The Southern College Boom: How SEC universities became enrollment winners by selling sunshine, football, and a particular vision of college life.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

There’s a drumbeat of bad news for many colleges in the headlines every day — stiffer competition for students, faltering enrollments, budget holes, program cuts. Yet each fall for years now, proud pronouncements have rung out from flagship universities across the South: A new record freshman class has topped last year’s record incoming class.

Even as flagships elsewhere, such as the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and West Virginia University, faced flat or declining enrollments and weighed or enacted academic-program cuts, almost all of the 15 public institutions of the Southeastern Conference have steadily added undergraduate enrollment over the past decade, most by double-digit percentages.

How did the South become the center of college-recruiting success? In a way, its success has been under construction for decades, built on its track record of teaching and research as well as a tradition of high-profile Division I athletics and high-spirited campus life. More recently, these institutions have benefited from new channels of media exposure and a strategy of more aggressively recruiting out-of-state students, in part to make up for flagging state support. And, some observers have argued, SEC flagships also might be beneficiaries of a shift in national politics. For some students, the thinking goes, sun, football, and a more conservative climate are potent attraction

An article well worth your time.