Dartmouth in 1950 was an all mens college that enrolled less than 2,500. Women weren't allowed until the 1970s.

Dartmouth today has 6,700 students of all races, genders, religions.

Enrollment numbers can and do change, but it is much harder and slower to change something that is physically and resource constrained than it is to change policy.

I thought we could fix the world by writing things on offical looking paper though, you are saying we cant just vote that everyone gets a free Lamborghini?

There's long been this mythos around Dartmouth in the vein of Daniel Webster's "It's a small college but there are those of us who love it" when in fact it's a research university even if it at least clings to the idea that it's a rural, athletically-oriented New England liberal arts college.

Harvard, Yale, etc. could set a particular standard and increase enrollment to accept everyone who met that standard and (if logistics allowed) that could possibly be a good thing. In some ways the massive online classes seem to be piloting this idea.

However, if you go spend some time teaching at a community college, I don't think you'll walk away with the idea that somehow getting all those students pushed into a university would improve things for the community college students or for the ability to educate kids at the university.

Increasing enrollment might be beneficial, but past a certain point it is going to be detrimental to education.

Increasing enrollment means increasing faculty.

Maybe controversial but I really believe this lowers overall standards. You just can't find enough faculty to meet the high standards.

Look what happened when tech blew up - they hired like crazy. I'd argue the overall level of programming skill went down.

I can’t find the study, but all the inflation in tuition can be basically be traced back to everything but increasing educational staffing (in other words all the incremental spending goes to new new sports complexes, administrators, etc.)…

> You just can't find enough faculty to meet the high standards.

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Many/most PhDs who want a faculty position will never be able to get one because the availability of jobs is so low. There's really no shortage of potential faculty members.

Elite institutions do not exist to give more people access to anything.

And where that is a goal, there is clearly a point where you have to draw a line based on capacity, student:teacher ratios, etc.

You can't enroll infinite people.

No, but surely you can enroll more people.

I can't imagine theres a dearth of physical space or qualified educators near any university. The fact that they are not growing to accommodate the demand has always boggled my mind...

Space isn’t the limiter, teaching hours via faculty are. The most popular universities, research ones, have faculty that teach only a few undergrad classes a year. Changing those popular universities into ones more focused on undergrad education would make them less popular.

Germany might be a better model where barebones education is easily accessible. They leave much more up to students: your homework might not be looked at and your grade depends solely on a final exam. No student centers or leafy campuses either.

>Space isn’t the limiter, teaching hours via faculty are.

The glut of un/under employed PHds suggest that the limited faculty is an artificial limit. Schools could easily hire more faculty and expand their undergrad programs if they wanted to.

They see their half percent acceptance rate as something that makes them special.

It's an artificial limit that keeps up the quality. It's the reason nightclubs have bouncers.

There are a lot of great PhD students who will never be able to get a faculty position. It bears notice that the number of faculty spots has being going down for over a decade.

Exactly.

There's no shortage of people who can teach, there is only a shortage of a willingness to pay them to do so.

Your popularity goes down if too many of your classes are taught by PhD students and post docs. Overhead is brutal, and research grants are limited, so hiring more faculty is tough. If they just hire enough professors to satisfy demand, they would be on the hook for paying most of their salaries since they are unlikely to get funding. Hiring a bunch of pure teaching faculty is a no go since that turns the flag ship into a less popular non-research university.

In the humanities at least, tenure-track hiring numbers are down about 50% from pre-2008 era, while the supply of humanity PhDs is broadly stable.

The problem is that the university departments are less willing to hire the faculty that they once did, and that largely comes down to university administrations having decided that paying for anything non-STEM (and non-sports, I guess) isn't worth it anymore.

Research universities don’t pay most of their faculty’s paychecks, research grants do. Research funding agencies are more to blame for this than universities, and it also reflects more STEM demand in the job market, why encourage creating a bunch of graduates who can’t get jobs?

That’s the supply / costs side of it.

The demand / revenue side might be another obstacle, especially if the easy money environment for school loans evaporates

> They leave much more up to students ... No student centers or leafy campuses either.

Sounds like a community college.

Many things fail at scale.

Not sure if you're referring to Dartmouth or universities in general. For state universities, I think they do increase enrollment all the time. University of Michigan, for example, increased enrollment by 25% in the last decade.

What did you have in mind?

I tend to think there is an unspoken fear that if it became more accessible it loses its prestige

> I tend to think there is an unspoken fear that if it became more accessible it loses its prestige

That might be a concern for Dartmouth and the Ivys. But for US state schools, not so much. And those generally provide a very high value:cost product.

College already lost its prestige since today everyone who wants to attend a college can do it, there are free spots every year. Now only specific colleges are prestigious not colleges in general like before.

Also means that the "just increase the spots" already happened as well, there is no lack of spots today, just a lack of prestigious spots. But not everyone can get into prestigious positions, by definition prestigious has to be something special and not for everyone.

Related, men mass opting out of academia is going to erode it's privileged independently of the other factors listed - https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-...

but state schools are already massive? They are certainly already going with that approach.

> but state schools are already massive? They are certainly already going with that approach.

Sort of.

Sure, the school itself is huge, but often times that means that worthless majors[1] like Psychology and English are open, but more valuable majors are often limited.

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1. Worthless in the sense of earning potential with a Bachelors

I don’t know why this comment got downvoted.

It’s an objective truth that there are more elite students than there are positions in these schools. It’s also true that schools have absolutely exploded in administration size. They just haven’t hired more teachers.

Schools can’t double capcity overnight. But they currently aren’t making student body growth a goal. They prefer to keep it small and be extremely selective and exclusionary.

The flip side to this is that undergrad doesn’t matter. These elite schools don’t actually provide an elite education. They merely serve as a talent filter.

Why would we want more people taking student loans to get a questionable degree?

Trade schools make a lot more sense for most. Get a good job and you can self study from a position of safety...

Dartmouth actually has a pretty unique program that allowed them to increase enrollment substantially. Basically, every sophomore stays around for the summer semester, but takes off either fall or spring to do an internship or something. The sophomore summer is a great bonding experience for the students, and the program allows the school to enroll significantly more students than they would be able to house otherwise. To my knowledge, no other similar school has a program like this.

The Dartmouth plan (D-plan was basically a way to introduce co-education without reducing the number of male students. Not a bad thing at all but that was pretty much the impetus.