This idea is absurd. While it's true that in-state enrollment has dropped 18 percent in the last decade, putting a cap on out-of-state enrollment diminishes the overall academic quality of the USC student population, and the value of our degrees. The reason that in-state enrollment is down is because students are not meeting the qualifications for acceptance, which only requires scoring at least 1000 on the SAT and earning a 3.0 GPA.
The state's qualifications for acceptance are not extremely challenging. In order to increase in-state enrollment, South Carolina needs to work on improving the education system from elementary to high school. Programs should be put in place to motivate students to achieve the acceptance requirements.
Having a large population of out-of-state students helps the university financially, too. The legislature should realize that out-of-state students bring USC more revenue than they do. This money pays for a variety of things, from professors' salaries to residence hall renovations, and directly affects the quality of life and education the school provides.
The legislature should not be able to tell USC how many out-of-state students to accept. The university should be trusted to accept the most qualified and most diverse applicants in order to provide the highest quality of education to all of its students.