Reply to Scarcity of "elite college" slots in US relative to other countries

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[quote=Anonymous][b]This is an interesting piece in Jeff Selingo's newsletter. But I don't see US elite colleges increasing their supply, so it's a bit of a moot point. [/b]

On a day when early-decision applications are due at many selective institutions, it’s important to remember one reason why these colleges remain “highly rejective” is because they choose to keep their freshman classes small.

As Olivia Roark reports, the five top-ranked universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings—Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale—enroll about 6,400 freshmen in total each year and 32,000 undergrads in all.

In the rest of the world, including Brazil, South Africa, and Canada, the top 5 universities have 100,000+ undergrads.

[img]https://i.ibb.co/k9wNXgz/Top-Five.png[/img]

What’s happening: Applications to selective colleges have jumped during the pandemic when most of the institutions dropped their testing requirements for admissions. But institutions didn’t expand their incoming classes; they just rejected more students.

—Then two events this past summer put more pressure on selective colleges to either expand or rethink who they’re admitting.

First was the Supreme Court decision that struck down race-conscious admissions.

Second was the release of a report by economists showing wealthy applicants get into Ivy-plus schools at a higher rate than everyone else with the same SAT/ACT scores.
View from the north: The top-ranked universities in Canada enroll way many more undergrads than those in the U.S.

To fill the undergraduate seats at the five top-ranked universities in Canada with students from highly ranked U.S. institutions, you would basically need the undergrad population from the top 25 national universities in the U.S. News rankings.

—In many ways, the U.S. is more like India. The top five Indian universities on the U.S. News Best Global Universities list enroll roughly 15,000 students. The institutions in India are astoundingly small for a country of 1.4 billion people.[/quote]

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