Marsha Tripp graduated from the University of Florida in the 1980s. Her son is now a sophomore at the Gainesville school, but she worried that his path to UF was tougher than hers because of the growing number of out-of-state students attending Florida’s top-ranked university.
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UF is now enrolling more than twice as many students from other states than it did 10 years ago, and she fears those students are taking spots from deserving Floridians.
“That’s a slap in the face for our kids who take all these AP classes, and who work hard to get into these universities,” said the Ocala mother.
That’s a sentiment shared by plenty of other Florida parents and by David Jolly, the Democratic candidate for governor.
Jolly, who has dedicated a page of his campaign website to out-of-state enrollment, says he wants to give Florida high school students “preferred application status” at state universities.
He hasn’t offered specifics or proposed a new cap on out-of-state students. But he said Florida taxpayers support the state’s public universities, so their academically successful children deserve an opportunity to be educated here.
“You did everything right, and yet we put up a gate before you could get to our university. That’s wrong,” Jolly said.
Republican candidate Byron Donalds said he’d likely tackle the issue by pushing a hike to out-of-state tuition, which he said would help prioritize more in-state admissions.
“We want to make sure that our kids are going to our universities,” Donalds said.
The bottom line: In the coming year, there could be a push to rebalance the scales of admissions at Florida’s more-selective universities.
Florida caps overall out-of-state enrollment at 10% across all 12 state universities — a relatively restrictive rate compared to other states with comparable university systems. North Carolina, for example, limits out-of-state enrollment to 18% at its top research universities, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
However, Florida’s cap is calculated as an average, so several state universities have first-year classes where out-of-state students make up more than 10%.
Last year, for example, 21% of the first-year class at UF came from states other than Florida, according to the Common Data Set, a group that collects information from the nation’s universities. That compares to about 8% in 2015.
The out-of-state enrollment rate last year was 23% at Florida Atlantic University, 19% at the University of South Florida, 13% at Florida State University and 8% at the University of Central Florida. An FAU spokesperson said it had record-high interest from out-of-state students last year but put more priority on in-state students this year, dropping its 2026 rate to 17%.
At the same time, a bigger pool of applications has made it harder to get accepted into Florida’s more-selective universities.
USF last fall announced a “record-breaking” number of applications and a “record-setting” cohort of students with better grades and higher test scores than those in previous classes. FSU’s acceptance rate was 24% last year, down from 37% in 2021 and 58% in 2016.
Last spring, the Florida House pushed to restrict out-of-state enrollment to 5% at each of the state’s top schools. The proposal passed in the House but died in the Florida Senate, so it never became law. Rep. Jennifer Kincart Jonsson, the Lakeland Republican who sponsored the bill, estimated that if it had passed, the state’s schools would have lost a combined $54 million in out-state-tuition in the first year.
Jodi Furman, a Florida-based independent college admissions counselor, operates a Facebook group for parents of prospective college students with more than 15,000 members. Changes to out-of-state enrollment and the increasing difficulty of college admissions at Florida universities are common topics of conversation among group members.
The idea that out-of-state applicants are stealing seats from local high school students at Florida’s universities is “overblown,” she said. Florida’s top-ranked universities are getting more applicants than ever, and in-state students are competing against more of their fellow Floridians to attend the state’s top schools.
“It is too simplistic to say that it is just the increase of out-of-state students,” Furman said.
At the same time, Furman said she “welcomes” reform that prioritizes Florida residents at state universities, so long as it doesn’t sacrifice academic standing. Furman sees a Florida-resident-only early application, which binds the applicant to enroll at the school if they’re accepted, as a potential solution. In April, Florida State announced such a plan, and other schools could do the same, she said.
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Eli Goldberg, a UF junior from Long Island, New York, said he was drawn to the school because of its highly-rated programs. The warm weather and a so-called grandparent waiver — which allows Goldberg to pay in-state tuition because his grandparents live in Florida — didn’t hurt either.
He understands why Florida families would want the state to prioritize in-state students and wouldn’t be against the state raising out-of-state tuition. Currently, out-of-state tuition at UF is a bargain and less than what he’d pay at an equivalent school in New York.
In-state tuition at UF is $6,440 while out-of-state tuition is $34,620.
Goldberg credits going to school more than 1,000 miles from home with helping him become more social and more able to adapt to new environments, something that will be invaluable after graduation, he said.
“I’m someone who values new experiences and new people. I definitely think it’s important to go into a new setting and have to find your way from the start instead of just using what you have,” he said.
Florida universities frequently tout their appeal to students from across the country and the world. In August, Florida State announced information about its latest crop of freshmen.
“FSU received more than 96,000 applications for its first-year class, a 12% increase from the 2024-2025 application cycle,” it said as classes started. “The admitted class included students from all 50 states, all 67 Florida counties and 55 countries, representing more than 2,700 U.S. high schools.”
Mori Hosseini, the chair of UF’s Board of Trustees, pushed back on restrictions to out-of-state enrollment at a Florida Board of Governors meeting in September. Hosseini said UF relies on out-of-state students for higher test scores, and UF could take a hit to its academic ranking — based in part on those ACT and SAT admission test scores — if the state restricted out-of-state students.
UF was ranked eighth among public universities nationally this year by U.S. News & World Report and has been as high as fifth in recent years.
“We need to have students over 1500 SAT. Simple as that. There are not very many over 1500 in the state of Florida,” Hosseini said.
Data from the College Board, which administers the SAT, shows that only about 6,000 Florida students earned higher than a 1400 on the SAT last year, representing about 3% of all test takers in the state. Nationally, about 9% of all test takers scored above a 1400.
If UF can’t bring in high-achieving students from outside of Florida, the school would instead need to enroll fewer students altogether to keep its ranking, he said, rather than dilute its first-year classes with Florida students who did not have the same high academic credentials.
In a statement sent Thursday, a UF spokesperson said the school was “proud” to serve Florida.
“We will continue to seek new ways to ensure that Florida families have access to one of the very best public universities in the nation,” wrote Steve Orlando.
Meg Spodick, a Massachusetts parent of two FSU students, said she’s happy her kids went to school almost 1,300 miles away in Florida.
“They spent their whole life here, and the world is bigger than just Framingham, Massachusetts,” Spodick said.
Spodick said cutting out-of-state enrollment at Florida universities could bring unintended consequences. Florida’s 10% limit is already “strict,” she said, and having a healthy out-of-state alumni network can benefit in-state graduates.
She also worries that Florida’s top schools will have lower national academic standing and be more regional, if they restrict out-of-state students further.
Jolly said the goal of prioritizing Florida students isn’t to undermine academic status for the state’s top institutions or to make student bodies less diverse.
A native Floridian who attended college in Atlanta, Jolly said a range of perspectives from out-of-state and international students should still exist, just not at the expense of Florida’s high school students.
“It’s clear we’re not doing enough for Florida’s kids,” he said, “and we have got to lean into opening more slots for Florida students.”
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