<p>Since their student to teacher ratios are so low, why is it that selective colleges don't admit more students? I mean Yale says that they just have too many qualified students. They stated that directly on my rejection letter. So why don't they admit more of them?</p>
<p>The schools would recieve more money. More money means more to spend on improvements to their programs. Why don't they do this? Or is the "you're qualified and we really want you" statement a lie?</p>
<p>What is there to lose, Other than commmunication skills in English departments? I mean these schools have such a low ration that we hear of multiple students having independant studies in their subjects. How do schools pay for that and justify not filling that independent study with a few more students.?</p>
<p>Yale, for one, has a slight housing crunch even now, and because of the economy they’re delaying the planned construction of two new residential colleges. So eventually they will indeed admit more students, but first they have to have the space to house them.</p>
<p>Because they want to keep a low faculty: student ratio. Accepting more students also would change the type of college that they are, and accepting more students would cost them more money since what students – including full pay ones-- pay for their college education doesn’t cover the entire costs of their education.</p>
<p>"I mean these schools have such a low ration that we hear of multiple students having independant studies in their subjects. "</p>
<p>Their having classes with as few as one student in them is what makes those schools so special. For instance, Harvard guarantees that no class will be canceled because of lack of enough students. As long as students can find a faculty member willing to teach them, students can take an independent study in any class they wish. That’s the kind of thing that makes Harvard great and differentiates it from other colleges.</p>
<p>Where do you think those extra students would live (schools have neither infinite land nor infinite buildings)? Where do you think their financial aid would come from? What do you think the impact would be on student advising if each advisor suddenly had a bunch of extra students tacked onto their duties? Would the university medical and counseling systems be able to accommodate such an influx?</p>
<p>Universities don’t have infinite resources.</p>
<p>To give you an example that will explain why:</p>
<p>Swarthmore College spends $81,000 per student per year, not including financial aid. Sticker price is $47,500 or so. The actual cash money received from an average student (after financial aid) is $32,000.</p>
<p>Therefore, on average, they are giving you an $81,000 product and charging you $32,000. You can see that giving this same deal to more students would be hideously expensive (once you are past the point of needing to hire more faculty, build more dorms, etc.).</p>
<p>This $50,000 per student discount is funded, largely, but what was a million dollar per student endowment. Adding more students dilutes the endowment and undermines the quality of the school.</p>
<p>NOTE: adding more students only generates additional revenues to the extent that you can do so without building more dorms, hiring more faculty.</p>
<p>As others have said, it’s a matter of physical space. Yale hopes to have a class of 1250 each year because that’s what the campus can handle. </p>
<p>After WW2, lots of US colleges expanded their enrollments tremendously for returning veterans using the GI bill. G Bush senior’s young family lived in a quonsett hut along with 100s of other students and their families near Yale Bowl when he attended. Think of that! But that was an extraordinary time.</p>
<p>Yale and some other schools have expansion plans to address the exact question you ask. However it takes time and money.</p>
<p>Physical space is definitely a consideration, but here’s another one:</p>
<p>It costs Harvard about $50,000 per year (maybe more by now) to educate an undergraduate (not taking into account room and board). Tuition is something like $34,000 if I remember correctly. That means $16,000 per student comes out of endowment or other resources. </p>
<p>If private schools increased their enrollment, then they would have to either further tax their endowments, raise tuition, or decrease the resources they provide each student. Any of those things could compromise the institutions’ missions and/or lower the quality of education.</p>
<p>I’m beginning to see, but the idea is at least feasible if the government were to spend more money towards education. The money could be used to counter the cost of building dorms and taking money out of endowments. I’m sure you can see the possible positive effects of gathering together even more smart kids than before to tackle the world’s problems.</p>
<p>If there are more students, then either more professors are needed, or larger classrooms needed to handle larger classes. If there are more professors, space is needed for their offices, and more rooms are needed to accommodate the increased number of classes. For the larger lecture classes, more TAs or grad students are needed, which means increasing the size of the grad school. In science classes, more labs will be needed, as well as all the lab equipment. </p>
<p>All this can be done, but it takes money and can’t happen overnight. Columbia, for example, has been trying to expand its campus for years.</p>
<p>“I’m sure you can see the possible positive effects of gathering together even more smart kids than before to tackle the world’s problems.”</p>
<p>At any college, there are “smart kids”. I don’t think that all of the smart kids need to be at the same universities.</p>
<p>And college students aren’t going to be tackling the world’s problems while in college anyway – except in dorm bull sessions. It’s not as if think tanks are made up of college students.</p>
<p>“The money could be used to counter the cost of building dorms and taking money out of endowments.” Or the money can be given to states so the publics can be more affordable to the common person right? I don’t see anyone proposing to give $ to private schools with billions in endowment when the state univ down the road is having to raise tuition from $3000 to $3500. OP: you must remember that the rarefied air that most CC denizens breathe is not the same air that most 17-20 year olds in the country who are hoping for a decent college experience are breathing.</p>
<p>You have no idea how fiercely protective the people living around a university are of their neighborhood. My own university has been in litigation and arbitration for the better of a decade now trying to build a few more dorms (none has even begun to break ground). It’s insanely difficult with zone restrictions and angry neighbors. Even renovating a building requires a lot of compromises and agreements to not work beyond two in the afternoon, which is understandable because who wants a jack hammer pounding away on a beautiful summer afternoon.</p>
<p>"because if they became less selective, they wouldn’t be selective, now would they? "</p>
<p>lol that’s silly</p>
<p>“And college students aren’t going to be tackling the world’s problems while in college anyway – except in dorm bull sessions. It’s not as if think tanks are made up of college students.”</p>
<p>I can see this actually. We hear a lot from MIT or Caltech though. Maybe they’re just given more authority in papers? Thanks, if any mods like they can close this thread, I’m satisfied.</p>
<p>If you notice, most universities rank high say top 20 have a very small campus and student body. Though Stanford, one ranked high with a large campus but small student body. If Stanford was to increase it’s student body, not only would it require buildings/ land to support but high teachers to keep it’s prestige about the same.</p>
<p>OP - I think the number one biggest reason is that the faculty:student ratio actually isn’t that high. It’s tricky - you probably think it looks low compared to your high school’s ratio, or maybe compared to ratios at prestigious liberal arts colleges. However, in high school each teacher teaches 4-5 courses a semester (so lets say 9 credits). At liberal arts schools, proffs teach 2-3 courses a semester, so about 5 credits (and they only teach to an undergrad school, not graduate schools).</p>
<p>But Ivies and universities are research-based vehicles, professors generally only have to teach 1-2 credits over the entire year, and they offer sabbaticals for research far more than liberal art school teachers (and of course high school teachers never get sabbaticals). So in reality, large class sizes is actually easily the biggest problem that faces the Ivies. Whereas schools like Swarthmore and Williams are able to regularly offer classes of 6-15 people even for Intro classes, some of the biggest complaints that come out of Harvard and Yale are too big lecture classes with disinterest professors, and not enough small discussion-based classes. And this isn’t some small problem, the administration works frantically to try and fix this. Lately schools have decided to offer “freshmen seminars” to stop the flow of angry freshmen who are stuck in all lecture classes for their frosh courses.
So, the statistic is misleading. Ivies actually have a problem with large class sizes.</p>