Erik Arnold, a sophomore from Minneapolis, came to the University of Vermont because, among other reasons, he wanted to get out of the Midwest.
Aurelia Bolton, of the San Francisco Bay Area, visited the northeast as a child and attended summer camp in Vermont. The sophomore chose UVM in part because the area has always felt “like a little home,” she said.
Jillian Griffith, a West Virginia sophomore, came for the multiple engineering offerings and because the campus “had the best feel,” she said.
Arnold, Bolton and Griffith were among dozens of recently returned students lounging on the university’s Redstone Campus on a sunny Monday afternoon. Along with thousands of others, the three are part of a sizable majority on UVM’s campus: out-of-state students.
The University of Vermont, the state’s flagship, land-grant public university, has come to fill an unusual role. It educates relatively few students who actually hail from Vermont. Instead, the institution caters in large part to students from elsewhere.
Over the past two decades, the number of undergraduate Vermonters at UVM has decreased by about 300. Meanwhile, the university’s student body has added roughly 3,800 out-of-state students.
As of spring 2023, less than a quarter of the university’s roughly 10,700 undergraduates were Vermonters, the lowest of any spring semester for at least 26 years, according to university data.
What’s more, according to 2021 residency data from the U.S. Department of Education, UVM had one of the lowest percentages of new in-state students of any large public university across the country. Only two institutions — both online-only — had lower in-state percentages than UVM.
In a recent press release celebrating the arrival of the class of 2027, UVM noted that new first-years come from 45 states and 23 countries, and half are from outside New England.
That, administrators said, is “an indication of the university’s broadening national and international recognition and appeal.”
But as the university has added out-of-state students, the growth of its undergraduate student body has rankled officials and residents in Burlington, which is in the throes of a serious housing shortage.
And the figures raise thorny questions about the identity and function of Vermont’s largest public university. When fewer than a quarter of its undergrads actually hail from its home state, what is UVM’s mission in Vermont — and is it fulfilling it?
“I don’t think there’s firm agreement on what the function of (UVM) is or should be for the state,” said Kevin Chu, executive director of the Vermont Futures Project, a nonprofit think tank that works to promote economic growth in the state.
By the numbers
UVM was founded in 1791 as a private university, but it acquired “quasi-public” status in 1865, after it merged with the newly created State Agricultural College, according to the university’s website.
That merger allowed UVM to take advantage of a new federal law: the 1862 Morrill Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Justin Morrill of Strafford, which led to the creation of America’s land grant universities. The Morrill Act distributed millions of acres of federal land to states to fund institutions of higher learning — often appropriating indigenous land, a 2020 High Country News investigation found.
In many cases, including in Vermont, the land granted was not actually used to build a university. Vermont was given about 150,000 acres in western and midwestern states, according to High Country News. It was then sold for roughly $130,000, “nearly doubling the assets of the university,” UVM’s website says.
The university, Vermont’s second-largest employer, educates roughly 10,700 undergraduates, 1,600 graduate students and 500 medical students, according to university data from the spring semester.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the percentage of undergraduates from Vermont hovered around 40%, university data shows. But that percentage has dwindled over time, and by the 2022-2023 school year, only about 23% of the university’s undergraduates were Vermonters.
The increase of out-of-state students at public flagships is a national trend, experts say. But even so, UVM is an outlier. VTDigger compared federal data showing first-time students — undergraduates entering college for the first time — at large public universities throughout the country.
The most recent data available, from the fall of 2021, shows that only 18% of UVM’s new undergraduates that year hailed from Vermont — lower than nearly every other university on the list.
The only two institutions with lower in-state percentages were online-only programs: Purdue University Global, which describes itself as an “online university for working adults,” and Arizona State University Online.
This fall, university officials say that about 18% of the incoming class is expected to be from Vermont. That figure is, in fact, an increase from last fall, when 16% of first-year students were Vermonters.
‘Try our damned hardest’
So why don’t more Vermonters attend UVM? The answer is familiar to higher education administrators across Vermont: The state simply does not have enough students.
