Yale on the Move
In the Times, Peter Applebome writes about Yale president Rick Levin's push to add two residential colleges to the undergraduate population. Levin frames the idea as partly intended to relieve the pressure of the application process.
...after Yale expanded to its current size in the 1960s, there were roughly 4,000 to 5,000 applicants a year for 1,300 positions in the freshman class. The size of the freshman class has remained about the same, but now there are some 20,000 applicants, including a growing number of international ones, plus all the other desired niches of minority students, athletes, children of alums and the rest. “Expansion could help relieve those pressures and create more opportunities for students who are just ordinary, extremely brilliant and talented students who don’t have any of those other connections,” Dr. Levin said. “We have astonishing educational resources here. If we can educate more students and give them exposure to the opportunities here, I think we can make an even more substantial contribution to the nation and the world.”
Applebome points out that Princeton too is enlarging the size of its undergraduate population, and the Yale Daily News has a nice piece about enlarging campuses at Yale*, Columbia, Princeton and Harvard. Surely increasing the size of the undergraduate population is being considered at Harvard, but is there any public debate about the idea? Not that I know of.
Dr. Levin says there’s something perverse about the current system, where “prestige and reputation tend to depend on how many students you reject.”
This is true, of course, and good of Levin to say so. But a couple caveats: Yale had some opportunity to calm the application waters a bit by terminating its early admissions program, but has so far declined.
Moreover, isn't there a sense in which saying that more admissions will ease admission pressures is like Robert Moses saying that we need more highways to ease traffic? If you build it, they will come.
Nonetheless, what with this article and the implosion of MIT admissions chief Marilee Jones, I sense we're on the verge of a backlash against admissions insanity. This might be one backlash that Harvard wants to get in front of.....
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P.S. Incidentally, I recently met a current student at the Yale School of Organization and Management. We agreed that New Haven was becoming a very pleasant place in which to live....
