why do universities not admit more students?
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Anonymous
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clearly the demand for top 50 colleges is there. why not admit more in fields like STEM?
colleges would get oos tuition $$ and kids an opportunity that they might have just missed? |
Anonymous
Because we are not China. |
Anonymous
| Capacity constraints |
Anonymous
You should listen to the freakonomics series on college admissions. The gist is that Ivy and other top schools increased their class sizes from the 1960s through the 1990s and then stopped. Now, some of this was admitting women, but that largely happened in the late 1960s. In the 1990s, they made a decision they wanted to increase their cache and become more exclusive. Many of these schools had 30% - 50% admission rates back then. This contrasts with say Canada which views a low acceptance rate as a negative. If a school is too “popular”, they figure out a way to make it larger. Those schools are all public…but an interesting approach. |
Anonymous
| The schools won't be prestigious anymore. Especially the ones 26-50. |
Anonymous
| Urban colleges (e.g., GW, Georgetown, AU) have major restraints with regard to expansion. Neighbors don't want more college kids, and there are agreements in place limiting the growth of colleges/universities. Increasing housing for students presents a serious logistical challenge. Also, universities would have to invest in hiring more faculty. A university can't hire more than a certain percentage of faculty as adjuncts, otherwise they lose accreditation with the AAUP and other accreditation orgs. Full-time faculty are expensive compared to adjuncts. |
Anonymous
| Accommodations have become more luxe and private too and I don't see that trend changing anytime soon. It simply takes more space to house students vs. the long hallways and shared hallway bathrooms of 30/40 years ago. |
Anonymous
Most good private colleges subsidize and lose money on undergrads. They make money off of successful career-oriented master’s programs. So, they have an incentive to expand by adding master’s programs. Even Harvard does that. |
Anonymous
Not accurate. Harvard, the definitive Ivy, stopped growing in 1978 or earlier, and Penn and Cornell have been growing. https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-new-day-at-harvard/article/2021/2/12/berger-increase-undergrad-enrollment/ |
Anonymous
Why not? |
Anonymous
China is not something everyplace aspires to be, OP, including the U.S. If you don't know this, I do not know what to tell you. China is a third world country (or whatever the PC expression might be today), and there is growing disparity in classes, such that there will soon be only two classes in the U.S., very soon. There is also no caste system in the U.S. (unlike many Middle Eastern countries), and we prefer that. If you like China so much, and they are so great at what they do (hint: they are not) why stay in the U.S.? |
Anonymous
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They'd also need to increase the teaching faculty and classroom space, otherwise students wouldn't be able to get the classes they need.
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Anonymous
| Space. Duh |
Anonymous
Can you back that up with numbers? I don't believe what you say is true for T50. Perhaps it's true for T10, but as T50 goes the number of qualified applicants is on a downward trend, along with the number of HS grads overall. Many T50 schools are "buyers" needing to admit even unqualified applicants to fill their coffers. |
Anonymous
The problem is that, a lot of the time, non-U.S. universities hold tuition by spending a lot on government subsidies; offering a rigid or low-quality curriculum; or skimping on what we think of as basic student services, like dorms. So, for undergrads, even a lot of famous non-U.S. universities are a lot more like UDC would be if it had a lot of high-stats freshmen than they are like Johns Hopkins. For some students, a more sophisticated version of UDC might be perfect, but that’s not even the same experience students get from UMBC or George Mason. You really have to think hard about the tradeoffs. |