large schools that are also very selective?

bclintonk
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:20:16 +0000

tk21769:

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.



I don’t think it’s at all coincidence that “the ‘top’ schools tend to be small,” but I think you have the causation arrow reversed. The simple fact of the matter is that it’s much easier to fill a small class with high-stats applicants than it is to fill a large class with applicants of a similar caliber.

Truth be told, a school like UC Berkeley or Michigan enrolls more top-stats students than Harvard. Harvard’s 25th percentile SAT CR score is 690, which means 3/4 of its entering class, or 1246 entering freshmen, scored above that level, and the same number scored a 700 or higher on SAT M. At UC Berkeley, about 45% of entering freshmen, or 1,999 freshmen, scored 700 or higher on SAT CR, and 60%, or 2,666 entering freshmen, scored 700 or higher on SAT M.

The difference, of course, is that as a public university UC Berkeley has a much bigger class to fill (4,443 freshmen v. 1,661 at Harvard), so it’s got to reach deeper into the applicant pool to fill it, and that brings down its SAT medians. There’s not much question that if UC Berkeley had to fill only 1,661 seats in the freshman class, as Harvard does, its entering class stats would be much stronger, and so would its US News ranking. No “coincidence” there: a small undergraduate student body is a major contributing factor to “top” private schools’ ability to be highly selective. (It’s not the only factor, obviously, because many small schools aren’t very selective, but it’s a major factor).

As for “liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control”—I think that’s just wrong. I’ve spent a lot of time at both Michigan and Berkeley, as well as a number of top private schools. Schools like Michigan and Berkeley have every bit as much liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control as any private institution. And to the degree people rely on widely used rankings like US News to identify which are the “top” schools, it’s worth noting that things like “liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control” just don’t figure into those rankings at all.

One other area where size does matter in the US News ranking: the ranking favors a high rate of spending per student. Institutions with lots of resources and few students will always do better on that metric than institutions with lots of resources and many students, in part because some costs are fixed regardless of the number of students—Yale’s libraries cost just as much to assemble and maintain as UC Berkeley’s comparably-sized libraries, even though the former serve far fewer students—and partly because bigger institutions are able to achieve some economies of scale that allow them to provide some services on a lower cost-per-student basis. For example, Michigan uses its size to negotiate substantial discounts on purchases from preferred vendors, producing millions of dollars in annual savings, and it produces most of its own heat and electricity through an 86% fuel-efficient central co-generation plant, operating at twice the efficiency of the average private power plant. Savings like these are reflected in a lower operating cost per student, which US News rewards with a lower ranking.