Over the past decade, the number of students graduating from Vermont high schools has dwindled. In 2012, Vermont produced about 6,900 high school graduates, according to state Agency of Education data. In 2022, it produced only about 5,000.
Meanwhile, usually only about 60% of Vermont high school graduates go on to college, according to the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation — a lower percentage than other states, experts say.
Some Vermont high school grads may not want to attend UVM for financial reasons. Rural students may feel uncomfortable in the relatively large city of Burlington. And other Vermonters simply want to leave the state.
“American culture is mobile, and we often think about climbing the success ladder in terms of physically moving from one location to another,” said Cheryl Morse, a professor in UVM’s Department of Geography and Geosciences. “And so individual young people, young Vermonters, may get this narrative that to be ambitious and to achieve their full potential they need to move.”
University administrators have rolled out a slate of initiatives to attract more Vermont high school graduates. Since 2016, Vermont students who are eligible for federal income-based Pell grants have paid no tuition or fees. Starting this fall, Vermont students whose household income is $60,000 or less can attend fully tuition-free and have fees waived. Some scholarships are also available only to Vermonters.
The university accepts about 70% of Vermont applicants and about 60% of out-of-state applicants. Administrators have also frozen tuition, both in-state ($16,280) and out-of-state ($41,280) for the past five years, and room and board fees ($13,354) have been frozen for the past four years.
In all, nearly half of Vermont students attend UVM tuition-free, according to Jay Jacobs, UVM’s vice provost for enrollment management — “not a cheap way to run a business.”
Admissions officers “are continuing to try our damned hardest to recruit Vermonters, in all corners of the state, in all 14 counties,” Jacobs said.
In fact, compared to the declines in the number of high school graduates, the number of undergraduate Vermonters attending UVM has decreased relatively little — reflecting, perhaps, the effort UVM has put in to attract them.
Still, there are only so many Vermont high school grads who want to come to UVM. What’s more, Vermont’s government appropriates relatively little money to public higher education. So UVM has increasingly looked beyond Vermont’s borders.
“If we relied just on Vermont students, we would be a fraction of our size, we’d have a fraction of our talent base, and you can think through what that might look and feel like at the flagship university,” said Ron Lumbra, the chair of the university’s board of trustees.
Growing pains
As UVM has added out-of-state students — roughly 3,800 in the past 20 years — it has touched a nerve in Burlington.
City officials, lawmakers, residents and even some students are concerned that UVM’s undergraduates, most of whom live off-campus in their junior and senior years, are taking up an increasingly large proportion of the city’s precious housing stock.
And many expressed frustration that the university didn’t engage in more discussions with residents before bringing hundreds of additional students into the city’s housing market.
City Councilor Zoraya Hightower, P-Ward 1, said she would like to see the university take responsibility for housing more of its students, work more closely with the city in combating exploitative landlords and reach a long-term agreement with the city over enrollment.
“Housing is one of the issues where it feels like staff and faculty are on the same page, students are on the same page, the city’s on the same page, neighbors are on the same page,” said Hightower, whose ward includes part of UVM’s campus. “And UVM leadership just doesn’t seem to want to get on that page.”
Rep. Troy Headrick, P/D-Burlington, and an assistant director at UVM’s Center for Student Conduct, introduced a bill in February that would prevent the university from increasing its enrollment until the city’s rental vacancy rate reached 5%.
The proposed legislation would also guarantee at least 93 square feet of living space per student for on-campus housing, in response to concerns that many students were being housed in “triples,” with three undergrads per dorm room. The bill has not passed out of the House Committee on Education.
“I’m concerned that enrollment continues to go up, students continue to be forced into what I consider to be unhealthy living arrangements on campus, and we proportionately serve fewer and fewer Vermonters,” said Headrick, whose district also includes parts of UVM. “That, to me, is alarming.”
The growth of the undergraduate student body has even ruffled feathers on the board of trustees.
“I don’t think the enrollment grew with any participatory process with the board, the university community, the region and the state,” said Frank Cioffi, a member of the UVM’s board of trustees and executive committee.
