Weighing Expansion as More Top Students Clamor at Ivy Gates

It's good to see top universities expanding (or at least considering expanding) enrollments. 

The recent soul-searching is not just triggered by remorse. These colleges have been earnestly trying to open themselves to more kinds of students — from low income or black, Hispanic and Native American backgrounds, from foreign countries or remote states — yet have been trying to stay the same congenial size. As with a person who wants to eat rich foods while remaining the same trim weight, the zero-sum game has proved untenable.

Perhaps no motive is more gingerly discussed then the need to preserve so-called legacies.

Claire Van Ummersen, a vice president of the American Council on Education, pointed out that expanding enrollment would allow many colleges to continue to diversify but also let them keep admitting the same numbers of children of alumni, who contribute a large proportion of the colleges’ revenue and believe their families should retain that legacy advantage.

Speaking of legacies, if I were tsar, this favoring of the most priviledged students on the planet would be banned.  It's totally un-American.  I know the very practical, pragmatic reasons schools do it -- but that doesn't change the immorality of it.  My three daughters will be legacies at Brown and Harvard.  They've had every conceivable advantage in life -- and then they should get an edge at getting in to Brown and Harvard?!  How absurd is THAT!?

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Weighing Expansion as More Top Students Clamor at Ivy Gates

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: December 26, 2007

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/education/26education.html

In the mid-1960s, when William R. Fitzsimmons was a student at Harvard, the college took in a freshman class of roughly 1,550, including students at Radcliffe, which it would eventually absorb. In the four decades since, the population of the United States has ballooned by two-thirds, applications to Harvard have tripled and Mr. Fitzsimmons has ascended to the job of dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, but this year’s freshman class is only about 125 students larger than when he was a student.

That reluctance to grow has been true of many selective colleges that want to sustain their genteel scale. But with ever more students pressing at their gates, admissions officers find themselves having to reject what Anthony W. Marx, Amherst’s president, calls “astonishing applicants.”

The most elite institutions are accepting historic lows of 10 percent of applicants, and next year the sieve should become excruciatingly finer with applications from baby boomers’ offspring expected to crest.

At least four of the nation’s most exclusive institutions — Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Amherst — are either modestly expanding enrollments for the first time since the late 1960s (when some began admitting women) or have task forces studying the matter.