2021 Study: Which Colleges & Universities Do Freshmen Travel Farthest For?

Fewer Americans Are Going to College, but More Are Moving To Pursue Higher Education

Given the kind of year 2020 had been, it’s hardly surprising that fewer Americans enrolled in higher education than in the year prior, likely due to student debt concerns. According to the figures out of National Student Clearinghouse, just over 2.1 million people started college in the fall of 2020, 13% fewer than in the fall of 2019.

And yet, based on the internal migration estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, 938,000 Americans, or 43% of all who enrolled, chose to move to attend college last year. The out-of-state attendance number for 2020 is the highest rate the U.S. has seen since 2005, a year when half of all college freshmen left home to pursue education.

Brain Drain? States College Students Are Most (and Least) Likely To Leave

With so many newly admitted students moving to college, how far are they moving? Are most of them staying in their home state, or are they crossing state lines in pursuit of higher education?

Reasons to study in-state are plentiful: remain closer to family, save big money on tuition, or just because great schools are already in your home state. In fact, the data show 69% of college students who move to go to college actually stay in their state. This is especially true in states like Texas, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, states where more than 80% of college students have chosen to study closer to home. On the flip side, nearly a third (31%) of all newly admitted students relocated to a different state to go to college in 2020. The share of those who are prepared to travel far for a degree is especially high in remote states like Alaska and Hawaii, as well as small states within the New England area, such as New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

In all, roughly one in three (30%) students that went to college out-of-state moved to one of these previous five states.

The Colleges With Highest Percentage of Out-of-state Students

Moving for college, of course, is much more about the college than the city or state it’s in. Which colleges in the United States attract the most students from outside their states? We looked at the top 200 colleges and universities listed in the 2021 U.S. News National Universities Ranking and looked up their corresponding 2019 admissions stats from the National Center for Education Statistics. Here’s what we found out. There are a handful of universities where 98% of freshmen come from out-of-state, and most of them are in Washington D.C. This is hardly surprising, given how small the District of Columbia is, both in area and population. Yet besides D.C.-based colleges, the highest rates of out-of-state admissions belong to Ivy League schools Dartmouth (97%), Brown (96%), and Yale (93%).

That said, a few schools outside the Ivy League are so popular nationwide that greater than 90% of their new students move from other states. These schools are:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with some of the best technical degree programs in the country
• University of Notre Dame, with all-around great academics and a famous college football team
• Johns Hopkins University, known for their excellent medical school

Magnet Schools: Colleges with the Farthest Pull

Out-of-state admission is a decent measure of how much of a pull a given college has, but it doesn’t give us the full picture. Some schools may feature a high percentage of out-of-state students, but that number may be inflated by attraction from nearby states. To estimate the true “pull” of America’s top schools, we looked at the origin states of all new students beginning college in 2019 (latest data available) and calculated roughly how many miles an average freshman has traveled to study there. The answer? The average distance of a college move for the top 200 schools in America is 293 miles. 

The three colleges for which an average new student had to travel the farthest are schools famous for their programs in STEM and computer sciences: California Institute of Technology (CalTech), MIT, and Stanford University. All three average over 1,100 miles traveled by out-of-staters. To illustrate how far that is, sitting behind these colleges in average distance traveled is the University of Hawaii-Manoa, which is 3,758 miles away from the rest of the United States and 4,108 miles away from Japan! For most Ivy League colleges like Harvard, Brown, Yale and Columbia, the number of miles their new students traveled to study there sits around the 900 mile mark.

To find out which school is the biggest draw in your state, check the map below:

Great and Local: Top-Ranked Schools With Mostly Local Students

Despite a high percentage of admissions coming from out-of-state students for top colleges, not all great universities rely as heavily on out-of-state tuition. As a testament to the fact that Californians are less likely to leave their state to go to college, schools within the University of California system (all ranked within the top 100 of the 2021 U.S. News National Universities Ranking) have a share of out-of-state admissions below 10%.

Similarly, more than 93% of new students at the University of Texas at Austin, ranked 42nd, hail from Texas. Meanwhile, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, ranked by U.S. News as 63rd in the nation, draws 91% of its admissions coming from its native state of New Jersey. Other excellent schools for which fewer students cross the country to study at are UNC at Chapel Hill, University of Florida, and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The overwhelming majority of new students average around 40 miles of travel to study there.

To see how each of the top 200 schools compare on out-of-state admissions, the distances their students traveled for a degree, and a few other metrics, check out the table below.

Sources and Methodology

Figures on the number and percentage of people moving to college within or outside their home state come from the Current Population Survey (CPS).

Data on college admissions, including origin states of newly admitted students, is taken from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The U.S. News 2021 Best National University Rankings is used as the basis for selecting top 200 colleges in the United States.

To estimate the average distance traveled by a newly admitted student, we took the school’s location and calculated the distance between its campus and the statistical population centers of each state (as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau)

All calculations are weighted, which is to say, the more students a college admitted from further away, the greater the average distance traveled was.

Only moves within the United States are considered.

Illustrations by Vanessa Lovegrove