Nonresidents make up 78 percent of the entering class at the University of Vermont and 3 percent at the University at Buffalo. Both are state flagships. This measures how much of each class is drawn from outside the state, which the overall admit rate does not reveal, and which is not the same thing as an applicant’s odds.
A family in New Jersey looking at public universities outside their state is really asking two separate questions, and almost every guide answers only the first. The first is how hard a campus is to get into. The second, which matters more, is whether that campus wants nonresidents at all.
On the second question the fifty state flagships diverge more sharply than on almost any other dimension. At one end sit campuses that recruit nationally and draw a large minority or even a majority of each class from elsewhere. At the other sit campuses where the number of nonresident seats is limited by a governing board or by state law.
We pulled residency data from the IPEDS fall enrollment component for all fifty flagship universities, traced it back to 2016, and set it against published tuition and the formal enrollment limits that four of these campuses operate under. Across the fifty, 98,219 first-year students enrolled from out of state in fall 2024 against 165,127 residents, a nonresident share of 37.3 percent.
The Spread Runs From Three Percent to Seventy-Eight
Ranking every flagship by nonresident share produces a list that has very little to do with prestige and a great deal to do with state population and state policy.
Nonresidents as a share of first-time degree-seeking undergraduates, fall 2024, at the fifty state flagship universities. Orange marks a campus operating under a formal nonresident enrollment limit. Data: IPEDS fall enrollment component, fall 2024.
Vermont sits at 78 percent, Mississippi at 69, and Alabama, Delaware and North Dakota all at 59. Small states with smaller college-age populations tend to recruit more aggressively beyond their borders, both to broaden the applicant pool and to generate nonresident tuition revenue. West Virginia is at 58 percent, Rhode Island 57, Arkansas 56, New Hampshire 54.
The bottom of the list is different in kind. Buffalo sits at 3 percent, UT Austin at 8, UC Berkeley at 9, UNC Chapel Hill at 11, Rutgers at 13, Illinois at 14. These are large states with large applicant pools, and in three of those six cases the ceiling is written down somewhere.
Michigan is the most interesting case in the middle. It takes 43 percent of its first-year class from out of state, a higher share than Utah or Indiana, while admitting 16 percent of all applicants overall. It is simultaneously one of the most selective flagships and one of the most nationally enrolled, which is a combination almost nobody else manages. That says nothing about how a nonresident’s application is judged, only about how many nonresidents end up in the class.
At a Handful of Flagships, the Ceiling Is Written Into Policy
The distinction that matters most to a family is whether a campus draws few nonresidents because of demand or because of a rule. Three flagships or flagship systems in this set operate under hard nonresident limits: UNC Chapel Hill, the University of California system, and UT Austin. Virginia maintains a formal residency target rather than a cap. Wisconsin operates a separate systemwide policy that exempts Madison.
| Flagship or system | Limit | Set by | Nonresident share, fall 2024 |
| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | 18% of the entering first-year class | UNC Board of Governors | 11% |
| University of California, five campuses | 18% of undergraduate enrollment | UC Regents Policy 2109, adopted May 2017 | Varies by campus |
| UC Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego | Frozen at each campus’s 2017-18 nonresident share | Same policy; these four were already above 18% | Berkeley 9% |
| University of Texas at Austin | 10% of spaces for out-of-state and international | Texas Education Code sec. 51.803; UT Austin catalog | 8% |
| University of Virginia | Target, not a cap: about two-thirds Virginian | University policy under state restructuring | 29% |
| University of Wisconsin campuses except Madison | 27.5% of undergraduate enrollment, three-year average, excluding Minnesota reciprocity students | UW Board of Regents policy; Madison exempt | Madison 46% |
Nonresident enrollment limits and targets, with observed fall 2024 first-year shares. North Carolina, California and Texas impose hard limits; Virginia maintains a target rather than a cap. Data: UNC Board of Governors regulations; UC Regents Policy 2109, adopted May 2017; Texas Education Code section 51.803 and the UT Austin catalog; University of Virginia enrollment policy; Wisconsin state statute; IPEDS fall enrollment component, fall 2024.
North Carolina requires that at least 82 percent of the entering first-year class at Chapel Hill be North Carolina residents, which leaves 18 percent for everyone else. The observed share is 11 percent, well inside the ceiling.
