large schools that are also very selective?

tk21769
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 05:37:50 +0000

Only two of the US News top 20 national universities have more than 10K undergraduates. One exception is Cornell, but its enrollment includes students in several schools (Hotel Administration, Agriculture, etc.) besides the College of Arts & Sciences. The Cornell CAS enrolls only 4100 students. UPenn’s ug enrollment barely tops 10K; that number includes nursing students (as well as CAS, Wharton, and Engineering students).

Is it a coincidence that the “top” schools tend to be small?
Many of them are old (7 date from colonial times) and located in built-out environments with limited space for physical growth. However, even without that constraint, it may be harder to maintain the same liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control as enrollments get very large. Of the top universities with UG enrollments over 10K (USC, NYU, Berkeley, Michigan, UVA), only at NYU do (slightly) less than 10% of classes enroll 50 or more students. Is that a coincidence? Maybe it is just too hard to hire enough high-quality faculty to keep classes small in popular majors like English and biology when enrollments grow too large. I would think, too, that highly selective “holistic” admission would be harder and harder to pull off by the time applications start to reach Berkeley-sized numbers (> 50K).