I missed it at the time, but The New York Times‘ Education Life supplement had a piece on the whole top-students-going-to-public-universities thing I touched on yesterday.
It nicely captures some of the difficulties and tough questions brought about by the economic climate:
[A]pplications are pouring in from students shut out by the stratospheric cost of private colleges. That’s generally a good thing. Flagships are attracting more wealthy and better-prepared students. Yet as the counterargument goes, a flagship’s traditional mission is to educate its own, especially a state’s low- and middle-income students. The evolution under way is putting some flagships out of reach for the students who were typically enrolled even a decade ago. Each year, the quality of students as well as the budget model skews closer to that of elite private universities.
