New Hampshire
State universities admit more out-of-state students for the tuition bump – New Hampshire Bulletin
CORVALLIS, Ore. — Kennedy Cole, a college junior studying accounting, knew she wanted to attend school outside her native Nevada to expand her choices, meet new people, and explore different places.
Emma Nichols, a sophomore majoring in vocal performance, chose a school close to her home in Corvallis, Oregon.
The two friends, Oregon State University tour ambassadors who guide prospective students and families around campus, both think they made the right decision.
Cole said it was scary and tough to be at a school where many first-year students already knew one another or had gone to local high schools, but she found most students were friendly. Nichols said one of the exciting aspects of Oregon State’s campus is the ability to meet “out-of-state students and international ones from a different culture.”
But while they both have scholarships, there’s a big difference in their base tuition.
The university charges an estimated $13,800 in tuition and fees for in-state undergraduates in the 2023-24 academic year and about $36,600 for nonresidents.
At a time when school budgets are tightening and college enrollment is decreasing, state universities are increasingly turning to nonresident students to boost their revenues.
In 47 states, public research universities increased the proportion of out-of-state undergraduate students they admitted between 2002 and 2022, according to an analysis of federal education data done for Stateline by University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor Nicholas Hillman.
In those two decades, the percentage of out-of-state undergraduate students at those universities rose steadily from a nationwide average of 18 percent to 28 percent, Hillman found. Public research schools are generally large state universities that receive significant grants for research.
“Universities that have broad access missions have the least revenue stream,” Hillman said in an interview. Any shift in public funding “affects them more. Slots are being given away to people paying higher tuition. Politically, this is such a hot potato. Legislators are getting interested in this.”
While the funding boosts universities, critics worry that in-state students are being shut out. To minimize that, some states limit the number of out-of-state students.
Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, wrote a report on out-of-state enrollment in 2022.
In an interview with Stateline, Klein said: “The ability to go to a high-quality school near where you grew up is being taken away for many kids through a complex process in which public universities are swapping in-state students for out-of-state. In the end, society is no better educated, and student debt rises substantially.”
In Oregon, the average percentage of undergraduate students from out of state rose from 23 percent to 47 percent at the state’s public research universities, according to Hillman’s analysis.
At Oregon State University, 63 percent of undergraduate students are nonresidents, according to Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost of enrollment management, who has written extensively on the subject. The percentage drops to about half when including graduate students, he said. But Boeckenstedt also said virtually no Oregonian applicant who is qualified is denied a place at his campus. The university’s acceptance rate for first-year applicants in 2022-23 was nearly 83 percent, according to data provided by the school to the U.S. Department of Education.
“Up until about 2019 or 2020, we had sort of an informal, trustee-mandated ratio of two-thirds resident, one-third nonresident balance,” he said in an interview in his office on the lush Oregon State campus.
“But if you manage to that ratio, and resident enrollment falls by 100 [students], you need to purposely exclude out-of-state residents who want to come here and bring their out-of-state tuition dollars,” Boeckenstedt said. “And so I said, ‘Let’s think about this differently.’”
Shift toward out-of-state students
The trend toward admitting more out-of-state students started as far back as the 1980s, when state legislatures and governors began reducing funding for higher education, said Ozan Jaquette, an associate professor of higher education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies who has studied nonresident enrollment at public universities. He added that the trend has accelerated over the past decade.
“Once states said, ‘Hey, you can make your own money,’ the public universities that could, said, ‘We are going to dramatically increase nonresident enrollment because they pay higher tuition,’” he said.
Up until the end of the last decade, the move toward out-of-state recruitment mostly applied to flagship state universities, Jaquette said, as they had the widespread name recognition to attract students from other places. But now, he said, it has trickled down to the next tier of public colleges, as budgets get tighter and more nonresidents apply.
Some universities that recruit out-of-state students tend to focus on private high school students, since their families often can afford to pay higher tuition, he said. But some recruiting lately has expanded to public high schools, usually in affluent suburbs, or areas where there are few public state universities and pockets of affluent students all competing for the in-state slots. It’s easier, sometimes, to get in at a university in another state.
“The only viable route [to increase the budgets] is nonresident enrollment,” he said of schools with declining state funding. “If you are not Stanford or Princeton, there are limits to how much donation and endowment you have and there are limits to research funding.”
Some schools also recruit internationally.
