Looks like it's not just the taxpayers who are fleeing from one-party blue states to red ones.
The kids are fleeing, too. They've started shunning the Ivy League universities and are flooding into Southern universities.
According to the Free Press:
An unprecedented number of students are gravitating away from Ivy League universities and looking to Southern colleges that wouldn’t have been on their radar twenty years ago. The exodus is fueled, sources told me, by warmer weather, great college sports, and a more relaxed atmosphere, which stands in stark contrast to the Covid restrictions many Northern universities put in place from 2020–2023. (Elite colleges in the North often had the strictest Covid policies—from requiring students to wear masks at all times to limiting gatherings, inside and out, to five people—while Southern universities from Florida to Alabama to South Carolina allowed students to congregate in large groups, neither masked nor socially distanced.)
But another factor driving kids away from elite schools is their dominant progressive politics, which many feel deepen cultural divides rather than promoting healthy debate. The old-school vision of colleges serving as an open forum for ideas has been replaced with an us-versus-them mentality, where there’s only one “right” answer to any thorny issue and the winner is the one who shouts the loudest.
The warmer weather claim is nonsense, the weather has always been warmer in the South, plus, it's not like our warmer weather in San Diego. Heat, humidity, mosquitos, and gargantuan bugs come with the territory in the South, which is a different challenge.
More likely, it's the progressive politics, as the report delicately notes. Antisemitism, such as is seen at elite ivies is a major one, as the chaos at Columbia and Yale now show.
But there are others, too, which may be causing kids to look elsewhere for their education. College itself is being questioned as a value or investment now that the price has gone sky high, and all kinds of alternatives are now open to being considered, such as going to a state school, or going to a school without a politically charged atmosphere.
What's more, DEI is rampant at elite schools, meaning, white males are in for a rough ride, shut out of their favored majors, hectored as the source of all evil, and belittled for their naturally masculine traits. Who wants to be judged individually on the supposed crimes of a group?
Worse still, Joe Biden has recrudesced Title IX, meaning, young women can expect to compete with mentally ill male athletes who believe they are women, as well as share locker rooms and restrooms with them, and nothing can be done to stop them from getting a eyeful or doing worse. Crimes committed by men in womanface will only be addressed after the women get raped, not before, so too bad about that.
For men, they can be falsely accused of rape, and not entitled to any rights of defense or a jury trial, will be subject to just a wokester panel that has it in for them and seeks to jack up rape numbers for the funds, funds, federal funds, all to stop all the supposed rape out there, not the incentivized fake rape charges.
All of these things affect strongly the young people going to college, so a university that avoids this kind of controversy, and shuns the stoking of it, is going to be more attractive to those who want to study and move on into the work world.
The report begins with the case of a Jewish student who went to Elon University instead of some East Coast elite school, and found himself surrounded by other East Coast refugees from the northeast, all of them very happy with their choice in schools, as there was no grotesque culture of antisemitism such as is seen in the ivy league institutions. They also interviewed a black kid from Chicago who, based on his picture, looked like he came from a prosperous family, actually, who liked the friendliness and lower cost of the Mississippi college he chose to attend, very pleased that the historic stereotypes about the South were not what the left claims they are in the institution he chose.
It's pretty obvious these kids aren't looking back, and the Free Press had some statistics to show it:
Both Brown and Harvard saw dips in their application numbers this year—by 5 percent and 3 percent, respectively. (Early decisions to Harvard were down 17 percent.) And while applications to private colleges in mid-Atlantic (25.3 percent) and New England (29 percent) states have risen since 2019, the gains have been small compared to Southern colleges, which saw a 42 percent increase overall. The surge is even more pronounced at state schools. Public colleges in the South saw a total 62.4 increase in applicants, more than double their Northern counterparts, according to Common App data from earlier this month.
Southern colleges are also seeing a surge in applicants from northern out-of-state students. In 2023, for example, about 19 percent of total enrollment at Clemson in South Carolina came from New York and New Jersey—a big change from 2017, when the top out-of-staters were from the Carolinas and Georgia. Almost half the undergraduates from University of Miami in Florida came from out of state in 2023, with students from New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts taking three of the top five slots.
What's going to happen is that as these kids seemed to otherwise be headed to elite institutions, the institutions they chose will become elite as the ivys decline or spin off into anti-meritocratic DEI wokery.
That's the natural flow of events and the ivies, if they want to remain relevant, better change their act. This exodus is just the start for them.
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