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They have the right to do that, with the risk of tarnishing their reputation irrevocably.

It does go some ways to explain the existence of weed-out classes though.

You can sacrifice a little faculty and class space for freshman and sophomores if you know some fraction will not be showing up to 400- (or at some universities, 600-) level classes.

Elite universities don’t weed out to get rid of students, they need a super high graduation rate for the rankings metrics. But they can use weeders to get you to change your major to an easier one.

Most don’t and live with the crowding (recently happened at Purdue, Northeastern among others). But UCI rescinded aggressively in 2017 and nobody cares anymore. (You just have to actually enforce the things like “you need xyz GPA in your final semester” that they are often lax about.)

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