46 CommentsColumbia administrators, including President Lee C. Bollinger, are deliberating on increasing student enrollment in CC and SEAS. The undergraduate student body has not been informed nor asked for input regarding these considerations.
“I personally do not know anybody who is 100% happy with the direction [Bollinger] is taking the University,” said a faculty member, who chose to remain anonymous, in conversation with Bwog.
Under the guidance of President Bollinger, Columbia administrators are considering expanding the undergraduate populations in Columbia College (CC) and the School of Engineering (SEAS).
The University planned to expand the undergraduate population in 2009 following three years of deliberation, but all 2006 through 2009 student body presidents for CC, SEAS, and GS were included in the Membership of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, ensuring that student voices were considered. Columbia’s current student body has not been notified by the administration that the current discussions are underway.
These discussions have been held in private Zoom meetings since February 2021. The minutes taken during these meetings were not made available to the public; however, the dates of these meetings can be viewed on an Arts & Sciences Faculty webpage. Bwog retrieved the meeting minutes from an anonymous source with knowledge of the meetings.
This possible expansion of Columbia’s undergraduate enrollment raises questions of transparency and preparation regarding the administration. In a 2012 discussion with Bwog, Dean James Valentini expressed support for including student voices in important University matters. But students have been excluded from expansion discussions, and only a few faculty have been included in them.
Expansion by even a small percentage would have implications for the quality of housing, academics, and student life, yet the administration has not committed to obtaining new buildings or professors in these discussions if this expansion were to come to fruition.
The Current Expansion Discussion
Recent discussions of expansion began on February 16, 2021, when Interim Provost Ira Katznelson emailed the Department Chairs of the Faculties of Arts and Sciences and of Engineering, and copied the Executive Vice President (EVP) for Arts and Sciences Amy Hungerford, SEAS Dean and Incoming Provost Mary Boyce, GS Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch, and CC Dean James Valentini. The email, obtained by Bwog, announced the creation of a study group “concerning potential undergraduate enrollment expansion in Columbia College and Columbia Engineering.” In the email, Katznelson outlined the goal of the study group: to research the potential effects of undergraduate student population expansion.
Katznelson also explained that the CC and SEAS applicant pools have produced a greater number of prospective students in recent years, and therefore Columbia wants to “expand [their] mission to educate the next generation of leaders,” increasing access to an elite higher education. Katznelson announced that EVP Hungerford would spearhead the study.
On April 16, 2021, Katznelson and Boyce emailed Arts & Sciences—consisting of CC, GSAS, GS, the School of the Arts, and SIPA professors—and SEAS faculty to provide updates on the expansion study. In this email shared with Bwog, Katznelson and Boyce clarified the timeline of expansion discussions, with Katznelson explicitly stating that the study aims to “produce recommendations to the President and Trustees not later than the middle of the coming fall semester.” He also announced the creation of one Steering Committee and three working groups, anticipating “broad faculty participation in these working groups and in the discussions they will convene.” These committees were designed to consider the effects of expansion on faculty resources, teaching assistants, the budgets of Arts & Sciences and SEAS, student life, physical space and capacity for housing, dining, IT, advising, and other student support. The findings of these committees will result in a report with a “range of options” to be sent to the Provost in the fall. The Provost will then work with the President and Trustees to decide how to proceed.
On April 19, 2021, EVP Hungerford announced the dates for open faculty discussions: April 28, May 3, May 6, and June 15. Two sources closely involved with these meetings, who chose to remain anonymous, shared with Bwog that an additional faculty discussion was held this past Thursday, June 3 to address faculty concerns over the planning process. Roughly 160 individuals were present at this meeting according to a faculty member who was present.
Why expand now? That’s the question reportedly asked by a faculty member in the June 3 meeting. EVP Hungerford answered that the goals of expansion are to “increase access [to CC and SEAS] and to increase revenue.” This is one of the few times a reason other than increasing access to a Columbia education was mentioned by the administration in discussions of undergraduate expansion. Music Professor Elaine Sisman and three sources who chose to remain anonymous corroborated Hungerford’s answer. One anonymous faculty member confirmed that EVP Hungerford’s reasons for the undergraduate expansion were “Bollinger’s vision of accessibility and the University’s financial difficulties.” Mathematics Professor Michael Thaddeus discussed undergraduate expansion on his website in March, where he states “most prestigious institutions do not use undergraduate growth as a tool to produce revenue.”
Past Expansion Plans
Columbia has had several plans to expand in recent history.
