Comment by lolinder
19 hours ago
> 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?
We're talking in circles, so let me state my position in one sentence: the existence of demand for a service does not create a moral obligation to meet that demand.