Voting with their feet

Fascinating article in the Boston Globe yesterday about the number of Massachusetts residents who choose to attend out of state colleges rather than spending about half of the money to go to UMass Amherst. Some interesting stats - in the past ten years, the number of Massachusetts residents attending UConn is up 70%, 60% at UNH, and 50% at UVM. Some say the reasons are many: UMass' lackluster campus, the decline in the number of faculty, and their reputation as Zoo Mass.

I visited UMass a couple of times in the mid-90's when my friend Neil was attending there. Coming from a small, bucolic, Catholic college, UMass was a shocker to me and I wasn't impressed with the facilities. Hopefully over time they can address some of these problems as I'd love to see our state have a top-notch state university system. But, as usual, the money is being directed at hacks, layabouts, and illegals while our state parks and state universities are underfunded. The parks and schools deserve our money, not Gov. Deval Patrick's neighbor and Tim Cahill's coat holders at the Lottery.

By the way, here in the Merrimack Valley UMass Lowell is experiencing a sort of rebirth under the leadership of Marty Meehan. Now as a politician, Meehan is not my cup of tea but he is doing great work in Lowell, the school is growing, applications are way up, and there is a lot of pride there. With UMass President Jack Wilson retiring soon, I would not be surprised to see Meehan move to that job.