Should BYU-Idaho have beaten out Harvard on this list? It’s complicated

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A recent analysis found Harvard is first and BYU ninth for the highest percentage of out-of-state freshmen students at U.S. schools.

That alone is interesting, but what about BYU-Idaho and BYU-Hawaii? It turns out there’s a catch, and that threatened to topple Harvard’s hold on the top spot.

Here’s the original list produced by My Baggage and released by RepublicWorld.com :

• Harvard — 1,129 out-of-state freshmen, or 69% of its freshmen class
• Pennsylvania — 1,624 or 67%
• Northwestern — 1,372 or 67%
• Northeastern — 1,670 or 66%
• Delaware — 3,212 or 65%
• Alabama — 5,1776 or 4%
• Columbia — 979 or 64%
• Mississippi — 2,834 or 63%
• BYU — 3,427 or 62%
• Boston U. — 2,221 or 61%
• Syracuse — 2,497 or 61%

BYU-Idaho reported that it had 3,130 out-of-state first-year students in fall 2022, or 71% of the freshmen class. Of course, that would put it first on the list.

(For the record, BYU-Hawaii had 170 out-of-state freshmen, for 50% of that year’s class. Ensign College had 67 freshmen from outside Utah, for 17%.)

So, what was the catch? Why wasn’t BYU-Idaho first on the My Baggage list? My Baggage CEO Paul Stewart put me in touch with the company’s PR firm, Search Intelligence, which used National Center for Education statistics to conduct the analysis as a way to highlight how many freshmen need help shipping their belongings to school each fall.

The catch is that the data was for fall 2022, when schools were still coming out of the pandemic. Here’s what a spokeswoman for Search Intelligence said in an email about BYU-Idaho missing the list:

“The study filtered out any colleges where more than half of the students are enrolled exclusively in distance education courses. For BYU-Idaho, 52% of students are enrolled exclusively in distance education courses, so it just missed the cut,” she said.

A couple of issues complicate BYU-Idaho’s standing on the list as analyzed.

First, the school operates year-round with three semesters on what it calls a track system. Students are assigned to a track, to two of the three semesters. So a fall count doesn’t capture the university’s size or compare to most other schools where fall semester is the traditional start for the bulk of the student body.

For example, in 2022, when it had 3,130 out-of-state freshmen for fall semester, its full count of new freshmen across the school year was 6,162. Again, 70% of the full, yearlong freshman class was from out of state.

The second factor is BYU-Idaho’s massive online program.

For example, many of the students who are “off track” tend to take at least one online course when they aren’t on campus, even if it’s an internship course. That number is usually around 5,000 students per semester.

And the BYU-Idaho online program is adding more and more students from BYU-Pathway Worldwide, the low-cost on-ramp to higher education offered to students around the world. Right now, about 19,000 Pathway students enroll in online courses each year.

That complicates BYU-I’s ability to make a list when the data set is cut the way Search Intelligence created its list.

But rest assured, BYU-Idaho draws some of the largest numbers of out-of-state freshmen to its campus in Rexburg each year.

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