quench ten-figure debt.
And a key proponent of this approach has recently been hired up the road at UAB.
The Statistics of Shriveling Access
The radical decline in the in-state enrollment at the University of Alabama has begun to attract media attention in recent years. According to the UA Factbook 2014-2015, from Fall 2011 to Fall 2014 the number of first-time undergraduates at UA went up 18.8 percent but the number of students from Alabama actually went down 13.6 percent over the same period. This combination has dropped the percentage of Alabamians entering UA like a rock. The percentage of in-state first-time undergraduates was 74.0 percent in 2003; it sank to 48.7 percent in 2011 and plummeted to 35.4 percent in 2014, the first year in which the UA student body as a whole was majority out-of-state.
While out-of-state recruitment has been emphasized at many public universities in recent years, UA’s enrollment numbers are out of sync with neighboring flagship universities. The University of Georgia, where I teach, is 90 percent in-state at the undergraduate level. The University of Tennessee’s undergraduate population is 86 percent in-state. Ole Miss’s student body is 61percent in-state, and the University of Florida’s student body is 80 percent in-state.
The Witt Plan at UA: Reducing Access for Alabamians?
What’s going on at the Capstone? Ask outgoing UA System Chancellor Robert Witt before he exits the stage. On October 25, 2006, then-UA President Witt called UA “an academic community united in its commitment to serve the citizens of Alabama,” reflecting on his 2003 “new vision for the future” at UA [ Witt’s vision has instead made Alabamians a shrinking minority on their own flagship state university campus.
Examining admissions data at the county level reinforces this shrinking feeling. According to ACHE, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, back in 2006 a full 15 percent of undergraduates at UA came from Jefferson County. Next in line was Tuscaloosa County (13 percent), followed by Madison County (6 percent), Shelby County (5 percent), and Mobile (4 percent). The order of counties was the same in 2014, but the percentages melted away as inexorably as a Southern snow in the sunshine over those eight years: Jefferson County was down to 10 percent by 2014, Tuscaloosa County down to 8 percent, Madison and Shelby counties down to 4 percent, and Mobile County down to 3 percent.
Feeder Schools Feeding UA Fewer Freshmen
This pattern of limited access for Alabamians at UA becomes even more concrete when ACHE data for the top feeder high schools are examined. Three of the top five feeder schools for UA in both 2007 and 2014 were Hoover High School, Vestavia Hills High School, and Bob Jones High School in Madison. In 2007, 35.2 percent of Hoover’s senior class who went to Alabama public institutions for college attended UA. In 2014, that percentage was down to 18.4 percent. Similarly, 38.8 percent of Vestavia Hills’s Class of 2007 who attended Alabama public institutions went to UA, but only 27.2 percent of VHHS’s Class of 2014 did the same. And only 14.6 percent of Bob Jones’s Alabama public institution-bound class in 2014 attended UA, down from 21.2 percent in 2007.
Obviously, there are myriad reasons for students to attend a college, and the data do not indicate the percentage of students who applied to UA in 2007 vs. 2014. But the first prong of Witt’s plan was for UA to be “a university of choice for the best and brightest.” The dropping percentages of UA attendees from these three high schools implies that either Witt’s plan is failing to secure the interest and tuition money of these in-state students, or else many students at Hoover, Vestavia Hills, and Bob Jones just aren’t best-and-bright enough for UA anymore.
Bama-Bound No More?
Even more detailed (but uncorrected for changes in senior class size) data from the UA Factbooks reveal that the numbers of students enrolling from some high schools are falling precipitously:
- From 2011 to 2014, the number of graduating seniors enrolling at UA from Clay-Chalkville High School just northeast of Birmingham dropped 65.7 percent, from 35 to 12.
- Ramsay High School, the only Birmingham public high school listed among UA’s top 50 feeder schools in 2011, saw its number of UA-bound seniors drop 45.8 percent over this same period.
- The football-tradition-rich Prattville High School, up I-65 from Montgomery, sent 48.4 percent fewer students to UA in 2014 versus 2011.
- Perennial academic powerhouse Grissom High School in Huntsville provided 39.2 percent fewer students to UA in 2014 than in 2011, with a nearly identical downward trend for LAMP Magnet School in Montgomery.
- The numbers of students from the highly regarded Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School and the Alabama School for Mathematics and Science in Mobile who attend UA have remained in single digits from 2012 through 2014.
But perhaps the most sadly ironic statistic is that the number of new graduates from Paul W. Bryant High School just outside of Tuscaloosa who attend UA has slumped 48.3 percent from 2011 to 2014, from 29 students matriculating at UA in 2011 to only 15 in 2014. These are high school seniors at a high school named for Bear Bryant, located on Mary Harmon Bryant Drive, a 10-mile drive from Bryant-Denny Stadium. Either the Paul Bryant High School seniors can’t get into UA, they can get in but can’t afford UA, or else they don’t want to go to UA. That’s awkward.
