Comment by lolinder
2 days ago
> The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US
Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.
There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.
> it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands
except that it is about branding and ranking; these top unis have the money and the capability to double their undergrad student size; they have no problem attracting top talent as far as professors are concerned
I didn't just make this up[0]
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29309
> these top unis have the money and the capability to double their undergrad student size; they have no problem attracting top talent as far as professors are concerned
Professors are not the only bottleneck that the administration of MIT and company would be worried about. With more undergrads and professors comes more administration overhead, a need for more facilities (including land for those facilities that may not be contiguous with the rest of campus, which creates additional overhead of its own), and housing for the students (with the impact on the surrounding neighborhoods that that entails).
Additionally, allowing your school to grow from 8000 to 30000 undergrads dramatically changes the character of the school in ways that can't just be brushed off as "elitist".
And again: regardless of the reasons they don't want to change, I don't see any reason why we should expect any given school to so dramatically transform itself just because college became the default path for the middle class.
> I don't see any reason why we should expect any given school to so dramatically transform itself just because college became the default path for the middle class.
because most other schools, except the elitist schools, have
> just because college became the default path for the middle class
actually, that's not the case; college enrollment, as a percentage of high school grads, is the lowest it's been since 2006 and has only risen 10% in the past 50 years -- and that includes enrollment at community colleges
meanwhile the US population has grown 60% in the same period
US college age (20-24) population has grown from 16.5M in 1970 to 23M in 2022
so that means that elite colleges are serving an ever-shrinking share of the college population; and if you factor in the explosion in foreign undergrads in the past 50 years, top colleges share of US college population is even smaller
> a need for more facilities (including land for those facilities that may not be contiguous with the rest of campus, which creates additional overhead of its own)
have you taken a look at the endowments of elite colleges recently?
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