“You can’t add 200-some-odd students a year,” he added. “There’s no place to put them, right? There are no apartments in Burlington. There’s not enough dorm rooms.”
Town and gown
Between 2009 and 2019, UVM and the City of Burlington had a signed memorandum of understanding over housing, one in which the university agreed to provide housing for each new undergraduate student.
UVM has since declined to sign a new agreement with the city. Meanwhile, Burlington has withheld permission for UVM to build more housing on the northern end of campus, on what is known as the Trinity campus, over concerns that undergraduate enrollment would then increase further.
UVM administrators have said repeatedly that they do not intend to further increase the size of the undergraduate student body. (The university said it has no plans to stop adding grad students, who made up about 16% of the total student body this spring.)
Those pronouncements, however, can seem at odds with the past years’ trends. Between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2022 alone, the university added over 600 undergraduate students.
Asked if the growth in enrollment since 2019 was due to the end of the memorandum of understanding, Lumbra answered bluntly: “No. Period. Full stop.”
“I’m not telling you it hasn’t grown. The data is the data. I am 100% data-driven,” he said. “I can tell you unequivocally it is not our intended strategy to grow our undergrad population. It is to maintain a stable, consistent size of the university. That is our strategy at present.”
So why won’t UVM sign an agreement with the city codifying that commitment? Lumbra declined to answer, saying that it was up to university administrators to negotiate.
Adam White, a spokesperson for the university, said in an email only that “UVM’s commitments to not grow its undergraduate enrollment and to provide additional housing for students have not changed.”
The university recently announced plans to build a 540-bed housing complex for undergraduates on land that is currently a DoubleTree hotel parking lot in South Burlington. Under a separate agreement, some UVM graduate students will also be housed in dorms on Saint Michael’s College.
According to its website, UVM houses “more than 6,000 students.” As of the spring of 2023, its total student body was 13,350, including graduate and medical students.
Through a spokesperson, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger declined a request for an interview. In an email, Weinberger said he was “hopeful” that the city and UVM could agree on a new memorandum of understanding soon.
“My goal is to come to an agreement with UVM that allows the University to build a lot of new housing that meets their goals and reduces the terrible pressure on the city’s housing market,” Weinberger said.
‘What are the needs?’
Lost in the discussion, said Chu, of the Vermont Futures Project, is a deeper inquiry into what UVM does, and should do, for the state.
“The needs of a state change very much throughout history,” Chu said. “It’s this ever-evolving relationship. So it’s almost imperative for Vermont to define, what are the needs? And then for UVM to evolve to meet those needs.”
Answering those questions, Chu said, could help officials determine the institution’s path forward: How much should it grow? How much should the state spend on it? And, crucially, how should officials judge whether it has succeeded or failed?
Tom Sullivan, a professor of political science and UVM’s president from 2012 to 2019, said the question of in-state vs. out-of-state students “is an important question.”
“We are a state’s public institution,” Sullivan said. “So there are responsibilities, clearly, that UVM has to the state of Vermont. We would like to have, and should try to do everything we can do, to recruit, retain and graduate more Vermont residents, period.”
But, he said, “unintended consequences and demographics hurt that goal.”
As the number of Vermont high school graduates dwindles, the university is one of the few entities that can draw young people into the state in significant numbers — roughly a third of whom, administrators say, stay after graduating.
“There is no other institution or entity in Vermont that is like us in terms of attracting a workforce to the state,” UVM president Suresh Garimella told lawmakers on the House Education Committee this winter.
The questions go to the core of UVM’s identity and policies. How much effort and money should UVM spend to chase a dwindling number of Vermont high school graduates? And how much should it lean into its function as a magnet for out-of-state students — a way, as it were, to create new Vermonters?
University officials, meanwhile, say the institution is already serving both Vermonters and out-of-staters — goals that, they argued, are not in conflict with one another.
“Vermont should have a gigantic welcome sign for parents, families, students that are coming to the University of Vermont when they cross the border,” said Lumbra, the chair of the board of trustees. “‘Thank you for being here. And welcome.’”