In 1960, a faculty committee examined a possible expansion for Columbia College under the guidance of then Dean John Gorham Palfrey. This proposal was approved, under the condition that Columbia would renovate student facilities to accommodate the larger student body.
In 1996, the University published a report entitled Enhancing the Undergraduate Experience at Columbia. This report described then-President George Rupp’s vision to center the University around undergraduate life and increase enrollment from 3,500 students to 4,000 students over five years.
In October 2006, President Bollinger established the Task Force on Undergraduate Education. Led by former Provost Alan Brinkley, the force reviewed the structure and curricula of the University’s undergraduate schools. The findings of this review were then published in a report called An Agenda for the Future. During this expansion proposal, several working groups were established to focus on the following topics: Curricular Structure, Globalization, Organization and Expansion, Science Education, and Teaching. The Working Group on Organization and Expansion contained six members in 2009—Provost Alan Brinkley, GS Dean Peter Awn, VP for the Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty Nicholas B. Dirks, SEAS Dean Zvi Galil, SEAS Interim Dean Gerald Navratil, and CC Dean Austin E. Quigley—all of whom were deans or part of the higher administration.
This 2006-2009 Task Force spoke with the University Senate, involving student voices in the process. This plan sought to integrate CC and GS more closely, revamp the Major Cultures requirement, and increase the undergraduate population by 10-20%. A new dormitory was included in these proposed plans, to be built on 115 Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. Columbia did not build this new dorm due to a lack of gift funding, and the expansion was not seen to completion partly because of the 2008 financial crisis. However, the University still expanded enrollment by 50 students, and Harmony Hall was converted from graduate to undergraduate housing.
Other Ivy League institutions have recently considered expanding their undergraduate populations. Yale University expanded its undergraduate enrollment by 15% in 2016 due to a $250 million gift from an alumnus. Dartmouth College released a report in 2018 stating that the school researched expansion but decided against it, citing that “the College should address existing student needs” first. Princeton University decided to expand by 10% in fall 2020 after receiving a $25 million gift from alumni. Both Yale and Princeton agreed to expand their facilities to accommodate the larger number of students.
Concerns and Uncertainties
During his tenure, President Bollinger has been a force of change at the university, his most prominent project being the controversial Manhattanville expansion. One administrator described him as “a visionary with a bad process.” Many faculty members, including Professor Sisman, share concerns about the lack of consultation with the majority of faculty and the lack of explicit plans on how the administration intends to allocate resources. Sisman said that the faculty “need to have assurances that resources, space, [and] faculty size” are sufficient to “be able to effectively teach a larger student body” and that “[the] administration can’t simply say they will ‘figure it out.’” According to an April email from EVP Hungerford to Arts and Sciences faculty, the open faculty discussions were limited to 30 Zoom participants each time. This does not include the added meeting EVP Hungerford held on June 3 to address faculty concerns about the proposed expansion planning process. The upcoming June 15 meeting will have no registration limit.
This process also lacks consultation of the undergraduate student body, as no students are on the Steering Committee or the working groups. While Katznelson and Hungerford’s private emails to faculty express the intention to consider all aspects of student life that may be affected by expansion, there have been no publicly available documents explaining how the additional revenue generated by increased undergraduate populations will be reinvested into undergraduate-focused services, facilities, or faculty. According to Professor John Hunt, a committee focused on undergraduate quality of life is expected to be formed, but its members have yet to be announced. Hunt added that “many of us [faculty] feel that [the administration] should have looked into the quality of undergraduate life before announcing or considering expansion, not the other way around.”
There have also been no announcements of planning for new dormitories, classrooms, dining facilities, or faculty that would appear necessary with an increase in enrollment. According to a faculty member who was present at a meeting held on June 3, EVP Hungerford stated that the range of expansion being considered for CC is 5-15% and for SEAS, 10-30%. Such an increase would result in roughly 224 to 669 new CC students and 172 to 516 new SEAS students. Considering Katznelson and Boyce’s aim for a complete report by the end of the upcoming fall semester, a plan for property acquisition and professor hiring must emerge soon.
“There are not enough laboratories for all undergraduates in the biology department to work [on research],” said an anonymous faculty member, commenting on Columbia’s minimal facilities for an already large population. “Many classrooms are not of great quality, and the labs themselves are pretty ratty.” Professor Sisman also disclosed the lack of explicit plans being discussed in the working groups, adding that “right now it is unclear how space needs, including dorms and instructional needs, will be addressed.”
