<p>The number of applications is going up to the tippy-top universities. The number of bodies in the seats has been going up, too, but not nearly as much, and it has probably flattened out. Also, not so much in the universities that are getting all those applications, because they rarely add new seats, and they can’t fit any more bodies into the seats they have. In the part of the country where you live – the Northeast/Middle Atlantic – the number of bodies in the seats has definitely been going down, and is projected to keep going down, probably over most of the rest of your lifetime.</p>
<p>That said . . . .</p>
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<li> Of course it’s hard to open up a new university. Yale is spending over $600 million to allow it to expand enrollment by 200 students per class. Harvard has $2-$3 billion of plans to move some of its activities across the river to Allston. Cornell has committed $2 billion to building a tech campus on Roosevelt Island, with hundreds of millions worth of additional contribution from the City of New York in the form of land and cash. And none of those is anything like starting up a new university, faculty and all.</li>
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<p>Of course, you CAN start up a new university, faculty and all. For example – and definitely happening during your lifetime – the University of California at Merced, which started enrolling undergraduates in 2006. They’ve done that on the relative cheap – only about $2 billion. It took about 25 years from conception to opening. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It has a couple of hundred graduate students, and fewer than a couple of hundred “ladder” faculty (i.e., non-adjuncts), so it’s not all that impressive (yet) as a research university.</p>
<p>And then, of course, there is the University of Phoenix, without a doubt one of the most important educational developments of our time. It’s a for-profit business, enormously successful, largely virtual, educating hundreds of thousands of students. It is about 35 years old, and seems to have cost about $600 million (over several decades) to create, at least to the point where it could fund itself out of operations.</p>
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<li><p>As I am sure you are aware, reputation and branding means a lot in the university world. So instead of trying to create new universities from scratch, most of what has been happening is existing universities expanding. Maybe someone else can find great statistics on this covering the last decade; I couldn’t do it easily.</p></li>
<li><p>What you probably really want is more seats in top-quality universities. Apart from something like Olin, which is really an outlier (and not really a top university yet), this has been happening in two ways:</p></li>
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<p>First, top-shelf universities have been expanding their undergraduate class sizes. The Ivy League had a huge expansion in the 1970s – not coincidentally, when all the formerly single-sex institutions went co-ed. Since then, not so much, but Princeton has increased its class by about a third over the past decade, the University of Chicago has expanded slightly more than that, and as noted Yale is nearing the finish line on a 15% expansion.</p>
<p>Second, the ranks of top-shelf universities has been expanding rapidly, too. A generation ago, colleges like Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern, or Washington University in St. Louis were not really seen as equivalent in quality to the Ivy League colleges, or the Seven Sisters, or Williams/Amherst/Wesleyan. Now there’s no question that those schools can be mentioned in the same breath with the traditional Northeastern academic powerhouses, and Stanford is at or near the pinnacle of prestige. If all you do is look at “HYPS”, taking into account the inclusion of Stanford (which was by no means obvious 20 years ago, at the undergraduate level), the number of newly enrolled students/year at the most prestigious private universities has gone from under 4,000 to almost 6,000 per year.</p>