California’s policy is more specific than it is usually described. Regents Policy 2109, adopted in May 2017 and effective the following year, limited nonresident enrollment to 18 percent at five campuses. At the four campuses already above that line, Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles and San Diego, nonresident enrollment was instead frozen at whatever share each had enrolled in 2017-18. Since the 2022 compact with the governor, the state has funded the annual replacement of nonresidents with California residents at Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego, working those campuses toward 18 percent. Systemwide, the share of undergraduates paying nonresident supplemental tuition has fallen for three consecutive years, from 17.8 percent in 2021-22 to 15.5 percent in 2024-25, according to the UC Accountability Report. UC’s separate compact reporting uses a slightly different series and slightly different figures for the same years, so treat the direction as firm and the exact percentages as source-dependent.
Texas restricts nonresident enrollment at UT Austin to roughly 10 percent. The university’s own catalog states that as a state-assisted institution it reserves 90 percent of its spaces for Texas residents under state law, with 10 percent for out-of-state and international students, and the underlying authority sits in Texas Education Code section 51.803. A separate provision of the same statute guarantees admission to Texas residents in the top percentage of their high school class, which absorbs a large majority of the resident seats. Both mechanisms push the same direction.
The practical consequence is that at these campuses application strength runs into a fixed quantity of seats. A nonresident applying to Chapel Hill is not competing against the university’s overall admit rate; they are competing for a slice of the class that the Board of Governors has capped. But the caps constrain enrollment rather than admission, and that distinction turns out to matter more than the caps themselves.
Where Admission Rates by Residency Exist, They Complicate the Story
Neither IPEDS nor the Common Data Set collects admissions outcomes by state of residence, which is why enrollment share is the only measure available across all fifty flagships. A small number of institutions publish their own residency-specific figures, and the University of California publishes the most complete set through the UC Information Center.
Two things in the California data cut against the assumption that nonresidents face longer odds at the admissions stage.
The first is that UC applies a formally higher academic standard to nonresidents, and publishes it.
| University of California minimum eligibility | California residents | Nonresidents |
| Minimum UC A-G grade point average, first-year eligibility | 3.0 | 3.4 |
| Minimum college grade point average, transfer eligibility | 2.4 | 2.8 |
Minimum eligibility thresholds for admission consideration at the University of California. Meeting the minimum does not guarantee admission at any campus. Data: University of California Accountability Report 2025, indicator 1.4.1.
That is an explicit differential written into eligibility policy, and it is the clearest published evidence anywhere that a nonresident is held to a different bar. It applies to consideration rather than to the admission decision itself.
The second cuts the other way, and it is the more surprising of the two. At several UC campuses nonresidents are admitted at higher rates than Californians. At Santa Cruz in fall 2025 the campus admitted 84.0 percent of domestic nonresident applicants against 71.0 percent of California residents.
| UC Santa Cruz, fall 2025 | Applied | Admitted | Admit rate |
| California residents | 52,605 | 37,345 | 71.0% |
| Domestic nonresidents | 7,102 | 5,968 | 84.0% |
| International | 6,686 | 4,809 | 71.9% |
| All applicants | 66,393 | 48,122 | 72.5% |
Freshman admission by residency at UC Santa Cruz, fall 2025 entering class, first-time degree-seeking applicants. Data: UC Information Center, Freshman Fall Admissions Summary dashboard, University of California Office of the President. Figures are for one campus and should not be generalized to the system.
Nonresidents still ended up at roughly 9 percent of the enrolled class, about half the 18 percent the policy permits. The gap between an 84 percent admit rate and a 9 percent enrolled share is yield. Admitted nonresidents chose to go elsewhere, and the most obvious reason is the $30,000 or more separating what they would pay from what a Californian pays.
This reframes what the caps are doing at the campuses that have them. The ceiling is a backstop rather than the active constraint. At Santa Cruz, price and yield keep nonresident enrollment under the limit without the limit ever having to bind. The admissions office can be generous to nonresidents precisely because so few of them accept.
Virginia publishes residency-split rates too, and they run the other way. For the class entering in 2026, Virginians were admitted at about 22 percent while out-of-state applicants faced roughly 10 percent, and out-of-state applicants in the regular round succeeded less than 7 percent of the time. UVA aims to seat about two-thirds Virginians, and because roughly two-thirds of its applicants come from outside the state, residents are admitted at approximately twice the rate of everyone else.
Two published cases, pointing in opposite directions, is the honest summary of what residency-specific admissions data shows. At one campus nonresidents are admitted more readily and then decline to enroll. At another they are admitted at half the resident rate. Neither pattern can be assumed from enrollment share alone, which is the reason this article treats the national chart as a measure of enrollment composition rather than of anyone’s odds.
