>In the 16 years since, although the number of applicants to the College has more than doubled, the size of Harvard’s undergraduate population has remained relatively constant. This year, the College admitted 2,037 students to the Class of 2020; in comparison, 2,035 students were admitted to the Class of 2004.
IMO when your non taxable endowment gets large but your undergrad population stays the same maybe part of the endowment should become taxable.
Acquiring non-Harvard land in Allston met with some backlash owing to how they went about it (sneakily, to avoid getting put over a barrel on price).
Building up rather than out would require knocking down buildings that range from historic to merely very old.
Suggesting that Harvard should just take more students as the number of applicants grows sort of ignores the constraints they operate under.
Non-affiliated former Boston resident.
I've heard some schools even have online offerings, crazy.
Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.
And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare. Traffic sucks, and public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0].
Getting between the new science center in Allston and Harvard Square is about a 20 minute walk (hustling). Driving might shave 10 minutes off of that. Or it could add that much and more, depending on the time of day.
Harvard's med school is in Longwood, which presumably only works because the med students live off campus anyway and don't have to get to the main campus on a regular basis.
[0] See https://universalhub.com for examples. You're unlikely to have to look back more than a week.
Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.
In a world where NIMBYs weren't the most important people on the scene, building a tram (streetcar) line between those two campuses would be a working solution. High capacity, intervals can be adjusted to the needs of the school, no traffic jams on the track.
And Harvard sits on an enormous warchest, it could cover the costs handily.
But pushing such a construction project in contemporary atmosphere would take longer than landing on the Moon.