<p>I've read that Northeastern has decreased it's student body size to ~2800 from past decades to create smaller, stronger student body. However, I've recently visited and my friend said that Northeastern has become increasingly crowded over the past years, especially the international population (not blaming them but merely citing an example).</p>
<p>According to this site, the entering fall class of 2010 far exceeds the ~2800 the university had said it hoped to enroll. If my numbers are correct, the entering class reached almost 4000 new freshman. Is this going to be a future problem (overcrowding, too many students than expected, less personal contact with professors, etc.)? Although Northeastern is still a large private school, one of the reasons I chose it was to escape the overcrowding crisis of public schools.</p>
<p>I can’t really answer the main question, however I can tell you that even with a large student body, the problems, for us, students, can easily be ‘fixed’. As you mentioned, it might seem like it’s harder to reach out to a teacher, however in my experience, I come from a small school but we often had to select at least 2 year-round courses which were like lecture rooms literally like five hundred or more in a class (nasty I know lol), and the most serious students still were the ones benefiting more from the class, even though the environment wasn’t ideal.
The thing is, and mainly with college, you have to make what you want out of it. In my school these people, the ‘serious students’, sat in the same spot every class and they were the last ones to leave, they would talk to the professors and even schedule a meeting so that they got extra help. These are the same things you would have to do even in a class of 15 students.
Also, I know someone that transferred to NU a couple of years ago, and even though he wasn’t there for freshman year, he says that his classes don’t exceed an excessive amount of students, so don’t worry about that.</p>
<p>Look at the map again. The US map is enrolling “freshman”. The international map is “undergraduate”. I think the international map is the total enrollment of international students at NU, not just freshman.</p>
<p>I agree witrh wewsy’s interpretation of that map page. Northeastern is working to increase on-campus housing. A new residence hall housing 720 students will begin construction this summer. There are two reasons for this: to increase the sense of community by having more students living on-campus and pressure from the City of Boston to reduce the number of students living off-campus in surrounding neighborhoods. Increasing the size of the freshman class would work against this goal. </p>
<p>Another reason why Northeastern would not increase the size of the freshman class is to maintain the rising stats of entering freshmen. More freshmen=lower or stagnant admission stats=lower USNWR ranking.</p>
<p>Yeah, the map is definitely deceiving. Northeastern is big on their international stuff lately, so I’m not suprised they made the map look like we have way more international students than we do.</p>
<p>I’ve never felt Northeastern crowded. In fact I’m often surprised about how few people there are in certain groups. For example they said that there were about 30 (maybe 40) economics majors in my entering class (no idea how many stuck around), and they were absolutely shocked about how many people there were… meanwhile I thought that was incrediably small compared to my friends studying economics at other schools.</p>