Interesting perspective.
This may help explain by gaining admission to the Ivies among others has grown increasingly difficult.
Ivy League colleges grew by 14 percent over the last 30 years, lagging far behind the 44 percent rise in the number of high school graduates.
First, I didn’t read the whole article. 
In my mind, the problem isn’t that Harvard admits too few students. It’s that too many students have been hoodwinked into believing that they have to apply to Harvard. I would choose Amherst, Williams or Pomona any day of the week over Harvard for undergrad, yet we aren’t beating the drum that LACs are letting in too few students. The Ivy League has done a great marketing job.
Eh. Yes, restricting admissions is very elitist but it also works out to an extent. The Ivies/equivalents restricting their undergraduate numbers means talented students overflow to schools like WashU/Vandy/NYU/USC, increasing the quality of the student bodies there. These days, WashU undergrad BBA and Vandy are at least IB semi-targets while they weren’t a generation ago and both NYU and USC have shot up the rankings while a generation or 2 ago, they were schools for rich kids who couldn’t get in to decent publics.
The world also changes. The expansion of Big Tech in the US means that CS majors from good but definitely not Ivy-level schools like UIUC/UW-Seattle/Rose-Hulman/WPI/CalPoly SLO/NEU significantly outearn Ivy grads with humanities/social science degrees.
In just a few years the 2008 baby cliff arrives…
After a quick read of the article by Jeff Selingo, I think that the arguments made by the article’s author are weak and incomplete.
Comparing Harvard & Stanford to Arizona State University (ASU) & to the University of Michigan is not convincing as private universities have a different mission than do state supported public flagship schools.
The better approach, in my view, would be to discuss the indirect public support given to elite private colleges & universities harboring massive tax advantaged endowments and what–if any–obligation do those ultra-wealthy private schools owe to the public in return for the immense tax breaks received by those institutions.
LACs, smaller/regional schools and directionals without a strong brand will be hurt starting pretty soon.
A lot of closures and consolidation coming.
I agree. All but the strongest brands will start to suffer. Their only way to survive is to be in better control of their budgets.
Also, I see a pretty myopic focus on undergrad. While the elite schools have not expanded their undergraduate student bodies that much, they have expanded their grad (terminal) masters programs. Granted, many of those are cash cows, but that doesn’t mean the grads from many of those programs don’t do well.
With undergrad becoming more like HS a couple of generations ago (necessary but not sufficient for certain jobs or moving up the career ladder) and masters programs becoming the new undergrad as well as rigorous cheap masters coming in to being (like the GaTech/UT-Austin CS masters that cost about $10K), it’s starting to make a lot of sense to save money on undergrad to spend it on grad school.
I wonder if Jeff Selingo, the author of the article referenced in the original post in this thread who is affiliated with Arizona State University (ASU), thought about the Barrett Honors College at ASU when writing this piece.
Isn’t there a bit of irony to be found here ?
Much of what I object to in the Jeff Selingo article is his failure to differentiate the missions of public and private schools.
Is ASU’s Barrett Honors College more akin to a public school or does it act more like an elite private school ?
(Sort of in-between; more resources and selectivity than a regular student at a run-of-the-mill public but still less than an elite private)
ASU as a whole has a dual function as (a) a flagship-level state university and (b) a broad-access state university (being located where a very large percentage of the state population is in commuting range).
However, students aiming for (a) tend to be selectivity / exclusivity / prestige conscious, so they may not be too satisfied with a (b) school where anyone with a 3.0 HS GPA (and some with lower HS GPA) in the college-prep course pattern can get into. Hence the existence of an honors program to make the school more attractive to those seeking flagship-level exclusivity and prestige (it does not have the exclusivity or prestige level of an elite private school).
I didn’t read anything in the post but the title?
My response would be, if they want to expand capacity, they should. If they don’t want to, they shouldn’t.
These are businesses - they have employees. They need to make money or at least cover costs.
If they change their business model, that’s up to them - not me.
As a consumer, I’d decide whether or not I’d partake.
Rice is expanding their size. In theory that would provide more access - but maybe they’ll have more applicants and it won’t really.
They decided to grow their size - and if it works for them, it works for me.
If it doesn’t, I’d give my money to someone else.
So a whole bunch of students get overly optimistic at a “test optional” policy forced by the pandemic, flood a school with applications, and it becomes an “institutional failure”?
A college should base its capacity on how many students decide to fill out their application form?
What a ridiculous premise.
Agree with @RichInPitt.
My reading of the referenced Jeff Selingo article suggests an underlying assumption that more applicants are applying to US colleges & universities. Are there more applicants or just more applications by fewer applicants ?
Unique apps were up 1% on the common app platform (as of January) but that doesn’t give us visibility to app volume thru Coalition app, or schools’ own apps. Number of unique apps is projected to be essentially flat until 2026, and then start dropping due to lower number of HS students at that point.
Here is some other common app data broken out by school type and region:
I agree with the point made by @Publisher about the need to focus on the indirect public support given to these elite private institutions. At the end of Selingo’s article he links to a 2015 piece he wrote about that very issue: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/04/06/are-harvard-yale-and-stanford-really-public-universities/
It’s true that private and public universities have different missions. But it’s also true that there is something perverse about every year celebrating the dropping admissions rates, as though the measure of success should be how many people you keep out. And it is part of ASU’s mission statement to create broad public access to learners at all levels. ASU’s Mission Statement says: “ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed . . .” ASU Mission & Goals | Office of the President.
Do you think that state flagship Honors Colleges (ASU Barrett, Ole Miss, Univ. of South Carolina, Univ. of Alabama (both Honors College & University Fellows), & Honors Programs (such as that at the University of Georgia Honors Program & Foundation Fellows) are designed to compete with elite private National Universities ?
It would be interesting to read the mission statements of various state public flagship honors colleges & programs.
Plus the premise of the article in the first place is flawed…that we have to educate more kids in these “best” schools in order for them to succeed.
All but one director of the NASA stations from the big ones like Johnson Space Center and JPL to the less known like Armstrong at Edwards were educated at public schools, most of them random, no name ones. The lone holdout…RPI. No Ivy, no Stanford, no MIT, no Caltech.
Look at where Fortune 500 CEOs went to undergrad…all over the Podunk U map.
This reflects a couple of things. First that there are plenty of intelligent people at public flagships. Second, that for most of the people that go to Stanford, MIT, or CalTech, becoming a government employee is not high on their priority list even if they do some pretty cool work. A large percent of the engineers and CS majors at those schools end up in startups, hedge funds, the FAANG companies, or something like Tesla or SpaceX.
@hebegebe this was definitely our son’s take on public sector employment. It was not low on his list, it was nowhere close to being on his list.