Benefits of student body expansion outweigh costs

The university will enlarge its undergraduate population by some 500 students over the next few years. This growth will bring several specific challenges, but also one profoundly important opportunity: to offer a world-class education to more people.

First, the challenges: This campus is currently far from overcrowded, but there are already several significant logistical bottlenecks that will only be accentuated by the presence of several hundred more undergraduates. Selective classes already turn away a large number of students who are eager to enroll. Some juniors already settle for graduate students as advisers for independent work because professors are stretched thin advising seniors.

The administration should publicly discuss strategies to deal with the escalation of these issues and those issues that will arise only when additional students arrive. If precept sizes are to remain the same, the administration should explain where it will find additional preceptors. If the same fraction of students will be offered spots in selective seminars, the administration should note what new seminars it will be offering. And if the administration doesn't intend to expand these programs — which offer students the kind of individual attention they came to Princeton for in the first place — along with the student body, it should say so explicitly. The best way for the University to prepare for the upcoming changes is transparently, with students and administrators jointly anticipating and preparing for the challenges they will soon face.

However, these potential issues should not overshadow the good that can and will come from expanding the undergraduate student population.

Simply put, accepting more students will allow the University to do more of what it does best: turning bright, excited students into well-read, intellectually curious members of society. Standards need not be lowered — the University already receives applications from far more qualified students than it can accept each year. Moreover, with these additional 500 spots, the University could try to seek out students interested in currently underused programs. Recruiting students interested in small academic departments might be the most direct way to create a more even distribution of students among majors.

Accepting more students over the next few years might hurt our selectivity rankings. It may even cost us a spot on a Top Colleges list or two. But what really makes Princeton a top college is the impact it has on its students once they arrive. Why not let Old Nassau have this impact on the lives of more potential Tigers?