Nevertheless, nonresidents play an important role on campus. Their presence introduces resident students to peers from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, promotes a national culture, and generates additional revenue for institutions.

State policies can encourage or discourage interstate student migration. Policymakers discourage nonresident enrollments by establishing higher nonresident tuition rates, setting stricter admission standards for nonresidents, or imposing numerical limits on nonresident enrollments. Likewise, they encourage residents to attend in-state institutions through preferential tuition rates and less stringent admissions standards.

In order to develop appropriate policies for their states, policymakers need information about trends in college student migration and how these trends are likely to affect their enrollments. While institutions and states can develop profiles of students migrating into their higher education systems from their own student enrollment records, determining where their residents migrate is not possible without analyses of national data.