I probably shouldn’t be too pro-Yale here, considering I am about to enter the formal employ of Harvard, but bravo to my alma mater for expanding its undergraduate population by about 16 percent and adding two new residential colleges to its current twelve.

It’s one of the unfortunate realities of higher education that, while the number of Ivy-qualified applicants has soared, and the scale of economic resources to those universities has skyrocketed, the number of spots available in each year’s freshman class has remained largely constant. (Here, I’m using “Ivy” in the broad sense, including the Stanfords, MITs, Cal Techs, et cetera.)

When I applied to Yale in 1993, 22 percent of applicants were accepted. This past year, it was around eight percent. In 1993, Yale had an endowment of around $3 billion. Now it’s over $22 billion.

I’m all for Yale having more money. (Its money manager, David Swensen is a longtime crabwalk.com fave.) But if its mission is the education of talented people — or, more broadly, the advancement of human knowledge — why not use some of that mad cash on giving more people access to a Yale education, instead of happily becoming an ever more exclusive club year after year?

There are a host of culprits for the institutional resistance to expand, but high on the list is the damnable U.S. News ranking of top schools that comes out each year. Among the mathematical factors those rankings ding schools for are acceptance rate, average SAT/ACT scores, and average spending per pupil. Each of those is negatively affected by expansion; schools interested in maximizing their U.S. News ranking are encouraged to stay small and exclusive. It’s another reason I give Yale credit for expanding — they’ll probably be penalized for it in the public arena.

Harvard, of course, has the only endowment larger than Yale’s, at around $40 billion, and while it certainly has expanded in myriad ways over the years, its undergraduate population has been essentially stable over the past few decades. (Starting a couple weeks from now, that endowment will be paying my salary, so I should probably keep quiet.) Its impressive (and still newish) president Drew Faust used her commencement speech last week to defend its epic scale, particularly from those who want to tax it.

Brad DeLong, himself a Harvard grad, had some interesting thoughts on the matter a few weeks ago. And I do have to endorse his concluding thoughts on “[t]he question of how Harvard should expand if indeed it should expand: it doesn’t seem to be nearly as good as the small liberal arts colleges or even its rivals Yale and Princeton at undergraduate education.”

08 June 2008

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