Faculty members are also concerned that the quality of a Columbia education is already decreasing with the currently packed classrooms, believing that a new expansion would hasten this decline. “Students are coming here thinking they will have personal interactions with faculty, and that ends up more limited than it should be,” said Professor Hunt. If the stated goal of expansion is widening access, these changes will disproportionately affect the very people the expansion expects to bring in. As one anonymous faculty member stated, “students who come in from less privileged backgrounds tend to have less preparation and less experience navigating this kind of culture in the real world…as the stresses build, they are disproportionately affected by it.”
Committees and Working Groups Do Not Facilitate Transparency
Even if these resources were to be included in the deliberations thus far, the public would not yet be aware. The Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (ECFAS) was the governing body of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences until 2010 when the new governing body was voted upon to be the Policy and Planning Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (PPC). The PPC consists of nine tenured faculty: six elected from a nominated slate and three chosen by and from the Department Chairs.
ECFAS offers publicly accessible meeting minutes dating from 1999 to 2010. No meeting minutes are publicly accessible past 2010. The new PPC website explains that “this website is no longer being updated as we transition to the new one. If you would like copies of reports or minutes, please email ppc@columbia.edu.” After one Bwog reporter emailed the PPC directly, PPC Chair Jenny Davidson replied that the minutes are “confidential exclusively to PPC members and EVP [Hungerford]” and even faculty members outside of the process can not read them. A screenshot of this conversation can be seen below. The public is also not privy to the minutes of the meetings of the Steering Committee and working groups as they are password protected. In addition to excluding students from expansion discussions, the PPC furthers their lack of transparency by not having easily accessible minutes.
The conversation between a Bwog Staff Writer and the PPC Chair.
EVP Hungerford’s email from April 19 also announced the preliminary structure of the Steering Committee and the nomination process for faculty who wanted to get involved in the working groups. The Steering Committee was tasked with gathering input from Arts & Sciences and SEAS as well as advancing final options and recommendations to the provost, president, and the Board of Trustees. This committee consists of ten deans, the EVP of Arts & Sciences, the Chair of the PPC, and a professor. Out of the 13 members of the Steering Committee, only one person does not hold any higher position beyond professorship.
Two bodies have been involved in this discussion process: the Steering Committee and the CC/SEAS Expansion Working Group. The Steering Committee focuses on gathering input from SEAS and Arts & Sciences to produce final options and recommendations to the Provost, President, and Trustees. The Working Group focuses on utilizing their knowledge on particular topics pertinent to undergraduate life and the undergraduate mission as it relates to potential expansion plans. The Steering Committee consists of mostly administrators whom the Working Group and subgroups within report to. In other words, the Steering Committee is in charge of the final recommendations regarding expansion which will be presented to those who can implement these recommendations. The Working Group is in charge of looking into factors of expansion that would affect the lives of undergraduates, whether that be their living and learning conditions, or the faculty’s teaching environment and their wellbeing.
As of May 2021, the Working Group includes Arts & Sciences faculty, and the Steering Committee includes faculty both from Arts & Sciences and SEAS.
The membership of the Steering Committee includes Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Carlos Alonso, SEAS Vice Dean Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of Humanities Sarah Cole, Chair of the PPC Jenny Davidson, Dean of Social Sciences Fredrick Harris, Professor Julia Hirschberg; EVP for Arts & Sciences Amy Hungerford, SEAS Vice Dean Soulaymane Kachani, Dean of Science Robert Mawhinney, SEAS Vice Dean Barclay Morrison, Dean of Academic Planning and Governance Rose Razaghian, GS Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch, and CC Dean James Valentini.
The membership of the Expansion Working Group includes Dean of Humanities Sarah Cole, Professor Michael Cole, VP of Arts & Sciences Margaret Edsall, Professor Susan Elmes, Professor Stuart Firestein, Professor Marcus Folch, Professor Patricia Grieve, Dean of Social Sciences Fredrick Harris, Dean of Academic Affairs Lisa Hollibaugh, EVP for Arts & Sciences Amy Hungerford, Professor Matthew Jones, Director of Academic Affairs and Professor Caroline B. Marvin, Dean of Science Robert Mawhinney, Professor Mary Putman, Dean of Academic Planning and Governance Rose Razaghian, Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor Victoria Rosner, Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Andrea Soloman, CC Dean James Valentini, and Professor Yarhi-Milo.
Next Steps
As these proposed expansion ideas progress over the coming months, it is worth mentioning that the proposal has once again called into question the organizational structure of Arts & Sciences. In 2011, McKinsey & Company produced a report evaluating Columbia’s administrative structure. This report proposed alternative structures to the organization and hierarchy of administration to improve top-level coordination—like rearranging the organization chart to amend who each administrator reports to—and ways to increase the generation of funds, like by expanding enrollment in master’s programs.
