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.