<p>I’ve always wondered: how come I’ve never seen quality, nice universities open, pretty much since I’ve been born? Is it simply extremely hard to open up a new university, besides all the legislation and paper work, but to get students to attend? I see the number of applications to colleges around the U.S rise dramatically, and wouldn’t opening new universities allay that problem?</p>
<p>Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts is relatively new (the past 10 years or so).</p>
<p>Many colleges have rebranded themselves by changing names and merging with other schools. Trenton State College in NJ is now “The College of New Jersey” and Glassboro State in NJ is “Rowan College”.</p>
<p>The number of applications is going up to the tippy-top universities. The number of bodies in the seats has been going up, too, but not nearly as much, and it has probably flattened out. Also, not so much in the universities that are getting all those applications, because they rarely add new seats, and they can’t fit any more bodies into the seats they have. In the part of the country where you live – the Northeast/Middle Atlantic – the number of bodies in the seats has definitely been going down, and is projected to keep going down, probably over most of the rest of your lifetime.</p>
<p>That said . . . .</p>
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<li> Of course it’s hard to open up a new university. Yale is spending over $600 million to allow it to expand enrollment by 200 students per class. Harvard has $2-$3 billion of plans to move some of its activities across the river to Allston. Cornell has committed $2 billion to building a tech campus on Roosevelt Island, with hundreds of millions worth of additional contribution from the City of New York in the form of land and cash. And none of those is anything like starting up a new university, faculty and all.</li>
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<p>Of course, you CAN start up a new university, faculty and all. For example – and definitely happening during your lifetime – the University of California at Merced, which started enrolling undergraduates in 2006. They’ve done that on the relative cheap – only about $2 billion. It took about 25 years from conception to opening. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It has a couple of hundred graduate students, and fewer than a couple of hundred “ladder” faculty (i.e., non-adjuncts), so it’s not all that impressive (yet) as a research university.</p>
<p>And then, of course, there is the University of Phoenix, without a doubt one of the most important educational developments of our time. It’s a for-profit business, enormously successful, largely virtual, educating hundreds of thousands of students. It is about 35 years old, and seems to have cost about $600 million (over several decades) to create, at least to the point where it could fund itself out of operations.</p>
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<li><p>As I am sure you are aware, reputation and branding means a lot in the university world. So instead of trying to create new universities from scratch, most of what has been happening is existing universities expanding. Maybe someone else can find great statistics on this covering the last decade; I couldn’t do it easily.</p></li>
<li><p>What you probably really want is more seats in top-quality universities. Apart from something like Olin, which is really an outlier (and not really a top university yet), this has been happening in two ways:</p></li>
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<p>First, top-shelf universities have been expanding their undergraduate class sizes. The Ivy League had a huge expansion in the 1970s – not coincidentally, when all the formerly single-sex institutions went co-ed. Since then, not so much, but Princeton has increased its class by about a third over the past decade, the University of Chicago has expanded slightly more than that, and as noted Yale is nearing the finish line on a 15% expansion.</p>
<p>Second, the ranks of top-shelf universities has been expanding rapidly, too. A generation ago, colleges like Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern, or Washington University in St. Louis were not really seen as equivalent in quality to the Ivy League colleges, or the Seven Sisters, or Williams/Amherst/Wesleyan. Now there’s no question that those schools can be mentioned in the same breath with the traditional Northeastern academic powerhouses, and Stanford is at or near the pinnacle of prestige. If all you do is look at “HYPS”, taking into account the inclusion of Stanford (which was by no means obvious 20 years ago, at the undergraduate level), the number of newly enrolled students/year at the most prestigious private universities has gone from under 4,000 to almost 6,000 per year.</p>
<p>All of this should give you a real appreciation for the incredible wave of university creation and/or expansion in the second half of the 19th Century, really from the Civil War to the beginning of the last century. Cornell, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon (both halves of it), Emory, Duke (actually, the purchase, expansion, and re-branding of a pre-existing small college), and practically every public flagship university in the country were created during that period. It boggles the mind.</p>
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<p>A non-profit university along similar lines, [Western</a> Governors’ University](<a href=“http://www.wgu.edu/about_WGU/WGU_story]Western”>WGU's Story), started in 1997.</p>
<p>Among more traditional universities, [California</a> State University, San Marcos](<a href=“http://www.csusm.edu/]California”>http://www.csusm.edu/) admitted its first students in 1990, [California</a> State University, Monterey Bay](<a href=“http://about.csumb.edu/history]California”>http://about.csumb.edu/history) admitted its first students in 1995, and [California</a> State University, Channel Islands](<a href=“http://www.csuci.edu/]California”>http://www.csuci.edu/) admitted its first students in 2003. [UC</a> Merced](<a href=“http://www.ucmerced.edu/about-uc-merced]UC”>http://www.ucmerced.edu/about-uc-merced), which opened in 2005, is hardly the only university that opened in California recently.</p>
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<p>Some of the super-rich people of the day (Carnegie, Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt) wanted to do something with their money…</p>
<p>ucb – I knew there were others, but UC Merced is both the most recent and the most ambitious of them. I was using it not only as proof that there HAVE been new universities created, but also of how difficult and expensive it is to create them.</p>
<p>Add Rockefeller, Cornell, Mellon to that list. Yes, it was rich people, with huge egos and checkbooks, but it was still an amazing effort and amazing accomplishment.</p>
