I’m a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a longtime member of the Wisconsin AI Safety Initiative, a software engineer, and an aspiring AI safety researcher. I’m also a researcher at UChicago XLab and a Coordinator at UW-Madison’s Undergraduate Projects Lab.
My research currently focuses on differentiable geometry, optimization, and AI alignment.
Go Badgers!
I agree with your title, but cannot agree with your solution. Some of the issues you pointed out are not intentional decisions universities could remove without major restructuring:
Having a sizable portion of International students necessarily subsidizes the cost of higher education for domestic students. Studies found that at public research universities, a fall in state funding led to an increase in foreign student enrollment, and I think similar trends affect most private LACs and even the top elite schools, although the latter to a much smaller degree. I believe universities also likely need a portion of international students to maintain their global reputation and ranking. Simply removing international students would require a huge funding and incentive shift from the status quo.
Additionally, college standardized test scores are biased towards the highest income earners. If we only admitted students with 99th percentile (1500-1600 SAT) scores, it would produce freshmen classes full with almost only children from the richest families, arguably less meritocratic than the system we currently have. This distribution might be less skewed if we purely used test scores, but that trend is likely to remain.
I agree with some points very strongly:
This is true. The supply of spots at America’s top institutions is artificially constrained. Here, I’m focusing my criticism on just T15/T10 schools. Given their large endowments and access to top instructors, I strongly believe that these universities should all expand their freshmen class sizes by 10-20%. Despite the US and the world population increasing over the past 50 years, their class sizes have not kept pace. This helps increase the “prestige” of these universities in the rat race towards a lower admissions rate while increasing their rankings, but it has the socially irresponsible effect of making a social good, elite education, increasingly scarce. It also has the ripple effect of overwhelming the next best options for students, flagship state schools, which unduly burdens the public university system to maintain private schools’ elite status.
If we built the infrastructure (mainly to make space) and mandated a reasonable increase in freshmen class size over time, we could make elite admissions less competitive, reduce the feeling of “randomness,” and allow universities to continue some of their selective practices.