<p>I don’t know. But with the advent of online courses that cost next to nothing to produce, why spend money on bricks and mortar?</p>
<p>My money would be on hooks becoming far more important and academic strength becoming a less important criteria.</p>
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<p>Take a look at this:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr12-02.pdf”>https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr12-02.pdf</a></p>
<p>For most of the nation’s population, the Ivies and their peers are by far the best educational value going. For a low EFC family, they may well be the only POSSIBLE educational option.</p>
<p>Yale is expanding. They are building two new residential colleges and hope to have them completed by 2017. The plan is to expand by 15% over four years.</p>
<p>agree with Elliemom. Population is growing, the pool of top students is growing even if the percentage is still the same. Thus, harder to get in. Yale’s steps will help decrease some of the difficulty. Will quality suffer though?</p>
<p>I agree with the OP. Our oldest (twins) graduated HS in’02, another in '08 and the youngest last year. It is not just the top “elite” schools that have become much more selective. The CA UC system admissions is a whole new game compared to 11 years ago. Kids who graduated with our older kids and attended some of the UC’s would never gain admittance now. One factor is that Calif. schools are admitting more OOS and internationals to bolster the state budget. We fortunately kept up with admissions and planned applications accordingly for our youngest. Parents of kids who graduated a few years ago that we know just don’t get how much more difficult it is now. </p>
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<p>Just some anecdotal support. D’s good friend (we live in the midwest) is choosing between UCLA and UCB. She’s been accepted to UIUC, but prefers the UC schools “for so many reasons.” (I don’t think this winter helped.)</p>
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If we use Yale as an example, its expansion is slated to be $600M, one of the costliest building projects in New England. Just so it can increase its freshman class by a few hundred each year.</p>
<p>“If we use Yale as an example, its expansion is slated to be $600M, one of the costliest building projects in New England. Just so it can increase its freshman class by a few hundred each year.”</p>
<p>Doesn’t seem worth it economically to increase annual student population about c300. I wonder what else a $600M investment could buy for Yale. </p>
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<p>If one accepts the oft-quoted opinion that the elite schools could do away with their entire accepted class at a stroke and replace them with an equally talented class several times over–which I do–and that is coupled with the fact that there is a vast dearth of tenure-track jobs for superb academics trained in the best graduate departments (not to mention the numbers of potentially valuable scholars who are discouraged from entering the field at all, thanks to the dim job prospects), I would say no, quality is not likely to suffer in the least.</p>
<p>A real consideration in Yale’s planning is the physical expansion – and how it would affect student interaction. Many committees discussed a wide swath of concerns & issues. Plus, faculty expansion is not a zero sum game. People also aware that by opening more positions, they know that they are potentially hurting the so-called “2nd tier” institutions being culled of their instructors. The expansion has been discussed/analyzed/revised ad nauseum. BTW: one donor gave $250M towards the build. Largest sgle donation in Yale history.</p>
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<p>These highly desired schools (HYPS etc.) cannot expand to the point where they can meaningfully satisfy the high demand for their education/experience without changing their essential nature. Futhermore, the scarcity value of the degree is an important aspect of its desirability. These schools have no motivation to damage the prestige of the brand. Luxury goods are not for the masses and never can be by definition. Fortunately there are many places where a good student can get a good education, so it is not necessary for economic opportunity or social justice for HYPS and similar to expand in size.</p>
<p>Also, need-blind/meets-full-need schools are able to do this because they have huge endowments, but even these huge endowments are fragile. They can’t offer financial aid to every excellent student with need who applies. If they want to remain “bargains” for some, they have to be inaccessible to many.</p>
<p>Another concern of mine is what are we teaching and reinforcing with kids these days? Perfection seems to be the standard, and even that doesn’t guarantee admission, but that is a daunting task for anyone these days, more so for a young person. </p>
<p>“May I ask, with demand from students qualified to fill seats in the “top” tier of colleges, why have those schools not expanded supply (seats)? How would an expansion harm those top institutions if the stats of the applicant pool are so high?”</p>
<p>Schools can’t just wave a magic wand and cause dorms, classrooms, administrative offices, etc. to appear. Expanding in any significant way takes time and planning. And then, what if they decided to expand and then things changed? Some people believe that our country is experiencing a student loan “bubble,” much like the stock market and housing bubbles that recently burst. Those thousands upon thousands of students clamoring for admission and the chance to pay $200K tuition with borrowed money, may disappear someday soon, and then what does a school with several half-finished new buildings do?</p>
<p>Much safer to stick with what you have to admit is working well for them now – keep the student body the same size, let the selectiveness of the school increase.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if international applicants have also increased over the past decade or so? Or is the increase all coming from US students?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2013/2013-11-11-Open-Doors-Data”>http://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2013/2013-11-11-Open-Doors-Data</a></p>
<p>According to the Institute of International Education: “There are now 40 percent more international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities than a decade ago, and the rate of increase has risen steadily for the past three years.”</p>
<p>The press release also says that during the same time the number of US students who studied abroad increased by 3%. </p>
<p>Not sure how that breaks down into raw numbers, but I’m pretty sure the data is available if you follow a link in the link.</p>
<p>I wonder if both private and public colleges and universities in the U.S. are going to increasingly rely on full-pay international students to prop up their finances as the U.S. middle class stops being able to pay for high tuition.</p>
<p>There’s been some indication that the UC system has already begun to do that with OOS tuition.<br>
This was just the first article I found when I did a quick Google…there are lots more that discuss the issue: </p>
<p><a href=“http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/education&id=9078502”>http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/education&id=9078502</a></p>
<p>Everytime Harvard has tried to expand there has been a big NIMBY hoopla from the neighbors. Currently the campus is basically walkable for undergrads. It would be a very different place if they expanded.</p>
<p>FWIW, I think the key is not expanding a few especially popular schools (and that’s what this admissions percentage competition basically is all about—popularity, not necessarily excellence). The key is expanding potential applicants’ consideration set. We see that happening already, with some “second tier” schools now experiencing a surge in applications as students who might not have looked beyond a narrow range of namebrand elites being forced to “trade down” to prestigious private universities outside of the NE and CA (like Vandy, Emory, or WashU), strong public universities, and LACs that actually focus on undergraduate teaching. There are a lot of excellent options out there for good students, they just may not be the same options that their parents or older siblings had.</p>
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I think this is the key factor. There is much more of a national (and even international) “market” than there used to be. In my opinion, the top tier has gotten a lot bigger, with schools that used to be considered primarily regional, now playing a role in the national market–WashU is a prime example of this, but there are plenty of others. To put it another way, where do the 10,000 most qualified high school graduates go to college now, as opposed to 30 years ago? I think that’s changed a lot–the change in their qualifications matters less–although I think that there are more highly qualified kids from small cities and towns than there used to be as well.</p>