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You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than

by graeme 8y ago

You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt: ------------- " But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive. Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe): Princeton: 5,336 Harvard: 6,658 Yale: 5,405 Columbia: 6,068 Stanford: 7,063 Chicago: 5,590 Duke: 6,655 MIT: 4,503 Upenn: 9,682 CIT: 997 Dartmouth: 4,193 That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students. By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities: McGill: 30,000 UBC: 47,500 UofT: 67,000 So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students." Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education/ http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education... ---------- I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten. I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money. I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.

rellui 8y ago
Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're taking.
- graeme 8y ago
  The thing is, those top three are quite prestigious in Canada. Maybe not as prestigious, but being a smaller country we have less room for minor shifts in ranking value. MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don’t really care about money. The prestige has more of a perceived value. Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you’d be astounded to see what they could collect if they were truly profit motivated.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    If US schools are Veblen goods then we can look to luxury goods as a comparison. Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under new management and tightly control the supply.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
And yet, the media narrative focuses on the top 10/top ~60k at the expense of the rest of us. I wonder why?
geebee 8y ago
Some of the top US universities do take far more students, they just don't show up at the top of US News rankings. UC Berkeley, for example, enrolls 30,853 undergraduates and 11,666 graduate students[1], but isn't in the top 20 on the USnoozeAndWorldDistort rankings. https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers Interestingly, the elite research universities on your list above do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students to Berkeley (or Michigan, UCLA). The big difference is in the undergraduate enrollment. Also interesting is the way the list shuffles up when you consider top PhD programs or top science and engineering programs. Many of the schools in the top 10 on the US News List are replaced by top-50 schools with a much larger representation of public universities. Berkeley, for instance, by many measurements, has more top-5 PhD programs (a good representation of department strength in research) than any other university, including Harvard and Stanford. Michigan isn't far behind (and keep in mind, Berkeley's med school is split off into UCSF). Even US News's engineering school rankings, which I do think overwhelmingly favor very small private universities with large endowments, show this trend. https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering... There are privates on there (Stanford, MIT, Columbia), but now you have Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, University of Illinois, and UC San Diego and Texas at Austin at the 11th spot. One thing the US News report rankings don't do is reward scale, but scale does matter. UCLA, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. Until recently, this was true of Berkeley as well, and numbers are still much much higher there - not just as a percentage, but in absolute numbers. Private universities receive a lot of subsidies and favorable tax treatment on the grounds that they provide a public good - personally, I'm not enthusiastic about providing this subsidy to universities with massive endowments that enroll a tiny number of students.

by graeme 8y ago

rellui 8y ago

Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're taking.

graeme 8y ago
The thing is, those top three are quite prestigious in Canada. Maybe not as prestigious, but being a smaller country we have less room for minor shifts in ranking value. MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don’t really care about money. The prestige has more of a perceived value. Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you’d be astounded to see what they could collect if they were truly profit motivated.
- chillacy 8y ago
  If US schools are Veblen goods then we can look to luxury goods as a comparison. Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under new management and tightly control the supply.

akhilcacharya 8y ago

And yet, the media narrative focuses on the top 10/top ~60k at the expense of the rest of us. I wonder why?

geebee 8y ago

Some of the top US universities do take far more students, they just don't show up at the top of US News rankings. UC Berkeley, for example, enrolls 30,853 undergraduates and 11,666 graduate students[1], but isn't in the top 20 on the USnoozeAndWorldDistort rankings. https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers Interestingly, the elite research universities on your list above do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students to Berkeley (or Michigan, UCLA). The big difference is in the undergraduate enrollment. Also interesting is the way the list shuffles up when you consider top PhD programs or top science and engineering programs. Many of the schools in the top 10 on the US News List are replaced by top-50 schools with a much larger representation of public universities. Berkeley, for instance, by many measurements, has more top-5 PhD programs (a good representation of department strength in research) than any other university, including Harvard and Stanford. Michigan isn't far behind (and keep in mind, Berkeley's med school is split off into UCSF). Even US News's engineering school rankings, which I do think overwhelmingly favor very small private universities with large endowments, show this trend. https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering... There are privates on there (Stanford, MIT, Columbia), but now you have Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, University of Illinois, and UC San Diego and Texas at Austin at the 11th spot. One thing the US News report rankings don't do is reward scale, but scale does matter. UCLA, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. Until recently, this was true of Berkeley as well, and numbers are still much much higher there - not just as a percentage, but in absolute numbers. Private universities receive a lot of subsidies and favorable tax treatment on the grounds that they provide a public good - personally, I'm not enthusiastic about providing this subsidy to universities with massive endowments that enroll a tiny number of students.