A while ago, the Stanford dean wrote an open letter about the decreasing amount of funding for the UC system. In this letter, the dean mentioned the value the

A while ago, the Stanford dean wrote an open letter about the decreasing amount of funding for the UC system. In this letter, the dean mentioned the value the UC system provides to Stanford, the research community in general, and the state of California. However, the Stanford Dean also said something interesting, he said that Stanford can't provide an education on the scale that the UC system does. While I agree Stanford can't match the entire UC system on scale, I have to ask, why not on a scale similar to a UC Campus? UC Berkeley, for example, has over 27,000 undergraduates, with a vastly higher percentage of low income students than Stanford or any Ivy. At Stanford and Harvard, total undergrad enrollment is below 8,000. As a result, Berkeley educates more low income students than the entire ivy leave combined. This is true of a number of UC campuses. It's clear that the elite privates have decided to keep their undergraduate populations very small. Even if they do improve the percentage of low income students, the scale is so minuscule that they can't really be large scale agents of social mobility. So, why aren't Stanford and Harvard enrolling 25,000 undergraduates? If UCB and UCLA can do this, why can't they? These institutions do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students, the big gap is in undergrads. http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2014/10/13/why-elite-private-universities-get-more-per-pupil-government-money/ http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2014/10/13/why-elite-private-unive... Because these universities get a huge amount of money from the government, and a massive tax exemption, they end up being far more heavily subsidized per student than even the elite public universities, with far less restrictions on how they are allowed to operate. I'm not absolutely against the exemption in theory, but really, why should Harvard and Stanford get to keep this massively valuable tax exemption if they're going to refuse to scale, offloading the massively important task of educating large numbers of students to state supported universities. Really, if you look at the public funding (including the favored tax status) Harvard and Stanford are essentially state supported institutions. I'd say, privates need to either scale like UCB and UCLA, or lose the exemption.