June 28, 2022
We Need Less Harvard, Not More
By Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
Expanding enrollment at Ivy League institutions won’t solve inequality or fix our broken education system.
Gracing the pages of legacy media over recent years, a particular take has been presented as a rational, bipartisan solution to inequality at elite universities: enrollment expansion. “Many well-known public universities have expanded the number of students they serve without sacrificing quality,” writes Jeffrey Selingo in The Washington Post. “But for too long, our most selective schools have benefited from public funding and billions of dollars in tax breaks while acting more like exclusive clubs than institutions with a responsibility to educate our nation’s growing population.”
By enrolling more students, the argument goes, prestigious universities could theoretically democratize access to world-class resources, facilitate social mobility, and chip away at an enduring elitism. It isn’t a perfect solution—as some have pointed out, students would likely just filter up the status ladder. But on its face, it seems an honorable attempt to address higher education’s legitimacy crisis in a time of low acceptance rates at the top, struggling enrollment at the bottom, and record high tuition.
It wasn’t until I began to dig into my own school that I began to see how flawed the effort really is. During a fundraising livestream, Cornell University President Martha Pollack revealed that enrollment for students who receive financial aid has remained “relatively flat” since the mid-1990s, while enrollment for students who don’t receive financial aid “has grown quite significantly.” According to this data, it appears that virtually all of the roughly 1,500 undergrad seats Cornell has added over the past three decades have been filled by non-aided students.
