<p>Princeton.</p>
<p>The three cases he talked about were:</p>
<p>Middlebury: expanding enrollment to bump their stats around their fixed cohort of low-stat students (mostly athletes).</p>
<p>Chicago: expanding to bump their enrollment of future big donors around their fixed cohort of high-stat nerds. Winston clearly doesn’t think much of this strategy, wondering how they can maintain their academic market position in the mean time with signficantly reduced per student spending.</p>
<p>Princeton: expanding because they have more per student endowment money than they know what to do with – the highest in the country. Winston’s attitude towards this one seems to be, “what the hell, they’ve got the money.”</p>
<p>BTW, Morty must believe that Winston is right. Williams has fewer students today than it did 12 years ago. Given that the natural rise in endowment allows gradual growth without impacting per student spending, this amounts to signifcant downsizing of the school in “students adjusted for inflation” over the last decade.</p>
<p>Swarthmore has actually grown quite a bit over that period of time: from 1300 to 1500 students. However, I think that this is “making up” for a period of time when they had zero growth. They were at full capacity and had to bring the student center, the Lang Performing Arts Center, the Kohlberg academic building, the new Science Center, and the new Alice Paul dorm on line to accomodate their normal growth. </p>
<p>Their growth has been a ruler flat line averaging 11 additional students per year since they opened their doors. In their most recent land use plan, the working assumption is that the linear growth rate will continue. Enrollment was held flat over the last three or four years (housing crunch). With the new dorm now on-line and renovations to the Parrish dorm almost complete, they are hoping to increase the size of the freshman class by 15 students this year. Most likely they’ll get there since they increased ED acceptances by about 15 (as you say, these adcoms are professionals!)</p>
<p>Swarthmore’s growth and Williams’ inflation adjusted contraction have put their per student endowments back in concert. Swarthmore’s is now just a tick higher compared to 10 years ago when it was quite a bit higher. It’s all in the denominator.</p>
<p>All of this would be a lot more fun if you could isolate the undergrad endowments and spending at the universities. For the most part, their per student spending on undergrads is much lower than the top LACs. But, that’s intuitive. I mean we all pretty much know that a lecture class of 100 is lower “quality” than 12 kids in a seminar. That doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out. But, all of the statistical measures like student:faculty ratios and undergrad spending are so buried in the noise of the grad schools that they get a free pass.</p>