One caution about generalizing from this. Santa Cruz is among the least selective UC campuses, and the pattern at Berkeley and UCLA is different, since both are working down toward 18 percent under state-funded replacement targets. We report Santa Cruz because it is the campus for which the full decomposition is publicly documented, not because it represents the system. Fall 2025 is the most recent entering class for which we could verify a complete campus-level residency breakdown.
Thirty-Four Flagships Have Opened Up Since 2016
The current picture is only half the story. Tracking each campus back to 2016 shows a clear direction of travel, and it is not the one families assume.
Change in nonresident share of first-time degree-seeking undergraduates, percentage points, fall 2016 to fall 2024. IPEDS collects residency data biennially. Data: IPEDS fall enrollment component.
Thirty-four of the fifty take a larger share of nonresidents than they did in 2016. Thirteen take a smaller share, and three are unchanged: Nebraska, New Mexico and Virginia. The median flagship moved up 4 percentage points, and the aggregate nonresident share across all fifty rose from 33.2 percent to 37.3 percent.
Louisiana State moved furthest, from 18 percent to 39. Tennessee went from 16 to 35, Connecticut from 26 to 42, Utah from 26 to 42, Vermont from 62 to 78. Georgia and Florida both climbed from 11 percent to 19, which is a near doubling at two flagships families still think of as closed to outsiders.
The declines cluster where you would expect. Alabama fell 8 points, from an unusually high 67 percent. Wyoming, Maine and South Carolina each fell 7. UNC Chapel Hill fell 4 points and Berkeley 5, both while operating under caps.
For a family building a list this decade of movement is more useful than any single year, because it identifies campuses whose posture is changing. A flagship that has added twenty points of nonresident share in eight years is actively recruiting outside its borders, whatever its reputation suggests.
The Campuses That Charge the Most Often Enroll the Fewest
Nonresident tuition is a major reason many flagships recruit nationally, alongside geographic diversity, enrollment targets and demographic pressure. If revenue were the dominant driver, the campuses charging the steepest premium should be the ones taking the most nonresidents. The relationship does not hold.
Nonresident tuition premium, calculated as published out-of-state minus in-state tuition and fees, plotted against nonresident share of first-year students, fall 2024. Orange marks a campus operating under a formal enrollment limit. Data: IPEDS student charges and fall enrollment components, fall 2024.
Michigan charges the largest premium of any flagship, $43,210 a year above its in-state rate, and enrolls 43 percent nonresidents. That is the pattern the revenue logic predicts. But Virginia charges $37,709 more and takes 29 percent, UC Berkeley charges $34,200 more and takes 9, UT Austin charges $33,220 more and takes 8, and UNC charges $32,209 more and takes 11.
Meanwhile North Dakota charges a premium of $4,619 and South Dakota $3,510, the two smallest in the country, and both enroll well over a third of their classes from out of state. They are competing on price rather than rationing on quantity.
The takeaway for a family is that a high nonresident price tag tells you nothing about how much of the class comes from outside the state. At the capped flagships, nonresidents face both a large price premium and a deliberately limited share of seats.
What This Analysis Does Not Measure
Enrollment share is not an admit rate. It records who enrolled, which reflects who applied, who was admitted and who chose to attend. A campus with a low nonresident share may be turning nonresidents away, or it may simply receive few nonresident applications. This analysis cannot separate those.
Neither IPEDS nor the Common Data Set collects admissions outcomes by residency, so no national comparison of out-of-state admit rates is possible. The University of California figures above come from that system’s own published dashboard. Various consultancies circulate out-of-state admit rates for other flagships derived by subtracting reported totals, and those are estimates rather than reported figures. We have not used any of them.
The tuition premium uses published prices rather than net price. Several flagships discount heavily for nonresidents through merit scholarships, and a few reciprocity agreements let students from neighboring states pay reduced rates. The published gap is a sticker-price difference, not a student’s final net cost.
IPEDS collects residency biennially, so the comparison runs 2016 to 2024 rather than year by year. And the first-year cohort excludes transfer students, who at several of these campuses follow very different residency patterns.
How to Use This When Building a List
Check the nonresident share before the admit rate. A campus at 45 percent nonresident draws heavily from outside its state, which the overall admit rate does not tell you. A low share is a signal worth investigating rather than proof that admission is harder, and the Santa Cruz figures show exactly why: a campus can admit nonresidents generously and still enroll very few of them.