Arizona State University spotlights the fact that it is the top public university choice for international students, according to an Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report. Nearly 18,000 international students studied at the school in the 2022-23 school year, according to Open Doors data. The research institution tracks U.S. students studying abroad and international students coming to the United States.
About two hours south at the University of Arizona in Tucson, current undergraduate enrollment is 50 percent students from the state, 45.2 percent from out of state and 4.5 percent international, for about a nearly even split between residents and nonresidents, Kasandra Urquidez, the school’s chief enrollment officer, wrote in an email.
While University of Arizona enrollment for undergraduate state residents dropped 4.6 percent over the last decade, from 19,206 to 18,323, nonresident undergraduates have risen 41 percent, from 10,244 to 14,478, according to figures provided by Urquidez. Arizona resident tuition for undergraduates is $13,200 and nonresident tuition is $39,600, she said.
“As a state university, non-resident enrollment … provides university revenue and decreased state funding causes the university to seek alternative forms of revenue,” she wrote in the email.
She added that Arizona does not limit spots for residents: “We are very dedicated to the citizens of our state and would never turn away a qualifying resident for a non-resident.”
Chanah Tanioka is a senior of Japanese descent from Hawaii studying pre-med at Oregon State University. She’s the first of her family to go to college and said she looked at public universities all over the country, but chose Oregon State because it felt more welcoming to someone of her heritage than some schools in the Midwest or Southeast.
She also had a close family friend who attended the school and now lives in nearby Salem. Tanioka has scholarships that make it possible for her to afford the steeper tuition and recommends that students from other places who want to attend a big public university check out its culture before going.
Tanioka belongs to the Hawai’i Club on campus, which helps make her feel at home. She said one jarring thing about going to school on the mainland is the lack of understanding of her native Hawaiian Pidgin vernacular, in which “Are you pau with your food?” means “Are you finished?”
Some states seek limits
While many public universities have embraced nonresident enrollment in recent years, some states have quotas or laws that are aimed at putting in-state residents first.
In North Carolina, five state schools — including the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University — have an 18 percent cap. Seven have a 25 percent cap, two have a 35 percent cap, and one, Elizabeth City State University, has a 50 percent cap. Historically Black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, and schools that had declining in-state enrollment were granted the higher caps.
In Texas, state law mandates that high school students graduating in the top 10 percent of their class (except the top 6% for the University of Texas at Austin applicants) are automatically admitted to any public Texas university.
That can effectively limit the number of non-Texas students at those schools. Out-of-state enrollment in Texas public universities grew only 1 percentage point over the past decade, from 6 percent to 7 percent, according to Hillman’s research.
The University of California Board of Regents, under pressure from state lawmakers alarmed at the high percentage of nonresident students attending California universities, in 2017 adopted a new policy to limit nonresident enrollment. The board settled on 18 percent at five campuses; on four other campuses that already had exceeded that percentage, enrollment would be capped at their 2017-2018 levels.
The legislature then worked to appropriate more money to make up for the revenue hit the California campuses would take by admitting fewer higher-paying nonresident students.
The deal directed $31 million in state funding to the universities in 2022-23, and grew to $61 million in 2023-24, and is expected to increase to $92 million in 2024-25, according to Justin Tran, spokesperson for California state Sen. John Laird, a Democrat and chair of the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Education, who was instrumental in the actions. That is aimed at reducing nonresident enrollment to 18% of the undergraduate student body, replacing about 900 nonresidents with Californians annually, Tran wrote in an email.
Oregon lawmakers also are concerned about the number of nonresident students attending state universities. State Rep. John Lively, a Democrat and chair of the House Committee on Higher Education, wrote in an email that the lower ratio of Oregon students to nonresidents is something that deserves a “hard look” to see what role cost plays in that calculation.
He also suggested that people from elsewhere who go to school in Oregon may enhance the state’s economy by staying after graduation to work.
“It’s also a goal of mine to attract new students and decrease the barrier that cost of higher education creates on individuals and families hoping to make a future here in Oregon,” he wrote.
This story was originally published by Stateline, which like the New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
New Hampshire
‘Not cosmetic’: NH lawmaker wants state to cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss – Concord Monitor
Two years ago, Sue Prentiss got a sobering reality check at her doctor’s office. The news was blunt: She qualified for bariatric surgery, a procedure for patients whose weight poses life-threatening risks.
She was aware of her weight and had tried everything from high-intensity workouts to weight loss programs and diets. Nothing seemed to help until she started taking GLP-1 medications.
