Dr. Norm Matloff writes to his email list:

The State of California is broke. You know that, and you probably also know that the UC and CSU systems have been trying to raise money by admitting more non-California students (Americans from other states, and foreign students), who pay higher tuition.

But CSU's East Bay campus, formerly CSU Hayward, has taken this idea to the next level. CSUEB, located a few miles south of Oakland, is directing its master's degree programs to admit ONLY non-California students. Either admit only out-of-state students or admit no one at all, the departments are being told.

In addition, it turns out that for computer science, this means mainly international students. In fact, it had already been the case that the CS grad program had been 90% foreign, and this is my focus here.

Nationwide, only about 35% of CS master's degrees are earned by foreign students. But anecdotal information indicates that the CSUEB CS program is typical among schools of that level. This jibes with the old NSF study cited by David North, which found that among PhD programs, the lower the ranking, the higher the proportion of international students.

This of course flies in the face of the "best and brightest" claims made by the industry lobbyists concerning the H-1Bs hired off U.S. university campuses. It thus also has implications for the "staple a green card to their diplomas" bills. I must once again make the disclaimer that every school, regardless of reputational ranking has a few extremely bright students, but nevertheless the average quality of the students at CSUEB is far below that of Stanford, across the bay. Proponents of the "staple" bills paint a picture of granting green cards to tens of thousands of geniuses, and it just ain't so.

I'll have more to say on this, with some national data, in a few days.

Norm

One Cal State department refuses to let in out-of-staters over state residents

Rejected for Being In-State August 13, 2012 - 3:00am

By Scott Jaschik

In state after state, one of the ways public colleges and universities are balancing their budgets is by aiming to admit more students from out of state (who are charged much higher tuition rates). In theory, this means more revenue for the entire university, although critics have warned about weakening the ties between public universities and their own states.

In California, where public higher education has experienced cut after cut, the choices are particularly difficult. For the spring semester of 2013, the California State University has told campus leaders they may not admit any Californian students to graduate programs. Given that tuition covers only a fraction of the costs of these students' education, the university said it couldn't afford them.

But the system said its campuses could admit out-of-state students, since they didn't cost the state money. Many campuses simply adopted the rule across their institutions, but as the Bay Area News Group first reported, Cal State's East Bay campus decided to give departments the option to admit applicants from out of state (primarily international students) while rejecting Californians seeking to enter programs in January.

In most cases where public colleges or universities are admitting more out-of-state students, they are not banning in-state applicants, just raising the bar for them to get in, or expanding class sizes to admit more from out of state. The Cal State policy affects only a minority of students (grad students), but the idea that a public university would permit graduate departments to admit only from out of state has stunned and upset some faculty members.

The biology department has gone so far as to say it will admit no graduate students (and will give up money that it would have received for having more graduate students) this spring rather than deny access only to those from California.[More]