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Even as flagships elsewhere, such as the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and West Virginia University, faced flat or declining enrollments and weighed or enacted academic-program cuts, almost all of the 15 public institutions of the Southeastern Conference have steadily added undergraduate enrollment over the past decade, most by double-digit percentages.
How did the South become the center of college-recruiting success? In a way, its success has been under construction for decades, built on its track record of teaching and research as well as a tradition of high-profile Division I athletics and high-spirited campus life. More recently, these institutions have benefited from new channels of media exposure and a strategy of more aggressively recruiting out-of-state students, in part to make up for flagging state support. And, some observers have argued, SEC flagships also might be beneficiaries of a shift in national politics. For some students, the thinking goes, sun, football, and a more conservative climate are potent attractions.
The SEC’s growth is evident in the data. At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, undergraduate enrollment grew from 21,182 in 2013 to 28,883 in 2023, according to federal data, an increase of 36 percent. Four other public universities grew by more than 30 percent over the same period, and six others grew by double-digit percentages. The only SEC institution to lose undergraduate enrollment was the University of Missouri at Columbia, which dropped from 26,928 in 2013 to 23,613 in 2023, a decline of 12 percent.
A combination of right place and right time has helped heighten Southern flagships’ appeal. Suzanne McCray, vice provost for enrollment management and dean of admissions at the University of Arkansas, says the institution has been intentional in its recruiting strategies. But “we’ve also been lucky.”
The roots of the rise of SEC flagships in the 2000s coincided with the advent of social media. Pre-Facebook and Instagram, the SEC’s highest national profile came through televised football games during bowl season or Final Four appearances. Social media helped spread images of tailgating and Greek life, convincing prospective students that “it’s an exciting place to be,” says Craig Goebel, a principal of the Art & Science Group, a company that consults with colleges on strategy. By having tens of thousands of unofficial enrollment influencers on tap, he adds, SEC institutions are “going to win all day long compared to a smaller college or university.”
Social-media depictions of good times are a boon for SEC institutions, “which are, in fact, pretty-ordinary public universities,” says Brendan Cantwell, a professor of educational administration at Michigan State University. “I don’t mean to degrade them. They’re fine places, but you’re not getting anything educationally at Knoxville that is unavailable in Buffalo. But what’s unavailable in Buffalo is SEC football and that lifestyle and that aesthetic. Gray skies and concrete are available in Buffalo.”
The South is also, in a word, hot. The region is a destination right now for people seeking better weather and a more easygoing, less expensive life. Eight of the top 10 states that gained the most residents through in-migration in 2023 were in the South, according to U.S. census data. College towns like Knoxville have transformed into regional magnets with craft breweries, artisanal eats, and booming real-estate markets, yet they remain more affordable than coastal metropolises.
Post-Covid, many students were looking for something different from college, says Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. With the closed-off vistas of online school and social distancing, many high-school students sought “the stereotypical college experience.” The undergraduates he teaches want “the range of academic opportunities, but also just the range of other social experiences” that a big public university can provide.
The enrollment success of the SEC has become self-reinforcing. Many Southern flagships have been plowing their good fortune back into their operations through strategic investments, says Nanci Tessier, a principal of the Art & Science Group. “They’ve been investing in the curriculum. They’ve been investing in housing, student support, co-curricular activities. They’ve improved the lived experience for students in ways that students are enjoying.”
Students and parents may not pay close attention to the pressures on higher education, but they do notice the results. “They’ve seen what’s happening to higher education in much of the Northeast and Midwest with cuts, and that’s not something that’s happening as much in the SEC,” Kelchen says. “We’re seeing growth. We’re seeing new buildings, bright and shiny things.”
Many SEC institutions also offer alumni networks and internship and career opportunities that rival their more-elite peers. Fayetteville, home to the University of Arkansas campus, may sit in a relatively rural corner of the state, but it’s proximate to corporate headquarters for Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services.
The social draw of the SEC “alone will not bring a student to a university, and it shouldn’t,” McCray says. “It’s a great thing, but at the end of the day, they need a degree that matters, and they need to be able to get a job that supports the family, the lifestyle, the things that they want to do in the future.”
The SEC’s out-of-state recruiting boom began in the mid-2000s. Even before the Great Recession of 2008-9, many Southern elected officials were less enthusiastic about funding public colleges. With their federally funded research and renowned athletic programs, flagships were seen by many legislators as being more self-sustaining than community colleges or regional four-year campuses. “The conception was that these ones can make their own money” through increased enrollment, says Ozan Jaquette, an associate professor of higher education at the University of California at Los Angeles. “So, let’s let them make their own money.”
SEC flagships have benefited from a disparity in supply and demand. States like Texas and Georgia have burgeoning populations and large numbers of high-school graduates bound for college, and their most august four-year public institutions are becoming more selective. States like Arkansas and Alabama have smaller populations and lower college-going rates. “There’s a big market of students around the big population centers in the South with money and the cultural taste for that kind of SEC flagship experience,” says Cantwell of Michigan State. Factor in students in the Midwest and Northeast lured by the appeal of the SEC, and you have a boom.