Prentiss said between then and now, she had lost almost 80 pounds.
But at a $500 out-of-pocket monthly fee, every refill is a financial pinch.
“I’m just getting by, but I’m so much healthier, and if this can work for me, think about everybody else’s life where this would impact,” said Prentiss, a state senator.
To keep up with the cost, she’s made hard choices like cutting back on retirement contributions and squeezing her budget wherever possible.
Now, Prentiss is sponsoring Senate Bill 455, which would require the state to provide GLP-1 medications under the state Medicaid plan as a treatment for people with obesity.
As of January, New Hampshire’s Medicaid program has ended coverage for GLP-1 drugs like Saxenda, Wegovy and Zepbound for weight loss. The state still covers the medications when they’re part of a treatment plan for other chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, certain cardiovascular diseases, severe sleep apnea and Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatohepatitis (MASH).
According to the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, the state paid managed care organizations $49.5 million to cover GLP-1 medications between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026. The policy change in January reduced that cost to $41 million.
With these drugs gaining popularity, the state estimated that if were to resume covering GLP-1s for weight loss, it would need to spend an additional $24.2 million on top of the $41 million per fiscal year.
Jonathan Ballard, chief medical officer at DHHS, said the agency opposes the bill, which would require Medicaid coverage for anyone with a body mass index above 30 seeking GLP-1 medications specifically for weight loss.
Ballard said the state cannot afford such an expansion when budgets are already tight.
“The department does not have this money today,” he said. “So, living within the realities of our current budget, there will be significant trade-offs. We will have to cut other things that are very important to the health and well-being of New Hampshire to pay for this unless there’s some change.”
GLP-1 drugs carry a steep price tag that puts significant pressure on state budgets, particularly within Medicaid programs. Several states, including California, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, have moved to drop coverage of these medications for weight loss.
Prentiss initially drafted her legislation with private insurers in mind, but later pivoted to focus on Medicaid to serve more vulnerable populations. She is covered by commercial insurance and said the outcome of the bill will not personally affect her.
Lost coverage
GLP-1 medications mimic a natural hormone in the gut that helps regulate blood sugar, digestion and appetite.
Sarah Finn, section chief for obesity medicine at Dartmouth Health, said she has seen firsthand the impact on her patients after the state dropped Medicaid coverage for weight-loss GLP-1 drugs.
Without access to these medications, patients experience increased hunger, cravings and persistent “food noise,” as their bodies attempt to return to a higher fat percentage, a process known as metabolic adaptation, she said.
“This is the reality of the state I’m in right now, where I don’t have options except bariatric surgery for my Medicaid patients and a lot of times patients don’t want to do a surgery,” said Finn, at a hearing for the bill on Wednesday. “What I have to tell that patient is there’s nothing I could do to advocate.”
The Department of Health and Human Services faced a $51 million budget cut when the New Hampshire Legislature passed its biennial budget last year, forcing the department to reduce several services.
While Prentiss acknowledges the financial strain on the department, she wants the state to consider the long-term impact of using GLP-1s to prevent chronic conditions like diabetes, which is largely linked to weight gain and can drive up costs for the state over time.
“By driving down obesity, we can drive down the costs that are related to it,” she said.
Prentiss remains on GLP-1 medications and said she feels much healthier than before.
She said that after a few months on the drugs, her blood sugar levels and kidney function began trending toward more normal ranges.
“It’s not cosmetic,” she said. “Obesity is a medical condition.”
In New Hampshire and across New England, nuclear energy is in the spotlight. But as plans for the region’s nuclear future are charted, some of the big questions that stirred New Hampshire in the 1980s remain unanswered.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte has called for New Hampshire to embrace new nuclear technology, while state legislators have introduced multiple bills to promote its development. Then, last week, Ayotte joined the rest of New England’s governors in a bipartisan joint statement calling for the region to pursue advanced nuclear technologies while championing its two existing nuclear power plants.
There are timeline and economic questions about the implementation of emerging nuclear technologies. But front-end logistics aside, some say there’s a bigger and enduring problem: How will we safely handle nuclear waste, in New Hampshire and nationwide?
The spent fuel that nuclear reactors spit out is hot and remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 requires it be safeguarded and separate from nearby populations for at least 10,000 years. The law also requires the United States to come up with a national system to facilitate that at a centralized location, but no plan has yet emerged.
