Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes and on the subject, why don't restaurants I want to eat in just add more tables? And when there is traffic why not make the road wider? And make more seats on the plane so I don't have to connect in Atlanta. And why doesn't Taylor Swift just have the stadium enlarged so we can all have tickets? And can't they just grow more rice? I mean is it that hard? There's a global rice shortage you know.

Your snark has actually disproven your own point. Airlines HAVE added more seats to planes. AND they’ve added more planes and more routes. And restaurants are constrained by fire codes. BUT they do serve more people than before by online delivery etc. No one is suggesting colleges crowd people in. Merely that they expend their plentiful resources to acquire more space and more professors.

What you don’t like is disputing your romanticized version of the college experience.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Capacity constraints

This. The older schools like Yale, Harvard, ,UVA are at max capacity. They were built in the horse and buggy era and can't sensibly enlarge their classes (although all three have done everything possible to enlarge first year classes). There just isn't the dorm space.

Anonymous wrote:
Good luck figuring out where Harvard is going to house more undergraduates. It has taken literally more than a decade for Harvard to be able to build out some additional (non-residential) buildings in Allston (across the Charles) because of town-gown fights. Good luck trying to convince anyone in Cambridge -- let alone Boston -- to let Harvard buy more land and build more residence halls.

Stanford wanted to build 2600 additional student beds, among other things, on its property. It ended up ultimately withdrawing its permit request/plans in 2019 after this was demanded of Stanford:

The coalition of San Mateo County cities, which includes East Palo Alto, Atherton, Menlo Park, Portola Valley, Redwood City and Woodside, as well as county staff requested $196 million for an affordable-housing fund, $4.62 million for roadway improvements, $15 million for bike and pedestrian connections, $5 million for stormwater management and $6.78 million in “in-lieu property taxes” to compensate communities where Stanford owns properties and enjoys property-tax exemptions.

Yes, Stanford has a substantial endowment, but those funds were not given with the intention of passing through $200 Million+ to local governments.

"Oh, but they don't need dorms, just have more undergraduate students live off campus and commute (at Harvard) (at MIT) (at Stanford) (at fill-in-the-blank), like at UToronto!"

Where would students live? There are already immense housing pressures in many of these places. Logistically, where?

Even if someone could afford and find housing off campus, part of the value proposition of places like these is the ability to learn outside of the classroom -- in residential spaces and dining halls, where students debate ideas, share perspectives, and grow as people. That gets lost if half your student body is scattered around a city.

Lastly, intensive classroom experiences -- often, small classes, and many times, discussion-oriented courses -- are some of the hallmarks of these institutions. So, expect to build more academic spaces and hire more faculty (and more offices for them) so you're not cramming hundreds of students into lecture halls -- the hiring part is probably the easiest, excluding the financial outlay, but the rest will require more space. (Not to mention more space for things like dining facilities, et. al., you'll need with a larger student body)

I'm not arguing that the residential college experience is the only way to achieve a high-quality educational experience. Of course not. But it's part of what makes these institutions the places they are. Just like Cambridge and Oxford.

Places like UBC, UToronto, U Sydney, U Melbourne, U Tokyo, and so forth are able to be so large in part because that they are in the largest population centers of their countries -- some (many, in some cases) students still commute from home. They are also not focused on the residential learning experiences that these American schools are known for in terms of the undergraduate experience. They are amazing places, too, obviously -- but they are offering a different educational experience.

The coalition of San Mateo County cities, which includes East Palo Alto, Atherton, Menlo Park, Portola Valley, Redwood City and Woodside, as well as county staff requested $196 million for an affordable-housing fund, $4.62 million for roadway improvements, $15 million for bike and pedestrian connections, $5 million for stormwater management and $6.78 million in “in-lieu property taxes” to compensate communities where Stanford owns properties and enjoys property-tax exemptions.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

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.

I believe this switch for US colleges coincides with an emphasis on schools wanting to accept a small share of applicants because that helps their US News rankings.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

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 wrote:“I'm a Harvard grad. Traditionally the freshmen are housed in Harvard Yard. There are only so many rooms. “

My apologies. I forgot that Harvard is the only college on earth, & that there is a Massachusetts law that requires college students to live on campus. But hey, congrats on that Harvard Extension degree.

Anonymous wrote:Yes and on the subject, why don't restaurants I want to eat in just add more tables? And when there is traffic why not make the road wider? And make more seats on the plane so I don't have to connect in Atlanta. And why doesn't Taylor Swift just have the stadium enlarged so we can all have tickets? And can't they just grow more rice? I mean is it that hard? There's a global rice shortage you know.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, what part of "there are only so many slots for the top students" - do you not understand? Are you not a top applicant, and therefore, begrudging those who are?

The question is why there are so few slots. There are more students now than there were 20, 40, 80 years ago, at the same academic caliber.

As explained in numerous posts above, physical facilities have limits.