Dive Brief:
- Kean University, a public institution in New Jersey, received approval for a new bachelor’s degree program in architecture with a promise that only 25 students per cohort would be from the state.
- The promise helped diminish concerns from neighboring New Jersey Institute of Technology about competition for local students.
- Kean’s new program will launch in New Jersey as well as its campus in Wenzhou, China, and eventually expand into a master’s program that will cap in-state enrollment on the New Jersey campus at 15 students per cohort.
Dive Insight:
Kean expects to build up national and international interest in the program but after pressing from Inside Higher Ed about the in-state quota, a Kean spokeswoman said they do not envision a one-to-one ratio of domestic and foreign students for “quite some time.” Critics of the proposal point to the privatization of public schools whose mission should, first and foremost, be to use state appropriations to educate students within the state.
Many schools have grown to rely on international student tuition for consistent revenue. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has the largest number of international students of any public institution in the country at nearly 10,000, most of them from China.