University Provost Katherine Baicker said that the College will embark on a “multiyear plan” to increase enrollment to around 9,000 undergraduate students during an invite-only budget town hall on Tuesday.
Baicker noted that the College had been steadily increasing in size since the early 2000s until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when growth leveled off. The plan would mark a return to a pre-pandemic growth trajectory, she said. The current undergraduate population is just over 7,500.
Undergraduate enrollment at UChicago grew annually by an average of about 3.2 percent from 2000 to 2021 and has decreased by about 0.5 percent on average each year since.
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Interesting. I wonder if financial motives are part of this.
Like this sounds pretty similar to things I have seen firms say when arguing increasing production could improve margins:
Baicker acknowledged that plans to increase undergraduate enrollment would require “be[ing] very creative about spaces that we have on campus that are underutilized in their current configuration,” and highlighted ongoing conversations about how to allocate teaching responsibilities between tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty as important to assessing the College’s enrollment capacity.
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No doubt in my mind that financial motives are the most important part of this.
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