Admissions Impossible Continued

From the New York Times, in an article titled "Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier," about the idea that ever-more-selective elite universities are driving students to apply to less-elite universities, which are as a result becoming more elite:

The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession. High-achieving students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, primarily because of uncertainty over where they will be admitted. Supply, however, has remained constant. Most of the sought-after universities have not expanded their freshman classes.

While the spread of the "Northeastern obsession" is probably an accurate characterization of the last 20 or 30 years of college admissions, I don't think things have changed much in recent years. Moreover, the idea that supply is constant simply isn't true. Per the U.S. Department of Education, here's the percent change in enrollments at Ivy League campuses (in descending order of U.S. News ranking) from 2003 to 2006:

Princeton: +6.1%
Harvard: + 3.0%
Yale: +1.6%
Penn: -1.6%
Columbia: +1.0%
Dartmouth: +0.4%
Cornell: +1.7%
Brown: +5.4%

Seven out eight have increased the number of enrollments, at rates comparable to the overall national increase in the number of high school graduates. As the Times itself reported($) just a couple of weeks ago, Yale is considering a signficant expansion.