The matter is close at hand in New Hampshire, from the hilly west of the state, where a federal proposal for a deep nuclear waste storage site once threatened to displace residents, to the Seacoast, where spent fuel from the Seabrook Station power plant is generated and stored. To activists, just how we will handle the hazardous material is a hanging question that challenges the wisdom of embarking on a new nuclear era.
“There have been efforts over several decades here in New Hampshire to raise attention to this issue, but, obviously, we haven’t seen much real movement,” said Doug Bogen, executive director of the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League.
No stranger to nuclear waste
Three hundred or so million years ago, the long, fiery process that turned New Hampshire into the Granite State began. As magma seeped up into the crust from below and began to cool, seams of grainy, crystalline granite slowly formed.
The immense pockets of stone formed through this process are called plutons. When erosion washes away the sediments and soils around them, plutons can form mountains like the 3,155-foot Mount Cardigan. That peak is the crest of New Hampshire’s largest pluton: an approximately 60-mile long and 12-mile wide stretch of granite running through western New Hampshire.
In the 1980s, this swath of stone attracted an unexpected visitor: the United States Department of Energy, searching for a site to excavate a long-term storage facility for the nation’s nuclear waste.
Spent fuel remains radioactive for several million years, but its radioactivity decreases with time. The period of “greatest concern,” where levels of radiation are more dangerous to humans, lasts about 10,000 years, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
So, to keep the waste contained over that period, the U.S. government plans to rely on a combination of engineering and favorable geology, according to Scott Burnell, senior public affairs officer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A long-term storage site is envisioned underground, because certain minerals can help shield radiation.
Granite is one such mineral. That’s what drew the department to western New Hampshire in the ’80s, Bogen recalled.
In 1986, the department announced that a 78-square-mile area on the pluton, centered around the town of Hillsborough, was one of a dozen sites across the country under consideration for a potential deep storage facility. Residents understood then that a number of surrounding towns would have been partially or entirely seized by the federal government through eminent domain to make way for the facility. Many were distraught.
“There weren’t any Yankees that were going to take that,” said Paul Gunter, a founding member of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance.
The “Clams,” as well as the New Hampshire Radioactive Waste Information Network, which Gunter also co-founded; the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League; and other environmental groups, towns, and individuals mobilized quickly. In addition to organizing demonstrations, activists also circulated a warrant article opposing the generation and dumping of nuclear waste in New Hampshire. One hundred and thirty-seven towns ultimately voted to pass it, according to the New Hampshire Municipal Association.
Their opposition was multi-pronged, Gunter said. Organizers had health and safety concerns about the management of nuclear power and highly radioactive waste, including a lack of faith that the radiation would be safely isolated from human populations. They were also concerned about the proliferation of nuclear technology and the security risks that would come along with the transport of highly enriched nuclear fuel through their region. With some pacifist Quaker roots, the Clamshell Alliance also was, and remains, deeply opposed to nuclear weapons, Gunter said. They consider the matters of nuclear power and nuclear weapons inextricable.
News that New Hampshire was under consideration for a possible dump broke in January 1986. Later that year, the New Hampshire Legislature passed a law opposing the siting of such a dump in the state. When the Department of Energy dropped New Hampshire from its list, the storm seemed to have passed.
But while the Clams and others celebrated that, they continued to oppose the issue around which they had first come together: Seabrook Station nuclear power plant. At the time, then-Gov. John H. Sununu said he believed the two matters had to be considered separately. But Gunter said opposing the generation of nuclear waste went hand-in-hand with opposing its storage.
To this day, he said, the issues are often discussed separately, allowing the threat of nuclear waste to take a backseat in discussions and planning around nuclear energy.
New Hampshire’s high-level radioactive waste act was quietly repealed in 2011, and a subsequent attempt by the late former Rep. Renny Cushing to reintroduce legislation on the topic, opposing the siting of a high-level waste facility in New Hampshire, was defeated in 2020.
Where we are now
Hillsborough’s story has echoes elsewhere across the country. The most progress toward a potential deep storage site occurred at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, where excavation took place, but the site was abandoned amid opposition from the state.
In broad strokes, a similar story has repeated in other instances where a site was proposed, Burnell said. But a spokesperson for the Department of Energy, the agency charged with finding a location, said their search continues nonetheless.
President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a new tack, framing the search for a waste facility along with potential new development as a search for a “nuclear lifecycle innovation campus.” The move comes as Trump has attempted to bolster the U.S. nuclear industry, calling for a surge in nuclear generation and development with multiple executive orders.