The McKinsey Report, summarized in greater detail on WikiCU, led to the exit of Michelle Moody-Adams as the Dean of the College in August 2011 due to her concerns with plans to transform the administrative structure in Arts and Sciences. Moody-Adams is still a professor at the University as well as the head of the Philosophy department.
“I cannot in good conscience carry out a role that I believe to be detrimental to the welfare of the College,” Moody-Adams said in her resignation. She said that the “changes will have the effect of diminishing and in some important instances eliminating the authority of the Dean of the College over crucial policy, fund-raising and budgetary matters.” The McKinsey report, the Moody-Adams’ resignation, and the debates in the aftermath of her resignation came to be known as “Moodygate.”
According to our anonymous sources who work with the administration, a new committee to evaluate the structure and organization of Arts & Sciences is in the process of being created. But the committee has inadvertently heightened tensions, as described by one faculty member when they said “it’s not necessarily faculty vs. administrators but when the EVP seems actively obstructionist and PPC is protecting EVP from faculty, it’s a bit worrying.” In July 2020, EVP Hungerford, on behalf of the administration, pushed for graduate students and faculty to opt to teach in-person rather than solely online for the fall 2020 semester when COVID-19 still posed a significant health risk. When many faculty members opposed the pressure from President Bollinger and EVP Hungerford to return to teaching in person, Professor Sisman said that “Dean Valentini was the only administrator who supported faculty.”
Ultimately, faculty want their voices to be heard, as demonstrated by a resolution constructed and put forth for a motion to vote by a faculty member at the June 3 Arts & Sciences faculty meeting. The resolution passed with only one opposed vote. Below is the part of the resolution shared with Bwog; this text will be updated as we receive the full language of the resolution.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences affirms that it reserves the right to vote on any proposal that deeply affects the faculty, our students, and our institution, such as proposals to increase the size of Columbia College and General Studies or plans to restructure A&S. Specifically, if any such proposals are to come before the Board of Trustees or are to be considered for implementation by the university administration, the faculty will have the opportunity to express its views beforehand.
Although obviously the faculty does not have the final say, equally obviously, appropriate faculty governance not only permits but requires it to have full information and register its views on questions that are central to A&S.
There are also administration-faculty tensions over the University budget, specifically on what the budget is and how it is spent. “By the bylaws, the administration had an obligation to report finances of the faculty of Arts and Sciences,” one source said. “They provided no financial data to the faculty.”
These tensions inspired a faculty member to put forth a resolution at the March 31 Arts & Sciences faculty meeting. This resolution calls upon the EVP to reveal the Arts & Sciences budgets in detail from the last five years as well as the projected budgets for the next five years in an attempt to increase budgetary transparency. Below is the language of the resolution.
Since the Stated Rules provide that “the Faculty of Arts and Sciences shall have power and it shall be its duty…to discuss and advise on issues affecting the Arts and Sciences relating to…budget”;
Since the Arts and Sciences is facing urgent fiscal challenges requiring us to discuss and advise on our budgetary goals and academic values;
Since the Arts and Sciences General budget was transmitted to all Faculty members in the past;
The Faculty now calls upon the Executive Vice President to transmit to all members of the Faculty detailed Arts and Sciences General budgets and actuals for the last five years, and projected budgets for the next five years, listing principal revenues and expenditures, such as tuition in the various schools, indirect cost recovery, gifts and endowments, on the one hand, and instruction, administration, financial aid, and common costs, on the other, and to make this transmission an annual practice.
In response to this motion to publish budget details, “a draft format is being developed and will be put in front of the Budget Committee shortly,” according to minutes from the May 19 faculty discussion we obtained. The minutes explain that EVP Hungerford asks any interested faculty who wish to participate in the budget publication discussions to contact her. This work to draft and publish the budget will be shared with faculty in the upcoming fall semester.
Other sources have noted the tough position administrators are in given Columbia’s financial situation; according to the minutes we obtained, in the May 19 open faculty meeting, President Bollinger noted that at one point during the pandemic, the institution was losing $100 million a month. “Everything that [I have] done at Columbia, especially over the last year, has been motivated by a deep fear for the institution—that it would repeat that earlier crisis,” said President Bollinger at the May 19 open discussion meeting, according to the meeting minutes we obtained. Bollinger was referring to the severe dip in the endowment in the 1970s that took “decades to recover from.” The minutes state that Bollinger wanted to “avoid laying people off,” implying that expansion would help boost the school’s revenue and balance its checkbooks.
