Observation One:  A post last week about how the University of Vermont seemed to be the only state university in captivity serving more out-of-staters than its own residents should have pointed out that in some ways this situation helps young Vermonters and their parents.

UVM doesn’t have a huge endowment, and the money it gets from the state adds up to barely ten percent of the cost of running the joint. More than many quality universities, then, UVM depends on tuition.

That means it depends on out-of-staters, who pay more than twice as much as Vermonters to attend UVM. In-state tuition is  (in UVM’s Fiscal Year 2009) $11,048 a year, and a great many Vermont students don’t pay that much. Almost 900 of them pay nothing at all (though everybody pays the $1,796 in student fees, bringing the total cost for an in-state student to $12,844, plus room and board).

Undergraduates who are not from Vermont, whether they live as close as New Hampshire or as far away as Kenya,  pay tuition of $27,886. And as far as the university is concerned, most of them are really paying that much. Many may be getting student loans or Pell Grants or some other kind of assistance. But they’re funneling it right into UVM’s treasury.

The outsiders, then, are  subsidizing the state residents. If there weren’t as many out-of-state students, there might not be enough money to finance a quality university for anyone, residents or not.

Nor does there seem to be a major shortage of openings at the school for qualified Vermonters. State Senator Donald Collins, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he recently checked into complaints that Vermont students were having a hard time getting into UVM and found that “most high schools thought their students were getting fair treatment, that qualified Vermonters were getting in.”

UVM’s dependence on tuition raises the question of why the state doesn’t offer the university more support. Only one or two states pony up a smaller percentage of the cost of public higher education, and those are much poorer states. Is Vermont a higher ed .cheapskate?

Maybe, but a little perspective is due. Some state university systems have sources of income other than the taxpayers. In Texas, oil and gas production on more than 1 million acres of the Permanent University Fund Lands helps support the state university system. As a condition of joining the union, several other Western states had to set aside “school trust lands” to help support education.

If only maple syrup were as essential as motor and heating fuel, Vermont might have gotten in on that act, too. As it is, our only major source of public money is taxation. As has been noted, life isn’t fair.

That East is East is West is West and the twain aren’t exactly alike brings us to Observation Two, and helps answer a question from the reader who wondered at the statement in a recent post that “the lay of the land” helped explain why elementary and secondary education in Vermont is so expensive.

The reference was to both the physical and the cultural lays of the land. Vermont is the most rural state in the Northeast.  Maine and New Hampshire have more wild country, but in both states, more folks live in urban/suburban settings. By and large the Northeast is more expensive than most of the rest of the country, and rural can be expensive, too, especially decentralized rural, which is what Vermont is.

The other rural states are in the South or on the Great Plains. They have wide open spaces, not a town every few miles where most people like to maintain their own school. Those states also have county school systems, meaning far fewer administrators per pupil than Vermont, where there are 61 separate supervisory districts for 311 schools, some of them very tiny.

In some sparsely settled Western counties there is only one school-or one school complex with an elementary, middle, and high school all together-in the county seat. The school district does not always provide transportation for children who live far from town. Parents drive their own kids to school. Or mothers rent apartments where they stay with their children from Monday morning until Friday afternoon, when they head back to the ranch. Others board children with relatives or friends in town during the week. More expensive for these parents; cheaper for the school district.

Vermonters could consolidate schools or districts, but they don’t seem to like the idea. When former Education commissioner Richard Cate proposed trimming the number of districts a few years ago, he got his head handed to him. Consolidation, it seems, violates the concept of “local control.” Local control can be expensive.

Does this mean Vermont can’t do anything to hold down school costs? Of course not. It does raise the question of whether these state-by-state cost comparisons are at all useful.–Jon Margolis.