You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt:
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But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive.
Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):
Princeton: 5,336
Harvard: 6,658
Yale: 5,405
Columbia: 6,068
Stanford: 7,063
Chicago: 5,590
Duke: 6,655
MIT: 4,503
Upenn: 9,682
CIT: 997
Dartmouth: 4,193
That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.
By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:
McGill: 30,000
UBC: 47,500
UofT: 67,000
So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students."
Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...
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I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten.
I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money.
I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.
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" But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive.
Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):
Princeton: 5,336
Harvard: 6,658
Yale: 5,405
Columbia: 6,068
Stanford: 7,063
Chicago: 5,590
Duke: 6,655
MIT: 4,503
Upenn: 9,682
CIT: 997
Dartmouth: 4,193
That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.
By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:
McGill: 30,000
UBC: 47,500
UofT: 67,000
So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students."
Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...
----------
I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten.
I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money.
I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.