Despite actions taken by the PPC and the administration, Columbia has not officially decided it will expand. As stated in the May 19 minutes, Bollinger “did not say ‘we are expanding,’” although he supports the idea.
Without dedicated student involvement, broad faculty input, and transparent investments in education-enhancing resources, this undergraduate expansion could negatively affect not only student life and education but also the quality of the faculty’s well-being and teaching environment. The complexities of this issue reach beyond numbers and logistics; the decision to prioritize top administration voices, as seen with the disproportionately administrator-heavy Steering Committee, risks further tension and rifts between the administration and faculty.
“One thing I could say is that lots of faculty in the Arts & Sciences have a problem with Bollinger,” said an anonymous source. “They don’t think he’s done a great job and they can’t trust him.”
Bwog has reached out to Columbia University, CCSC, ESC, University Senate, Interim Provost Ira Katznelson, EVP Amy Hungerford, PPC Chair Jenny Davidson, Incoming Provost and SEAS Dean Mary Boyce, and CC Dean James Valentini for comment.
Incoming Provost and SEAS Dean Mary Boyce replied to Bwog’s request with the following statement:
“Expanding access to Columbia’s incredible academic resources and research opportunities has been one of my highest priorities as Dean of SEAS, and as incoming Provost, I am committed to continuing that mission. A reasonable expansion of the undergraduate student body is one potential mechanism for strengthening the University and securing excellence at an even higher level — and it is in that spirit that we are taking a look at the idea. However, while I am excited about this possibility, please recognize that we are just getting started, and as you point out in your story, many important questions must be addressed.
I look forward to sharing more details in the coming months as the assessment takes shape and once I assume my role as Provost.”
This article is a developing story. We will update it with new information as it is discovered.
Update on Wednesday, June 9 at 1:30 pm: This article has been updated to include Dean Boyce’s statement to Bwog.
Reporting contributed by Lauren Kahme, Caroline Mullooly, and Aditi Misra
Columbia from Above via Bwog Archives
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46 Comments
@Anonymous the worst thing about capitalism isn’t the system but capitalists themselves
@Anonymous Just take super rich students like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford do to increase your wealth. Stanford followed this Harvard Princeton model and doubled their endowment and increased their rankings.
@Bwog alum-turned-ink-stained-wretch I have to say, the reporting on this piece was excellent. Whatever you think of expansion’s merits, Bwog should be proud of itself for producing this kind of journalism that can inform and elevate campus conversation. Kudos from this former Bwog writer/current professional journalist.
@Fuck off journo Enemy of the people.
@bwog wit da gossip this is the juice the people want!!
@Student The country club republicans have entered the chat…
@Anonymous Like Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ever hear of him?
@Alum Columbia already has the cash cow School of General Studies and School of Professional Studies that have expanded astronomically unchecked over the years that none of the other Ivies possess. Why does Columbia need so much more money than the other Ivies to function? Someone better look at their finances and expenses.
@Anonymous Columbia is being faced with a unique challenge: the institution has the potential to become the greatest research university in the world, yet its struggling finances make it difficult for the school to achieve this. Look at the structure: with top professional schools and academic departments, it could become a Harvard or a Stanford, which schools like Princeton would never be able to achieve.
But using the undergraduate school to bring in additional revenue and decrease its selectivity would hurt the reputation of Columbia. For most people, the only time that they would apply to colleges is for undergrad; if Columbia isn’t selective for undergrad, then people would think that it’s not elite. Being selective builds the reputation of a school as being elite.
Let’s say 70,000 students apply to CC and SEAS 5 years after the expansion had taken place, and learn that Columbia’s admission rate is only lower than Cornell’s within the Ivy League. Those 70,000 applicants would now have the impression that Columbia’s substantially inferior to Harvard and Yale. Columbia would cease to be an elite school.
A great example is UC Berkeley. UCB has top world-class academics and professional programs, and is widely respected inside academia, yet people don’t think that they are on the same level as Stanford. It’s because UCB’s undergraduate acceptance rate is a lot higher, and so the perception is that it’s not an elite school.
If Columbia is aspiring to become a UC Berkeley, meaning that the public reputation of the school would trail its actual merits, then by all means, it should expand its undergraduate enrollment. If I was faced with a choice, I would choose the opposite: Princeton has no top law, med, nor business schools, yet the public thinks that it’s one of the best schools. It’s because Princeton has demonstrated that it’s elite by its undergrad selectivity.
Perception should be prioritized over reality. Columbia needs to explore other ways to raise money. Sacrificing its elite status for money shouldn’t be a choice.