To summarize: whether you go to high school in Birmingham, just outside of Birmingham, down in Lower Alabama, up in the Tennessee Valley, in the shadow of Bryant-Denny and/or at some of the most academically challenging high schools in the state, your chances of ending up as a freshman college student at UA are likely going down. In 2011, graduates from the eight high schools listed above composed 4 percent of UA’s freshman class; in 2014 that number was down to no more than 1.7 percent.
Only a few UA feeder schools have shown an upward trend since 2011, including Mountain Brook High School (the number 1 UA feeder school in 2014, up 9 percent), McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile (number 13, up 9.7 percent), and Chelsea High School in Shelby County (number 17, up 47.6 percent). Any socioeconomic reasons for these schools’ increases are left to the reader.
It must be stressed that the widespread decreases in UA-bound Alabamians are in absolute numbers, not just percentages. These downward trends are not because UA is simply adding in-state undergraduates at a slower rate than out-of-staters, as was erroneously reported in the New York Times in May. No. Instead, UA appears to be constricting its in-state enrollment while also simultaneously and rapidly expanding its out-of-state numbers.
The Second Yankee Invasion of Tuscaloosa: This Time It’s For Keeps
Returning to the big picture, possibly the most jaw-dropping statistic regarding UA undergraduate enrollments is this: beginning in 2014, likely for the first time in the 184-year history of The University of Alabama, there are now more undergraduates at UA from outside the 16-state region included in the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) than there are undergrads hailing from all the states that border Alabama. As recently as 2007 there were almost four times as many students at UA from Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida than from outside the SREB. But now there are fewer border-state students at UA than from outside the South! Because if you’re from outside the SREB, you are most definitely not a Southerner. (Even Delaware is in the SREB.) One might even call these way-out-of-state, out-of-region recruits “Yankees.”
This Yankee invasion dwarfs the first one, back in 1865, in terms of sheer numbers. From 2007 to 2014, the number of Yankee undergrads at UA increased by a factor of seven—from 724 outside-the-SREB students in 2007 to 5,306 in 2014. (In contrast, Union General John Croxton brought only 1,500 troops with him to Tuscaloosa in April 1865.) Even after accounting for the explosive growth of the UA undergraduate population, the percentage of Yankees at UA went up by more than a factor of five in the last seven years, to 17.3 percent in 2014.
The Witt “Plan(s)” Revisited
Supporters of the Witt plan would say these statistics are signs of success, reflecting a newfound ability to recruit thousands of students to the Capstone from thousands of miles away. Talented students within an hour’s drive or two of Tuscaloosa might wonder if that’s the only reason it’s happening. For example, is this massive push for out-of-state students related to the massive out-of-state tuition revenues they generate? Is there a financial motive related to the billion-dollar debt that has been run up by UA in recent years? If so, these trend lines are unlikely to reverse, unless there is a major change in UA admission patterns or a massive influx of in-state students to UA from other universities.
Furthermore, it is something of a misnomer to refer “the Witt plan.” Which Witt plan? Witt’s original plan, in 2003, was for 28,000 students at UA by 2010. But instead UA blew past that objective two years early and hit 30,232 students by 2010. This plan was then revised by Witt in 2010 to a goal of 35,000 students by 2020. But UA enrolled 36,115 students by 2014 —zooming past the revised target six years early this time. If there is still a plan at UA, it seemingly has no relation to enrollment targets anymore. The only “plan” is “more, more, more” students — but, since 2008, fewer and fewer Alabamians at UA.
Looking Ahead to UA in 2025
In the perceived absence of any clear plan at UA, let’s use simple extrapolation to see what the Capstone could look like in Fall 2025 if current enrollment and financial trends during the past decade continue until then:
UA in 2025 will boast well over 50,000 students, but only about 30 percent will be from Alabama. Less than 20 percent of the freshman class will be from Alabama, with perhaps 6 percent of that class from Jefferson County — nearly all of those lucky students from a few over-the-mountain high schools. The “Yankees,” most of them from 1,000 miles away or more, will rival the Alabamians as the largest single geographic group on campus. The “Yankees” may already outnumber the “locals” from Alabama by 2025. Despite all that out-of-state tuition, however, the debt incurred by UA (in part to recruit these students from far away) will have ballooned to somewhere between $2 billion and $9 billion.
Is the “Witt Plan” Coming to UAB?
A key architect of the Witt plan for metastatic growth at UA was Bradley Barnes, who had served in Undergraduate Admissions and Enrollment Management at Tuscaloosa since 2004. In July Barnes began his new position as Vice Provost for Enrollment Management at… UAB. Barnes’s stated objective is to make sure that “UAB is increasingly viewed as the destination of choice for the nation’s best and brightest students at home and abroad.” Are these words indicative of policies that were already in place before Barnes’s arrival, as I am told, or will bigger changes be afoot that represent more of a continuum with Barnes’s previous work at UA?
Alabama taxpayers who are already footing the bill for an out-of-stater flagship university should pay careful attention to the developments in enrollment management both at the Capstone and on the Southside.