Treat the capped flagships as a separate category, and understand what the cap does. Chapel Hill, the UC campuses and UT Austin are constrained by policy on how many nonresidents may enroll, which is not the same as a limit on how many may be admitted. At UC Santa Cruz specifically, the published figures show the admissions office admitting nonresidents at a higher rate than residents while enrolled nonresidents stay near 9 percent, which points to price and yield as the operative constraint at that campus. Whether the same holds at Berkeley or UCLA is not something the public data settles.
Look at direction, not just level. Louisiana State, Tennessee, Connecticut and Utah have each added at least 16 points of nonresident share since 2016. Those campuses have become substantially more reliant on nonresident enrollment, which is a useful signal that their institutional posture toward out-of-state students has changed.
Do not read a small tuition premium as a small bill, or a large one as a closed door. North Dakota and South Dakota charge nonresidents almost the same as residents. Michigan charges the most in the country and still fills 43 percent of its class from out of state.
For counselors: the nonresident share is the single most useful public-university number you can put in front of a family, and it is the one nobody looks up. It reframes the conversation from whether a student is strong enough for a flagship to whether that flagship is in the business of enrolling students like them at all. For students in large states with capped or crowded flagships, New Jersey, New York, California, North Carolina and Texas among them, the practical move is often to look at flagships in small states, where a nonresident is not an exception but the majority of the class.
Working out which flagships are genuinely open to a particular student, and what each one will actually cost after aid, is the part worth doing carefully and early.
Methodology
The universe is the primary public flagship university in each of the fifty states, identified by conventional designation. Where a state has more than one campus that might be called a flagship, we use one for consistency. New York is the clearest case: both the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook are commonly described as flagships, and we selected Buffalo. Rutgers-New Brunswick represents New Jersey on the same basis. Readers should treat single-campus figures for those states as a methodological choice rather than a definitive statement about the state system.
Residency figures come from the IPEDS fall enrollment component and cover first-time degree-seeking undergraduates. IPEDS records state of residence based on legal residence at the time of application, which is close to but not identical with the tuition residency classification that governs the enrollment caps discussed above. Tuition residency is a legal determination that can differ from an applicant’s reported home state, and IPEDS migration counts can include students from other U.S. jurisdictions. The two are close enough for comparison across institutions, and the distinction is worth keeping in mind wherever this article moves between out-of-state and nonresident. IPEDS collects state of residence biennially, so 2016 and 2024 are used for the decade comparison. All fifty flagships reported residency data for fall 2024.
The nonresident tuition premium subtracts published in-state tuition and fees from published out-of-state tuition and fees, from the IPEDS student charges component for fall 2024. These are published prices before institutional aid, and they exclude housing, meals and other costs.
Enrollment limits are drawn from institutional and governing-board documentation: the UNC Board of Governors regulation requiring at least 82 percent North Carolina residents in the entering first-year class; UC Regents Policy 2109, adopted May 2017, which set an 18 percent nonresident ceiling at five campuses and froze the four already above it at their 2017-18 shares; Texas Education Code section 51.803, together with the University of Texas at Austin catalog statement that 90 percent of spaces are reserved for Texas residents; and University of Virginia policy, under which roughly two-thirds Virginian functions as a target rather than a hard limit. Wisconsin statute caps nonresidents at 27.5 percent at every University of Wisconsin campus except Madison, which is exempt. Other flagships may operate under informal preferences not documented in policy, and those are not captured here.
Admit rates shown in the charts are overall institutional rates from the IPEDS admissions component for fall 2024 and are not broken out by residency, because no national source collects that split. The residency-specific figures for the University of California come from the UC Information Center Freshman Fall Admissions Summary dashboard for the fall 2025 entering class, and the minimum GPA thresholds from the University of California Accountability Report 2025. The University of Virginia figures come from UVA admission statistics and its Common Data Set as compiled in College Transitions, University of Virginia: Inside the Numbers, July 2026. The UC Santa Cruz campus dashboard reports slightly different application and admit totals for the same cohort than the systemwide dashboard does; we use the systemwide figures and do not blend the two.
Data: IPEDS fall enrollment, student charges and admissions components, fall 2016 and fall 2024, U.S. Department of Education. University of California Accountability Report 2025 and UC Information Center Freshman Fall Admissions Summary dashboard, University of California Office of the President. University of Virginia admission statistics and Common Data Set. UNC Board of Governors regulations; UC Regents Policy 2109; Texas Education Code section 51.803 and the University of Texas at Austin catalog; University of Virginia enrollment policy; Wisconsin state statute. Residency figures cover first-time degree-seeking undergraduates and exclude transfer students. Charts: College Transitions Data Team.
