5 ms·
Perhaps, but I think there is a much more practical and likely reason. It's just one that won't sell magazine articles: Harvard exists in a finite amount of spa
by eob 17y ago
Perhaps, but I think there is a much more practical and likely reason. It's just one that won't sell magazine articles: Harvard exists in a finite amount of space.
Anyone who lives in Cambridge knows that Harvard, like many other city-schools, has expanded to the absolute borders of its property lines. It literally has nowhere else to go, which is why it is now buying property across the Charles river in Boston across from HBS.
While it is always fun to criticize "elite schools" for their snobbery, I would suggest that the administration of Harvard actually had a rather simple decision: keep harvard at the scale and size that has proven successful for decades upon decades, or build a satellite campus to hold new students so it can grow it's size. A dimension of a university that is hard to put a dollar amount on is community. While building a satellite campus in Boston is possible, I think this would seriously damage the community, and thus output, of the school by dividing it into two disjoint locations.
Anyway.. I just think it's easy to get mad at a school like Harvard for not accepting more students. But in reality, they simply are a school built a long time ago for a certain amount of students and can't realistically grow much larger.
- jbellis 17y ago> Harvard exists in a finite amount of space. True, but that's not the limiting factor in this time frame. From TFA: "Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that's precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone."
- cpr 17y agoThose are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from center to center, but Harvard (including Radcliffe) is already 2 miles from end to end. (I know, because I used to have to race from one to the other between classes at times.)) The real scandal with the Allston campus is that Harvard was buying it up piece by piece (most of it was admittedly pretty useless--train yards and trucking distribution points) using front corporations for the past 2-3 decades. Only recently did they come out and admit what they'd been doing. I suppose there's some argument that they had to keep things quiet while buying, in order to discourage speculators from competing with them. Now Allston is faced with a huge tax loss, though Harvard does voluntarily pay a property tax fee of $80M a year to Cambridge (or used to). That's probably a lot less than the commercial value of that land, but the non-commercial value of Harvard's central presence in Cambridge is hard to calculate.