Southern flagships are enrolling more students from out of state, but that doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned in-state students. McCray says that the University of Arkansas’ in-state recruiting has become more aggressive and comprehensive, and its financial aid to in-state students more generous, in part thanks to a scholarship fund backed by the state lottery. But the state is projected to lose as much as 15 percent of its college-bound high-school graduates by 2029, according to research by Nathan D. Grawe, a professor of economics at Carleton College, as part of the so-called demographic cliff. “We’ve been trying to do a lot to prepare to be cliff-proof,” McCray says.
That means fielding a substantial out-of-state recruiting operation. When McCray became head of recruiting at Arkansas in 2009, the university had eight recruiters, all of whom were based in Fayetteville and traveled as needed around the state or the country. Now it has 27, including several based in other states, and it’s looking to expand — potentially to Chicago, Colorado, or the Northeast.
At the University of Arkansas, nearly all in-state students who apply receive some institutional aid, McCray says, but out-of-state students with a 3.2 high-school grade-point average can get a 70-percent reduction on the additional out-of-state tuition they pay, and higher GPAs can win even higher reductions.
The University of Arkansas is up against hundreds of other institutions, including fellow SEC members, in vying for out-of-state recruits. The University of Alabama has been particularly aggressive. It conducted 3,900 out-of-state high-school visits, accounting for 91 percent of its total recruiting visits in 2017, according to research by Jaquette, the UCLA professor. A spokesperson for the University of Alabama did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Auburn University isn’t necessarily pursuing a growth trajectory, “but we need to make sure that we are increasing the bandwidth, the reach of the institution,” if in-state enrollment numbers shrink due to demographic shifts, says Joffery Gaymon, the university’s vice president for enrollment management. When Gaymon joined Auburn in 2019, the university received at most about 20,000 freshman applications. For the 2025-26 academic year, it received more than 59,000.
“The volume of out-of-state applicants to the number of in-state applicants is a lot larger,” Gaymon says, but Alabama students remain the priority for admission and aid. While most institutional-aid dollars go to in-state students, “we award out-of-state students merit scholarships — kind of the top of the pool,” Gaymon says, Auburn is not as competitive as some of its peers in using financial aid to recruit out-of-state students.
Even without copious institutional aid, out-of-state tuition at SEC institutions can still be a bargain for students from other states. In the 2025-26 academic year, the full nonresident tuition for a full year of undergraduate studies at the three fastest-growing SEC institutions are $30,704 at Tennessee, $31,550 at Arkansas, and $36,022 at Auburn. Nonresident tuition at two of the three fastest-growing institutions in the Big 10 conference are notably higher: $44,640 at the University of Washington and $44,210 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Compared to some public institutions in the Northeast or many private colleges, “the cost is half,” says Goebel of the Art & Science Group. “When half equates to saving $30,000 a year, that’s significant to families.”
Flagships putting more emphasis on recruiting out-of-state students is almost inevitably going to draw a more well-heeled student body, because “more often than not,” says Dominique J. Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, “they are wealthier students.”
There have also been shifts in the race of undergraduate populations. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, which increased its undergraduate enrollment by nearly a third between 2013 and 2023, saw its Black undergraduate enrollment drop by 29 percent. A spokesperson for the university did not respond to requests for comment. Auburn saw a 21-percent drop in Black undergraduates between 2013 and 2023. Gaymon, the vice president for enrollment, declined to comment.
One popular narrative holds that the recent rise of the South as an economic and social powerhouse derives from the deep conservatism of many of its state governments and citizens and its alignment with the political orientation of the current Congress and the Trump White House.
Kelchen is skeptical that politics plays a large role in college decisions, but he points to recent research by Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University, in Ohio, that found students would pay several thousand dollars to attend a college with 10-percent fewer peers of the opposite political party.
SEC universities would, perhaps, like to think of themselves as apolitical. Gaymon, of Auburn, describes the institution’s contrast to a “noisy” world as part of its appeal. During the protests over the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas that roiled many campuses last fall, “we didn’t really have those same challenges. When the world seems to be very noisy, there may be issues on campus, but it just shows up very differently for us. Some of those things really do matter to prospective students and families.”
Baker, the Delaware professor, believes the appeal of the SEC flagships aligns with the country’s right turn. “You see this sort of backlash and regression around civil liberties, civil rights, etc.,” she says, citing SEC member Texas A&M University system’s recent announcement of a policy limiting faculty discussion of gender and race. Some students and families may not think or care about such things, but “people’s imaginations about Southern public flagship institutions align with all those trends.”
Baker grew up in Virginia and lived in the South most of her life. She finds it astounding that anyone would think of a public university in the South as apolitical. “No one who lives in the South,” she says, “believes that Southern universities are not political.”
Brian O’Leary, senior interactive news producer, contributed to this report.
