Expanding Elite Institutions: Why? Is Bigger Better? Can It Be?

Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are in different stages of thinking about it or doing it. Haverford decided not to. NYU has expanded. This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Elizabeth F. Farrell examines some pros and cons and some institutional planning. Requires subscription and registration of purchase of a temporary pass for access.

The country's richest and most selective institutions have recently been devoting their wealth to improving their facilities and raising the number of faculty members. Both Harvard and Brown Universities have added at least 100 new faculty members in the past five years, and Princeton has added 60 over the past 10 years. Stanford has added 250 more faculty members over the past decade.

Many of these universities are also buying more space. Yale purchased the former campus of the Bayer Healthcare complex, in Orange, Conn., last summer, which will add over 500,000 square feet of laboratory facilities to the university. Harvard plans to add 600,000 square feet of science-teaching space and laboratories for its stem-cell-research center and other projects. Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania have recently acquired 17 and 14 acres, respectively.

Both Harvard and Dartmouth College say that as much as they would like to admit more students, space constraints on their campuses make it impossible for now. But for some elite institutions, adding more students is a way of increasing access to a tremendous wealth of resources that keeps on growing.

"As knowledge expands, great universities have to expand along with it," says Christopher L. Eisgruber, provost at Princeton. "If you want to have the right educational ecosystem, when you grow the faculty you have to grow the student body, too."