The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2007, Friday

Copyright 2007 The Chronicle of Higher Education
All Rights Reserved
The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 23, 2007 Friday

SECTION: STUDENTS; Pg. 23 Vol. 54 No. 13

HEADLINE: Is Bigger Any Better?

BYLINE: ELIZABETH F. FARRELL

BODY:
Admissions deans have perfected the wistful tone of regret. In rejection letters, they talk of wrestling with "difficult decisions" and having "so many more qualified applicants than space." Harvard University's dean of undergraduate admission wrote last year that he wished "it were possible for us to admit more of our fine applicants."
To the rejected, those words often ring hollow. After all, the student remains excluded no matter what the reason. But there is mounting evidence that top colleges, especially wealthy private ones, do sincerely feel bad about having to turn away so many of their applicants. Stanford feels bad. Yale feels bad. And Princeton does, too.
In his president's column in Stanford University's alumni magazine, John L. Hennessy recently floated an idea that has already gained some traction at other ultraselective institutions: Why not expand?
By turning down a record number of "exceptional and deserving students," Mr. Hennessy wrote, the university must "come to terms with the fact that we are denying Stanford the benefit of talent that could contribute to the university and society at large in a significant way."
Yale University is considering a similar move for the same reason. Two committees there are examining the possible impact of gradually adding 650 more undergraduates, for a total undergraduate enrollment of 5,900. And Princeton University is already in the third year of an expansion that will eventually bring its undergraduate enrollment up to 5,200, an increase of 500 students.
It is difficult to discern which types of students would benefit from marginally higher odds of acceptance at these institutions. Both Stanford and Yale say it's too early to even speculate, and Princeton says its expansion was not intended to benefit one group of students in particular.
Critics view such plans to grow as attempts to hoard more of the brightest students. Not so, the colleges say. There are many more qualified students out there than in past years, and accepting more of them is part of colleges' social obligation.
"This kind of expansion shows the commitment our institution has to offering this incredible education to more students," says Janet Lavin Rapelye, dean of admissions at Princeton. "We have the capacity to educate more students, so it was right for our university."
Growing Knowledge
Considering the recent fortunes of the country's richest institutions, it is no surprise that they feel a responsibility to share the wealth. Endowment coffers are more flush than ever at most Ivy League institutions, while enrollments have remained more or less static. Spending per student is at an all-time high, and the last notable expansion at most of these universities happened when they went co-educational in the 1970s. Since then the number of students attending college has nearly doubled.
The country's richest and most selective institutions have recently been devoting their wealth to improving their facilities and raising the number of faculty members. Both Harvard and Brown Universities have added at least 100 new faculty members in the past five years, and Princeton has added 60 over the past 10 years. Stanford has added 250 more faculty members over the past decade.
Many of these universities are also buying more space. Yale purchased the former campus of the Bayer Healthcare complex, in Orange, Conn., last summer, which will add over 500,000 square feet of laboratory facilities to the university. Harvard plans to add 600,000 square feet of science-teaching space and laboratories for its stem-cell-research center and other projects. Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania have recently acquired 17 and 14 acres, respectively.
Both Harvard and Dartmouth College say that as much as they would like to admit more students, space constraints on their campuses make it impossible for now. But for some elite institutions, adding more students is a way of increasing access to a tremendous wealth of resources that keeps on growing.
"As knowledge expands, great universities have to expand along with it," says Christopher L. Eisgruber, provost at Princeton. "If you want to have the right educational ecosystem, when you grow the faculty you have to grow the student body, too."
Though additional students could lead to more tuition revenue, the logistics and costs involved in any significant expansion of a private university would make it unlikely to be profitable, at least in the short term, says Gordon C. Winston, an economist at Williams College. A college's customers are paying only a fraction of the actual cost to educate them, even when they pay full tuition, Mr. Winston says. So at most institutions, additional students are costing more money than their tuition generates.
At Princeton, for example, the university finances the expense of more students through its $15.8-billion endowment. According to the provost, net tuition revenue per student is lower than it was before the expansion began, in part because the university is enrolling more students who qualify for financial aid. University officials had not originally intended for the expansion to change the proportion of such students. But Princeton's program to replace all loans with grants in every financial-aid package, introduced in 2001, attracted more students who qualified for aid.
