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Sakky while I agree with you now that at this moment the administration's views toward the undergrad are that the quality is expendable as long as the state is happy
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<p>Sofla, right there in that last phrase, that was one of our points of contention. You say that the administration keeps expanding the student body to keep the state happy. We don't actually know that. It's possible that that is the reason why the administration keeps expanding the school. But we just don't know. You may remember in the previous thread that I told a plausible story that perhaps the administration is just engaged in empire-building, i.e. administrators want to bring in as many students as they can because it makes their resumes look better because they can say that they provided services to more people. Or, perhaps they simply do so as a matter of habit: they've always expanded before, and so they continue to do so now (never discount the importance of organizational inertia when explaining organizational behavior). Or it could be that we just have lots of individual administrators who simply (wrongly) believe that constantly expanding the school is the 'right thing to do'. For example, perhaps they truly believe that "access" (meaning lower selectivity) is more important than quality. Or perhaps it is simply that they themselves weren't able to get into Cal when they were young and they're still ticked off about it and want to lower Cal's selectivity.</p>
<p>The point is, we just don't know why the administration keeps increasing the population. Hence, state pressure and state funding may not be the driving force, which would mean that a larger endowment would not stop expansion. We just don't know. All we know is that, for some reason, the administration keeps expanding the population.</p>