@Alum There are other ways to make money than increasing enrollment. Increasing enrollment in the long term will cost more money and decrease quality and rankings. A new dorm will cost 100 million, new labs, new facilities, increased financial aid, more faculty and staff expenses will end up losing money. Money should be spend on the students already here. Schools like Yale, Stanford and Princeton are highly ranked because of their very small ultra elite well funded programs with huge endowments per student. Princeton is ranked top college because it has the highest endowment PER STUDENT in the world. Better investments, seeking donations, partnerships with the city and state, increased research and patents are better ways.
@Anonymous What do you make of the Amazon deal, then — the New York AI Research Center? Not trying to argue anything, I’m just curious.
@Anonymous That’s a good start. Now do twenty more (like Stanford and MIT).
@Anonymous It took Columbia half a century to recover from their disastrous management decisions in the 60s and 70s, which primarily involved administration and real estate not students. This decision will tank CU’s ranking for 100 years.
Look what happened to Rutgers…
@Alex Expansion makes sense. The massive increase in applications in recent years ensures that a targeted expansion won’t affect quality, and more students obviously bring more revenue, and make it easier to fulfill competing objectives in producing the best possible class (diversity, legacies, arts, athletics, intl., first-gen, etc.). Other Ivies have aggressively expanded, with no apparent negatives. Also, the main campus will have much more available space in the coming years with the moving of graduate programs to the Manhattanville Campus.
@Alum No other Ivy has “aggressively expanded.” Harvard’s class is actually smaller. Columbia has actually increased the most in the last forty years. And i you include GS, Columbia by far has increased the most.
@Anonymous This is ridiculous cope. Quality does not degrade linearly with quantity beyond current numbers, instead it falls sharply off a cliff. If your premise were correct, second tier universities would be closing the gap with CU. That’s not the case. Compare the kids from High School who ended up at Cornell, Michigan, Northwestern and Duke to those who went to Ivies. If CU expands, that’s the cohort they will be admitting.
@Anonymous First of all, every single one of the universities you mentioned is a peer institution. Cornell is an Ivy. If you are a good enough student to perform at or get into those schools, you are certainly good enough to perform at Columbia. Your dismissal of those students is remarkably elitist. Also, what criteria are you using for “closing the gap?” There is only one relevant ranking and not every school can be in the top 10. By the time they were, they wouldn’t be “second-tier,” whatever that means. I think you should probably re-examine the premise guiding your worldview, rather than poorly critiquing others.
Assuming you are a student here, you should be aware that you belong to this cohort because you got lucky, not because of your extra special moxy and intellect. You met some basic admissions criteria that thousands of rejected students also met, and an admissions officer happened to just drink their coffee before reviewing your file. This is the case for most of us. They could have accepted the next 5% of students and there would be zero impact on student quality.
Speaking of which, the admissions rate has been cut in half at least twice over the last two decades. It’s now around 3% and quickly approaching near zero. There is no evidence to suggest that the cohort of students on campus today is materially smarter, more creative, or more well-connected than prior classes when the admissions rates were considerably higher. If that were true, our alumni network would not be a major draw for the university.
In fact, most alumni would correctly acknowledge that if they were applying today, they would not be admitted at all. In my view, that is a huge problem. Our priority, both as a university and as a society, should be to give as many people as possible a shot at a world-class education. This isn’t just true for those students that never made a mistake in their whole damn life, but also the unremarkable kids.
I understand there are logistical challenges with expansion, but it is the only way to close the various achievement gaps in our society. If we believe we provide a great education, and I believe we do, let’s fight to give it to more students. I promise you, they are worthy.
@Anonymous >Cornell is an ivy
Do you really expect people to take you seriously after that?
@Anonymous The last fat Cow squeeze before its collapse…
@Anonymous Increase in revenue through expansion of the College may be just one of many strategies to pay the unfunded costs of building up Manhattanville. The debate generated by the prospect of expansion is, for the central administration, a useful distraction from the real issues – that Bollinger has undertaken costly and ill-informed projects that are inadequately supported. His legacy will be a University struggling with financial burdens (probably for decades) and unable to keep up its quality.
@Anonymous a visionary with a bad process and a worse spending habit
@All about Dues This reasoning is exactly why Country Clubs let everyone in…
@Alum Every building built so far in Manhattanville has been 100% funded with donations. No building is started until it is 100% funded. The new SIPA building is on hold until funded. Jerome Greene, Lenfest, the two new Business School Buildings were all funded with new donations. This does not even include the massive increases in research dollars the new buildings bring in. Columbia is number three in the US for federal funding research dollars.