<p>One thing to remember is that the real model of the modern university didn’t exist before that period. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Virginia . . . they had been around for a long time, but they were nowhere near the forefront of education at the time, not yet. As we know, over time they responded pretty successfully to the challenges all these “charter schools” presented – and we shouldn’t forget to include Michigan and Berkeley with them – with their novel concepts like co-education, “majors”, financial aid, graduate degrees, sports, clubs, community service, nondiscrimination . . . .</p>
<p>JHS, do you feel like the reputation of public universities in this country has declined over the past century? Two examples are the University of Wisconsin-Madison and William & Mary-both are among the oldest institutions in the country but neither are considered “super elite” in this day and age. In fact, newer private schools like Wash U and Rice are considered to be a quite a bit better at the undergraduate level.</p>
<p>goldenboy, I think the reputation of public universities in this country has declined sharply over the past 20 years, roughly since the introduction of the USNWR rankings, whose formula devalues what public universities do, i.e. educating a broad range of students for a broad range of careers without a lot of luxuries. But state legislatures have contributed mightily to the decline, too. For most of the top public universities, state funding represents a comparatively small percentage of their budgets, but the constant political controversies about funding levels, and constant cut-backs, both create an impression of instability and crisis, and in many cases put public universities at a competitive disadvantage for attracting the top faculty and students, both at the graduate level and the undergraduate level. (My favorite current PhD student chose her second-choice program, a private university, over her first-choice program, a public one, in large part because the private university could offer a somewhat better economic deal and could guarantee it for multiple years. The two universities are tops in her field – and she was a hot property as an applicant – but the public university won’t be able to stay on top indefinitely if it can’t compete for the best students.) Political pressure to hold down in-state tuition and to expand class sizes hasn’t helped, either.</p>
<p>I also suspect that, in part because of their greater social diversity, public universities were far more traumatized by the upheavals of the Vietnam era. And if you want to see a decline in a public university’s reputation far sharper than Madison’s, take a look at the Sorbonne.</p>
<p>In the end, though, high academic prestige is very much an elitist luxury, and democratic institutions aren’t so great at nurturing elitist luxuries. Once upon a time, state governments had such an advantage in capital formation over the private sector that they could simply muscle their way to the forefront, but in the modern world it is the private sector that can raise almost unlimited capital, and the public institutions that are undercapitalized. </p>
<p>(William and Mary is really a very different case than Wisconsin, however. I think its reputation now is higher than it has ever been, at least during my lifetime. Unlike Wisconsin, it was never a player in the Great Research University game, and it has benefited mightily from Virginia’s increasing prosperity and secondary education quality, combined with UVa’s tiny size compared to most other state flagships and the relative paucity of private institutions in the Old South.)</p>
<p>Interesting, I just assumed that W&M was held in extremely high esteem and was probably considered a top 5 university in the 18th and 19th centuries due to the relative paucity of competitors in the higher education realm in this timeframe and its age advantage (2nd oldest after Harvard College). At any rate, we’re lucky to live in a country with so many strong universities big and small. Even your average Big 10 School like Penn State here in the U.S. has greater research productivity and academic resources than the preeminent institutions in other countries in the world like the IITs in India or Tsinghua in China.</p>
<p>There were rumblings about starting an elite Washington Institute of Technology as part of the UW system before the financial crisis. I have recently heard there is some discussion of this again, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.</p>
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<p>Hmmm, seems like a stretch since the University of Washington’s computer science department is very undersized compared to student demand for the major (based on the reported extreme selectivity of allowing University of Washington students to declare the major). If there are not even the resources to expand an undersized in-demand STEM department, it seems difficult to believe that there are resources to build an entire university focused on STEM subjects.</p>
<p>William & Mary was doubtless a “top 5” college in the 18th century here, when there weren’t many more than 5 colleges in existence. Virginia was certainly a top 5 colony, and W&M was its college. But, even though we like to pretend otherwise, being a top American college then was not such a big deal. Colleges were very local institutions educating a tiny number of men, basically training upper-class clergymen and serving as a finishing school for their pals. W&M, however, had two major problems in the 19th Century: First, it seems to have misplayed the fashions for secularism and science, and therefore been outflanked and then eclipsed by the University of Virginia. And then it spent the second half of the century – when the modern American university system essentially was born – sitting on the sidelines, bankrupt, and only intermittently educating anyone. So by the turn of the last century it was barely relevant.</p>
<p>If you want a handy little guide to academic prestige for universities at the outset of the 20th Century, look at the charter members of the Association of American Universities. (And then look at who else joined, and when. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good index of mainstream prestige.) It was convened in early 1900 by the presidents of Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Berkeley, and the additional initial membership consisted of Clark, Cornell, Michigan, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Yale. Of those, only Clark has failed to remain in the top ranks of American academia. (Clark withdrew from the organization a little over a decade ago, and it has recently forced out some other members who hadn’t stayed up to snuff.) Note that the founding group excluded some relatively ancient universities – W&M, Dartmouth, Brown (which joined not much later) – and included others that had graduated only a few classes at the time – Chicago and Stanford. Age and prestige were not synonymous.</p>
<p>I think there is still room for new “niche” colleges. For example, Patrick Henry College, primarily designed for Christian home-schooled kids, was founded in 2000.</p>