It's interesting to think about why this might be so.
Also, while they used to serve almost exclusively US students they now accept students from all over the world, making the chances of an average child getting in more remote. My father got into Stanford a long time ago when you could be a local kid at public schools with nothing distinguishing you but good grades and test scores. Now to replicate that feat you need an athletic scholarship, or an amazing personal story, a legacy, or a huge donation.
I believe this will begin to erode the concept of elite schools truly representing the most capable. In a previous job we sometimes found that kids who were coming from a good public engineering program were often more skilled at actually writing code than people from some fancy ivy league schools. The fancy schools turned out graduates who were usually smart and very polished. But they didn't necessarily have more of the skills we were looking for.
The life experience of DE Shaw himself makes you wonder why he why he values an Ivy League school so much. His biography demonstrates it is not the skills. It is the access and the pedigree.
Exactly. And what public policy needs to do is revoke the non-profit status of schools that fail to make any effort to expand despite having an abundance of resources and qualified candidates.
Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool. That fact that it doesn't spend a penny of its $30 billion endowment doing so reveals that its mission is brand management, not education. And that's perfectly fine. But it shouldn't enjoy a tax-advantaged status predicated on the make-believe that its a philanthropic organization.
(Unstated above is that I believe that undergrad is fundamentally an in-person experience.)
Buy up existing hotels?
The George Washington University has purchased many hotels and condos and converted them to student housing, and that is downtown DC real estate.
Works well when you pay no property taxes.
Increasing the class size would be good.
But Danny Rubin isn't going to be able to teach screen writing to 120 kids instead of 12, even if he actually wanted to. RJ Tarrant can't expand his personal Classics section beyond 15.
And the undergraduate animal transplant surgery class (12-15 students)? How, pray tell, will that scale? If you wanted to 10x the size of the class... I don't know if there's a single place on Earth that conducts 10 transplants, human or large animal, in one building, at the same time.
Not everything can be scaled. Not even "not scalable" things can be scaled with money, even a lot of it.
A more interesting conversation is why nonetheless billionaires do a bad job at education, despite (not because of) all the money. I think this thinking is part of it. It also shows a lack of understanding of what makes Harvard special. It's not just "brand management."
Overall, society isn't putting enough money into research. Elite universities hiring more faculty would be a great thing, in my estimation.
Harvard could dectuple the number of faculty positions, and still turn away a dozen promising qualified academics for every position it fills.
I didn't go to Harvard, but I did attend a comparable fancy lad finishing school. The notion that there's any sort of magic compared to, say, Texas A&M doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The real difference is that the reputational capital of an Ivy League school. Which means that a bunch of impressive people will bend over backwards to become associated with the school.
Which in turn makes the institution itself prestigious. Which then attracts the next-generation of impressive people. Like a social status perpetual motion machine.
Under capitalism. :)
So if it's hard to fit in more students per professor, then the issue becomes finding more teachers. I suspect that might be more of a bureaucratic/political issue. Research and teaching are conflated, putting teaching at the bottom of the totem pole and pay scale for most aspiring professors unless you're famous for being good at teaching.
Maybe there should be more dedicated teaching openings.
What needs to happen is a broadening of the definition of "top schools".
The issue is that a "top school" is a definition inherently limited in size. The top 10 is the top 10 regardless of whether there are 100 or 1000 schools being considered. Also, regardless of how many people there are, as an entire society we can only agree on a group so large before the "top schools" are no longer actually common knowledge (and thus not a "top school" in many important ways).