@Michael Thaddeus I do not think this is true, and I would certainly like to know the basis of your assertion. President Bollinger told Arts & Sciences Faculty meetings years ago that the draw-down of the endowment has been increased to pay for Manhattanville. More recently, the generic names of Manhattanville buildings (“The Forum,” “600 West 125th St.”) suggest that major donors have not come through. One of the two Business School buildings was to be called the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation, but the name has reverted to the plain old East Building after Perelman reneged on a $100 million pledge:
http://web.archive.org/web/20200714135935/https://neighbors.columbia.edu/content/columbia-business-school
https://neighbors.columbia.edu/content/columbia-business-school
@Anonymous Manhattanville is a rare opportunity for Columbia to expand and enhance their facilities, but it could also be a financial disaster if the expansion is rushed. If every building in Manhattanville is built after securing the funding, Columbia would not have to use its endowment nor increase tuition through dubious means such as increasing CC enrollment. Unfortunately, that has not been the case and the administration is rushing to create buildings without appropriate funding, and this is most likely why Columbia is currently faced with financial troubles.
The administration should wait until they secure funding. But with the current rate, it would probably mean that the completion of Manhattanville would take at least four decades, and that’s ridiculous. I hope major donors step up and help Columbia complete the campus by 2030, which was its original goal. If it was Harvard or Yale, every acre of the campus would have been named and completed by now…
@alum Now is a good time for Columbia and Barnard to merge into one stronger (and smaller) university.
@Anonymous Agree. A merged Columbia Barnard would be the best school in the nation by far. Make the Barnard campus a student living center. This is exactly what Harvard and Brown did.
@Anonymous Columbia needs to look for big donors, not increase enrollment. Columbia is third in the world for billionaire alumni, surely they can find some. Columbia needs to raise money for infrastructure and facilities.
@Anonymous Good luck with that. Not naming names, but there is at least one billionaire alum who has been known to walk into alumni events without paying at the door. Everyone is too nice to call the person on it.
@tea name names tips@bwog.com
@Alum This is absolutely ridiculous to expand CC or SEAS or GS. They are way too big as it is now. GS almost has as many students as CC and is already strangling the undergraduate College experience. Classes are packed and go on at nights and weekends. We already have the least space and the least endowment per student in the Ivy League, so expansion would be absolutely insane. There is not enough dorms, dining halls, study spaces, labs, classrooms as it is, so expansion is just wrong. Manhattanville is only for research and grad studies. Yale and Princeton only recently expanded for the first time in over a hundred years due to massive donations that built new dorms, student centers, performing arts centers, museums, athletic centers, etc. Harvard’s class is actually smaller than it was fifty years ago. As soon as Columbia builds new dorms, student centers, athletic centers, study and social spaces, they can consider expansion.
@Anonymous “strangling the undergraduate College experience.” Lol, take a chill pill
@Anonymous This is absolutely ridiculous to expand CC or SEAS or GS. They are way too big as it is now. GS almost has as many students as CC. Classes are packed and go on at nights and weekends. We already have the least space and the least endowment per student in the Ivy League, so expansion would be absolutely insane. There is not enough dorms, dining halls, study spaces, labs, classrooms as it is, so expansion is just wrong. Manhattanville is only for research and grad studies. LYale and Princeton only recently expanded for the first time in over a hundred years due to massive donations that built new forms, student centers, peHarvard’s class is actually smaller than it was fifty years ago.
@It's over Might as well rename the place Columbia State.
@Anonymous This article fails to understand the core issue at hand. The admissions rate for CC and SEAS was like 3% this year. Admissions to elite institutions is becoming decreasingly meritocratic and increasingly like a lottery. It is unsustainable. We cannot be a hedge fund educating the children of our investors, and this means dramatically increasing undergraduate enrollment. There are legitimate concerns, specifically with respect to student housing. We cannot forget that students at the school of general studies are already not guaranteed housing from the university. However, this does not mean that increasing access to elite higher education should not be the top priority of the university. In my view, concerns about student life and faculty access are largely overstated here. More students likely mean more opportunities for participation in student life, not less. Moreover, the current issues with faculty access from my experience revolve around not enough students utilizing office hours, not the other way around.
Overall, I think this is a well-researched article, but it presents undergraduate expansion in the same light that the republican party presents expanding immigration. The university should be diligent about addressing the concerns of faculty and students, but not at the expense of the thousands of qualified applicants who are denied admission every year because of a misguided obsession with prestige by the university and its students.