The average scholarship awarded to freshmen entering in the fall of 2001 was $22,300, compared with $31,000 for those entering in the fall of 2007. Over the same time period, the percentage of low-income students (those whose families make less than the median family income as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau) grew from 10.9 percent, or 130 students, to 15 percent, or 180 students.
Some institutions, however, can bring in more money by expanding if they intentionally admit less-expensive students.
At Cornell University, enrollment has gradually drifted up about 5 percent in the last 20 years, according to Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.
The institution was able to avoid a significant increase in costs by accepting more transfer students, who are upperclassmen and do not require on-campus housing. Had the college needed to add more dormitories, the expansion would not have been as profitable, he says.
Mission and Reputation
The most difficult question for institutions weighing the pros and cons of expansion is "How many students is too many?"
To find the answer requires careful contemplation of a college's mission and reputation.
Three characteristics traditionally influence a university's reputation: its age, size, and selectivity. For most colleges, expansion often comes at the expense of selectivity. Elite institutions are in a rare position because they can add more students without becoming noticeably less selective.
There is a limit, however, to how much any college can expand while maintaining the quality of its educational experience. Institutions like Princeton pride themselves on their intimate environment and know they cannot double in size and maintain that culture. Even adding a relatively small number of students required building a new dormitory at Princeton because of its strong residential tradition.
Haverford College recently decided to forgo an expansion that would have added 200 students to its current 1,200. After a year and half of debate and many meetings, university officials decided that more students would dilute the Haverford experience that all students share, says Jess H. Lord, dean of admissions.
In contrast, concerns about identity did not stop New York University from adding over 1,000 students to its undergraduate population, now 19,400, over the past five years. As a large urban institution with students living throughout New York City, NYU did not have to worry about preserving a close-knit sense of community because its students tend to be more independent, according to Barbara F. Hall, NYU's associate provost for enrollment management.
"We don't get together on a Saturday afternoon and paint our faces and go to football games -- in fact, we don't even have a football team," she says.
Benefits of Bigness
At Princeton, at least, expansion has been costly, and it has not improved any one applicant's razor-thin chance of being accepted. In fact, since expansion, the opposite has happened. In 2004, Princeton received 13,700 applications and admitted 12.7 percent of the applicants. Last year close to 19,000 students applied, and the acceptance rate fell to its lowest level ever, 9.7 percent.
Even when an institution is turning down more students than ever before -- in both sheer numbers and overall percentage -- accepting a larger number of students does give admissions officials more freedom in crafting the freshman class.
In recent years, Ivy League institutions and others with reputations for being elite have come under fire for giving preference to legacy students and athletes. Some critics have argued that this practice denies space to academically worthier students who do not have the advantage of family connections or a winning jump shot.
"With expansion, the idea is it's less of a zero-sum game, and you can open up opportunities for low-income kids without cutting access to existing groups," says Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington. "It's a very political process -- there are a limited amount of spots, and each constituency group pushes for its own interests."
Another advantage an admission office gains by accepting more students is the opportunity to improve its academic profile. Though Princeton was not wanting for high-achieving applicants, it has a strong athletics tradition compared with its peers, and is one of the smallest institutions in the Ivy League. Even after Princeton completes its expansion, only Columbia and Dartmouth will have fewer undergraduates.
The athletes who are admitted to Princeton have much higher test scores and grade-point averages than athletes at many other universities, but the athletes' test scores and averages still tend to be slightly lower than those of other Princeton students.
"We're obviously very proud of our athletic teams and their contributions to Princeton," says Mr. Eisgruber, the provost. "But when we expand the number of students we admit and not the number of teams, it does ease the choices that have to be made by the dean of admission."
Those choices are only relatively easier, of course. Even with a significant expansion, Ms. Rapelye, Princeton's admissions dean, says her office is forced to turn down many students it would like to accept. If Yale and Stanford follow through on their plans, the magnitude of growth at their institutions will do little to stem the tide of hopeful applicants who will be rejected. The regret that admissions deans write about to applicants appears sincere, but also unavoidable.
Eric Hoover contributed to this article.

LOAD-DATE: November 19, 2007