Sun 1 May 2005
This article (which features a quote from Dick Nesbitt) makes me really, really glad I applied to college at the nadir of the college-bound population (1993). There is no way I would have gotten into anyplace like Williams today. I very much hope that Williams overlooks these sort of summer programs that are, clearly, opportunities only a very wealthy family could afford, and are probably related more to the initative and resources of parents than anything else. I also hope that Williams still admits that occasional kid who, while smart and motivated, also finds time to actually enjoy high school and experience growing up w/out a laser-beam like focus on college admissions.
More generally, I think it’s interesting that the population of qualified college age kids is exploding, and the resources of the top colleges and universities have also exploded, but with very few exceptions, their undergrad populations have remained essentially stagnant. I have heard that Princeton is increasing its undergrad population, but that’s about all. I personally feel that it makes sense to provide an opportunity to attend a place like Williams to as many people as possible, without changing the character of the place. I’d imagine that Williams could someday (with the construction of one or two new dorms and the hiring of just a few more faculty members) easily accomodate entering classes of closer to 600 kids a year, while still maintaining a close-knit liberal arts community. The campus is very spread out so a few extra kids here or there would barely be noticed, and the school keeps building enormous new facilities that dwarfed existing edifices, for sciences, theater, dance, student life, the library, and art — why not admit about 10-15 more kids focusing on each of these categories each year, plus about 20 more low-income kids from Questbridge type programs? I think that would really diversity the campus without hurting Williams academic standing, given the tremendous growth in qualified applicants over the past (and the coming) decade. I think with a little more aggressive marketing, Williams could easily get around 7000 applicants a year, so its U.S. News numbers wouldn’t even suffer (and in fact, the average S.A.T.’s would probably go up in light of a lower percentage of tips in the incoming class).
May 1st, 2005 at 10:05 am
We differ on the college size target. I think Williams should shrink back to 1,800, which was its target in the mid-70s. With co-education pending, a college task force looked at the college’s infrastructure and decided Williams could increase its enrollment by 50% without undue hardship. (This was part of a stunt to get co-education going. Williams was worried about alums complaining that their sons couldn’t get in now that the college was admitting women. So Williams kept the number of men in a class the same (300) and added 150 women. Then, over the course of less than a decade, the college made the ratios equal.)
Over the years, the number crept up by 200, I’m assuming to get the extra bassoon player or Indian/Swedish student (don’t laugh, I met him) necessary to add diversity. At the same time, the college has run into dorm overcrowding from time to time, remaking the living rooms in Mission as bedrooms at one point. In short, I think the seams are bursting a bit, and Williams would do well to take away the strain.
While extending a Williams education to a larger group is admirable, the need never goes away. Once Williams is at 2,600, how about rounding the number up to 3,000? After that, how about 5,000?
I think the greater need is to superbly serve the students who are admitted. Besides, if you’re worried about staying at the top of the U.S. News and World Report slippery slope, decreasing the size of next year’s class is a fast way to increase the teacher/student ratio without going to the expense of hiring additional teachers. Let’s see, we save money and the education gets better. Not a bad thing….
May 1st, 2005 at 10:11 am
Ashok!
May 1st, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Jeff need not worry. As Nesbitt’s comment in the article (and recent books like Admissions Confidential and The Gatekeepers) make clear, admission officers are smart. They know what these programs are and who pays for them. Indeed, they are likely to get several applications from students in the same program!
Such shenanigans do not increase your chances of getting into Williams. If anything, junkets with Daddy’s Am-Ex probably hurt them.
May 1st, 2005 at 6:01 pm
Here’s an interesting discussion paper on college growth by Eph Econ Prof. Gordon Winston.
He presents the argument that, because net tuition (after financial aid discounts) represents such a small fraction of the cost per student, each additional student actually costs the college money. He further argues that NOT GROWING may actually be the prefered strategy.
Some incremental growth can be accommodated by the natural increase in endowment spending, so you would expect a college to grow by a few percent a year. Given that Williams’ enrollment has actually declined over the last decade, it appears to me that Schapiro takes Winston’s theory very seriously. In “inflation adjusted students”, Williams has actually shrunk the student body quite a bit over the last decade.
Here’s a bit of a companion piece by Winston on the financial performance of Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Wellesley. This is a bit out of date (from 1994) and may shed some light on why Williams has decided not to grow, even to keep up with its endowment growth, since that time. By stabilizing the enrollment for the following decade, the college has, I believe, made itself more competitive financially. Actually, over the past ten years, Swarthmore has grown quite a bit, after its own decade of zero growth (while waiting for a bunch of big building projects to increase capacity) prior to this 1994 paper.
As of June 2004, Swarthmore had a slightly higher per student endowment than Williams, although I think Williams spent more per student in this year’s budget (it’s a little hard to tell, because deciphering capital expenditures in the published budgeting info would require one of you econ majors!)
Anyway, interesting stuff that’s not necessarily intuitive.
May 1st, 2005 at 6:35 pm
The question of whether Princeton or Williams or Pomona should increase its size to meet the increasingly large pool of individuals who meet even the strictest of admissions criteria drips of elitism. The question is asked with the best of intent, because an education at one of these institutions is indeed elite. But it also implies that only these institutions are capable of providing that type of education. Apologies to Colby graduates, but while we may classify Colby amongst Williams and the other New England Liberal Arts Colleges, few of us would trade our acceptances to Williams for a spot at Colby.