@Anonymous There are 8 billion people in the world, and a good fraction of them would benefit from a Columbia education. But if Columbia doubled or tripled its enrollment, the quality (not just the prestige) of its education would tank. There have to be some limits on growth, if only to ensure that Columbia has the physical space to house and teach its students in the heart of Manhattan. Students are right that they deserve to be consulted.
@Anonymous So first of all, yes, more people around the world should have access to quality higher education (or education generally). That is a structural problem that needs to be dealt with by world governments, not Prezbo.
Where this argument goes off the rails is the implied belief that an education at Columbia or Barnard is somehow better than an education at Ohio State or NYU. It is not. There are only so many ways to teach calculus and organic chemistry at the undergraduate level, and there is little distinction between institutions in material, class size, or teacher quality. You are not getting a better education at Columbia, you are getting a better brand name.
I would challenge you to find a single class at NYU (whose freshman class is about the size of our entire undergrad population) that is materially worse in quality than a class at Columbia or Barnard.
This is all to say, yes, there should be limits on growth, but we are not particularly close to that limit. This may mean developing the campus beyond Morningside Heights, but I think that is well worth it to expand access to the university.
I understand that physical expansion can be controversial, so I should also note that I agree that any physical expansion of the campus should address concerns about gentrification and other sociocultural concerns.
@Anonymous meh, i have friends at other LACs, and compared to what I see at CC, completing an entire major is about as hard as completing our core. i have friends in other engineering programs, SEAS is a hundred times more rigorous. there is a difference, and if you don’t think there is, check out some bulletins from other colleges. don’t sell columbia short here.
@Anonymous True, that. But that makes Columbia an outlier, even within the Ivies. The other 7 schools are not nearly as rigorous in undergraduate education. The whole point of an Ivy is getting in. Every single Columbia graduate has to read more books and write more papers than many Brown alums combined.
@Anonymous Exactly. Let Brown “aggressively expand”. Given the opportunity, there are more than enough indolent, alcoholic sex perverts that would line up to give Brown their money.
@student agree to some degree. note that the 3% admission rate was probably because of the pandemic, past years it’s been around 5-6%. but thats semantics, because it feels like it’s clearly stated that the goal of expansion is making more money for the university – are students just cash cows now? additionally, there is already no space for undergrads on campus: theres a housing waitlist, no study spaces, crowded dining halls, shitty prof/student ratio. we are so cramped as it is, and adding 300-1,000 more students will make it worse. if they care about expanding access, maybe they should make it livable for the current students first, and only then see how many more students campus can actually accommodate.
and finally, if they really cared about students, why did they hide this from us? were they ever planning on asking for student input? shady business…
@Anonymous I don’t know that the stated goal of the expansion is making more money for the university, perhaps that is more implicit. My personal preference, and where I think student consultation could come in handy, is demanding that any expansion to the undergrad population comes close to exclusively from families making under $150,000 per year.
Also, students are cash cows, this is a business masquerading as a non-profit. It also happens to provide tremendous upward mobility for a lot of people from varied backgrounds. That is why I feel it is imperative for us to expand; to allow less remarkable students onto our campus and give them the opportunities associated with elite higher education. As I addressed above, this likely means a physical expansion of the campus.
Let’s assume though that physical expansion is not politically or financially tenable for the university, and we cannot physically accommodate students currently as you argued above. Is it your opinion that we should shrink the undergrad population? Would we be better served bringing our admissions rate down to sub-2% for CC/SEAS and sub 5% for Barnard? Who exactly does that level of exclusivity serve?
@Anonymous The administration clearly is doing this to make more money. Therefore, they absolutely will not listen to any demands that expansion should favor low-income families, and they absolutely will not physically expand the parts of the campus devoted to undergrads. They will just cram more students into the existing space.
@Anonymous paragraph that begins with “Why expand now” makes pretty clear that the goal of expansion is to make money.
I don’t think we should shrink our undergrad population, but instead physically expand as needed to accommodate them first, and only then think about adding more students. I agree that columbia should expand in the long run, but doing it now seems like they’re grasping for anything that will boost the endowment, without taking into account infrastructural changes that will need to be made.
@Alum Taking more students who can’t afford tuition would only further cripple the university. Why pay more millions in aid? Actually, taking students who can pay full tuition would make more sense if the university needs money. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford didn’t become the wealthiest universities in the world by taking poor students. They take the wealthy, the VIPs. Money brings more money.
@Anonymous Oh hi Lee. Just FYI your rogaine order was delivered to my house in error. I’ll bring it this afternoon when I come by to visit with Mrs. Bollinger.