“The Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses Initiative is a new effort to modernize the nation’s full nuclear fuel cycle,” a spokesperson for the department’s Office of Nuclear Energy said in an email. That would involve a federal-state partnership with funding for a nuclear technology facility where many stages of the process could be colocated, they said, naming fuel fabrication, enrichment, reprocessing, and “disposition of waste” as some of what would occur at such a site.
The deadline for states to submit “statements of interest” for hosting sites was April 1, and the spokesperson said “dozens” of responses had been filed. But they declined to say whether New Hampshire was among those, and the New Hampshire Department of Energy did not immediately respond to the same question.
In the meantime
Spent fuel generated at Seabrook Station is initially stored in 40-plus-foot-deep pools of water for preliminary cooling, then moved to steel-and-concrete casks, according to Burnell and NextEra spokesperson Lindsay Robertson. The concrete casks remain on-site on a concrete pad, Burnell said. Until another plan is developed, this is the case for spent fuel generated at reactors across the nation.
The storage facilities in use at Seabrook were tested and built to government standards, intended to withstand “extreme weather,” Robertson said. She declined to say how much spent fuel was generated or stored at Seabrook Station.
Since coming online in 1990, Seabrook Station has generated a significant portion of New England’s power without generating much news. Yet Gunter said his concerns about the station and storage of its spent fuel have not been ameliorated with the passage of time.
“They’ve been affirmed,” he said.
Gunter has concerns about concrete degradation and wiring at Seabrook Station and other power plants nationwide. Regarding waste, Gunter and Bogen said they worry about sea level rise affecting the storage area; Seabrook Station is located adjacent to tidal marshland. And, lacking a national plan for more long-term storage of nuclear waste, they wonder what will happen to the material currently stored on a temporary basis at Seabrook if no such plan emerges.
Gunter said his concerns about nuclear waste are part and parcel to his overall opposition to nuclear power, including those generators already in use.
“The new reactors are still on paper. The real threat is really in the day-to-day operation of aging nuclear power plants that are way past their shelf life,” he said.
Nuclear power plants are expensive to construct, creating what Bogen called the “opportunity cost” of embracing them at the expense of other sources of power generation. He and Gunter see renewable energy, principally through offshore wind, as safer and faster to deploy, and were disappointed to see politicians renew their focus on nuclear energy.
“It is coming back in a rebranding, which this industry is very well versed in,” Gunter said. “… Nuclear waste is going to be a persistent hazard over geological spans of time, while the electricity is going to be a fleeting benefit.”
Bogen said he wanted to see more reinforcement of the waste stored at Seabrook in a model called hardened on-site storage. But in terms of dealing with future waste, he and Gunter believe the best solution would be to stop generating it altogether.
“If you find yourself in a hole,” Bogen said, “the first thing you do is stop digging.”
Conversely, the New Hampshire Department of Energy does not see the question of nuclear waste as a barrier to further development in the state, according to an email from department Legislative Liaison Megan Stone. The nuclear roadmap that Ayotte’s March executive order directed the department to craft would include consideration of the “nuclear lifecycle,” including storage and “disposition” of waste, Stone said.
Then, she alluded to the expectation that a federal plan would emerge. “Dry cask storage is a safe and effective method of storing spent nuclear fuel until it is collected by the federal government,” she said.
A motorcyclist from Douglas was killed in a crash on Friday, April 17 in Campton, New Hampshire.
Police in Campton identified the victim as Elias Alexandro Ramos, 18, of Douglas. He was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.
The crash occurred shortly before 11 a.m. on Route 3. The initial investigation indicates Ramos was traveling north on a Honda motorcycle when it went off the road and into a guardrail, police said. He was thrown from the motorcycle.
It appears speed or alcohol were not factors in the crash, according to police. Ramos wore a helmet, although it may not have been properly worn, police said.
The crash remains under investigation.
Ramos was due to graduate from high school in the spring. He had dreams of becoming a mechanic, according to his older brother, Alexander.
“He was so mature for his age, already having the next couple of years planned out,” said Alexander in an email to the Telegram & Gazette.
On a GoFundMe page he created to help with family expenses after his brother’s death, Alexander wrote of the way Elias would bring joy and laughter to those around him.
“Elias had a gift for making people smile, and he was always there to help anyone in need,” he wrote.
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