While I don’t have any hard data, just from skimming the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education over the past few years, it seems nearly every institution is increasing its admission standards. There is simply no need for Williams to increase its size to meet the increased supply of talented individuals. And I intentionally phrase this in complete opposition to students being consumers and institutions being suppliers. In a real sense, Higher Education does not only sell a service to its students, it provides a good to society with students being an important input. These institutions are all tax exempt for a reason. When our higher education system becomes solely a means to increasing the personal wealth of its transitory student population, then we can speak of high school applicants as consumers. Teaching at a large state university, I unfortunately see the prevalence of this perspective on education.
Williams is Williams. It sits in a town of 4,000. A school of 2,000 sounds just about right to me…indeed, maybe less. The students who don’t get into Williams or Swat or Hearst are simply funnelled to places like Bates and Colby and Trinity. The number of elite institutions will rise, and institutions that were once average, take the students that once went to these schools, and so on and so forth. The students who get hurt, or course, arent the ones at the top. As citizens, we should all be concerned about the state of our public universities, the extreme budget cuts they face, the apathy towards undergraduate education that pervades these institutions. The figures for students moving to a 4 year institution from 2 year community colleges are damning. Our system does not neglect the Williams’ of the world, or the Bates’ or the Skidmores. The kids with the 1300’s arent being squeezed, for the most part. But places like UMass, UW, and Florida State, these are the places we should be worried about as a society.
May 1st, 2005 at 7:33 pm
BTW, I think the notion that the qualified pool of applicants for elite colleges is permanently “exploding” is false. Much of it is a short-term demographic blip, the result of the echo boom. The same phenomenom was seen at the height of the baby-boom around 1970 when acceptance rates at the top LACs were exactly the same as they are today. Of course, in between, the schools saw a relative decline in applications and a corresponding increase in acceptance rates. So don’t interpret today’s demographic boom times as a permanent trend.
Also, you are seeing artificially inflated application numbers because kids are applying to so many schools and because of the huge numbers of iternational applicants (few of whom have any prayer of admission to elite US colleges).
May 2nd, 2005 at 7:16 am
A few responses. I don’t think it’s an elitist question. Pretty much all of us posting here think Williams is a special place, and that it provides something of value. I am sure Colby, Bates, etc. are no less special to alums of those institutions. But, if we think Williams has something unique to offer to certain categories of high school students, why not enable that to be offered to as many as possible, as long as that does not diminish the character of the institution or thin our resources too much? In fact, it’s elitist to artifically (if it truly is artificial) keep the number of Williams students from ever increasing, thereby making membership in the club that much more exclusive.
I think in terms of buildings and campus space, Williams will soon have the ability to accomodate far more than 2000. Having the Log, Goodrich, the new theater, and the new student center up and running, not to mention Chapin and Bernhard, creates an overabundance of campus meeting, performance, movie, and hang-out spaces. The campus could double the current number of events and performances and still not hurt for space. Likewise, once the new library is complete, that will give the campus two state of the art, huge new libraries. New classroom and office facilities are also part of the master plan, and studio art, theater, and the sciences already have massive new facilities. The only deficient areas on campus I would think are recreational athletic facilities, which I think are next to be addressed, and dorms, which could be solved by building relatively innocuous new dorm(s) to accomodate around 150-200 people down on the Mission side of campus (and adding some vitality to that side of campus in the progress). Financially, it should be doable as well, if the campaign succeeds in raising 400-500 million and assuming the market begins to recover at some point, Williams in ten years could be approaching a 2 billion dollar endowment.
I think by focusing on admitting a few more science, student-life, and arts focused students, as well as more student from atypical backgrounds, the college will accomplish three things (1) enable a lot more interesting events and speakers on campus and insure better attendance at some of those already happening, (2) slightly diminish the relative athletic “feel” of the campus since sports teams would likely stay stagnant, and (3) fully utilize the amazing facilities the college is spending so much to put in place.
I recognize the slipperly slope argument and that it is hard to pick an ideal number. I definitely think 3000 would be far too many, as that would move it away from pretty much all the other liberal arts colleges into small university territory. 2200-2400, however, would not be dramatically out of line with many of its competitors, and actually smaller than Middlebury.
I don’t think the admissions jump is just a temporary blip. Yes, part of it is a peak in the population of applicants, but there are other reasons both Amherst and Williams set all-time records for applicants this year, along with a number of other liberal arts schools. the overall population does continue on a gradual upward trend, and the internet and on-line applying and on-line tours and the like have made fairly remote schools a lot more accessible to people from all over the country, not to mention internationally. Moreover, I think the dramatic revitalization of the center of Williams campus will make the school that much more appealing to prospectives. I would be surprised if Williams ever had less than 5000 applications again, even once the population trends level off.
I am not advocating a dramatic increase in the student body, again, more like something along the lines of 10 percent, and I don’t think it should be considered, in any event, until the new academic quad is nearly completed and sufficient faculty are in place to maintain the ratio — perhaps with the entering class of 2011 or 2012.
May 7th, 2005 at 3:47 am
Who cares whether or not Williams is, or is regarded as, elitist. Williams’s admissions actions should be designed to make Williams as good as feasible, thereby serving its current and future students. It is hard enough to define and subsequently meet this objective, without worrying about what may benefit segments of greater society. If each educational institution should take, and be fairly successful at, similar actions for itself, the educational welfare of society as a whole would be advanced at an unprecedented rate.