Class size

Class size Concerned Parent brought up an issue in Bens blog (about halfway down the page at this point) about increasing class size at MIT, and how this would merely require more students to live in uncomfortable living situations. I was originally going to post this in Bens blog but it sort of turned into an entry of its own. I am dismayed that this year and next apparently represent the largest college applicant pool ever nationwide. As I understand the situation this is somewhat a result of more people going to college, a lack of additional colleges having been built, students taking longer than 4 years to graduate, but mostly I hear the problem is due to the baby boom generations offspring. This last thing I cited is an anomaly. What I dont quite understand is the lack of preparedness by the colleges nationwide to accommodate this aberration. I entitled this post Where there is a will.there is a way for a reason. All the wonderful words spoken in these blogs will not help these brilliant young students. I dont understand why colleges dont offer up more triples. Yes, it will be cramped. However, offering this up in advance gives people the opportunity to just say No if they are not interested. Allot a certain number of rooms as triples. I did read somewhere where someone said triples were awful. The gist of the post was that people need space. I dont know how horrible that kind of situation really is when you consider perspective on things. A horrible situation is what happened in New Orleans. How is living in Africa these days? or living in Baghdad? Allot a certain number of rooms and allow the individuals to decide for themselves. I also would suggest that you require people who wish to accept under these conditions to actually visually see what these conditions look like. From a student perspective, I assure you that its not just about the living situation although thats certainly a factor. Theres already a great deal of crowding in campus housing, since freshmen are required to live on campus (due to the 1997 alcohol-related death of fraternity pledge Scott Krueger). Theres also not a great deal of affordable off-campus housing this is Boston, after all, and there are literally tens of thousands of graduate students (MIT, Harvard, BU, etc) living in apartments around campus. Many apartment buildings dont allow undergraduates to live there. The housing situation is somewhat nonnegotiable, I think, particularly considering that even forcing doubles into triples, triples into quads, and quads into quints wouldnt create all that much more space. The MIT housing system is a bit unique in that, in most dorms, students (or at least upperclassmen) can have singles if they want them a high proportion of our dorm rooms are singles. And a single, as you might imagine, is not really a large enough space to accomodate two people. Even if you squeeze them in very tightly. But the fundamental problem is that MIT is just not a very big school. There are just 4000 undergraduates here, barely twice more than were in my high school. Having 4000 undergrads rather than 10,000 has a very great effect on our student culture its really possible to know the majority of people at the school. Size is an implicit factor in the sorts of departmental opportunities were able to have. The new Bioengineering major, for example, was considering holding a lottery for students to allow entry into the major because they werent sure theyd have enough lab space to accomodate everyone. In my own major, biology, a lottery is held every term for 7.02. Theres just not enough space in the departments lab to teach everyone. MIT has a limited campus area (see the campus map; were bounded on one side by the river and on two sides by well-developed parts of Cambridge) were not like rural schools which can expand in all directions. Were already reaching a point where buildings are starting to take over all the green space. We are blissfully free of intra-MIT application procedures theres no quota, for example, on the number of people who major in EECS at MIT. Once youre in, you can major in anything you want. I think it would be very unfortunate if MIT had to go the way of large state schools and begin having students apply to a particular major once a student at the school. I believe thats called bait-and-switch, and its not fair. But what else could the departments do, if student numbers exceeded the available teaching space? Our lecture halls are already the cause of the few lotteries we do have to face the HASS-D (humanities distribution) lottery being the prime example. Each term, a certain number of students cant take the courses they wanted to because there arent enough seats in the lecture hall for everyone whos interested in taking 9.00 (intro to psychology), 24.900 (intro to linguistics), and some others. Most classes at MIT arent lotteried, but if the number of students were increased, I have no doubt wed face more. This is obviously a situation students would like to avoid. Opportunities like UROP are available to every student at MIT. If the number of students were increased, however, participation in these programs wouldnt be increased proportionally theyre dependent on the number of spots in faculty laboratories. I, like many of my friends, am paid directly out of my faculty supervisors research funds; he wouldnt pay for three of me. I hope that gives a good overview of why, as a student, I wouldnt want MIT to begin admitting a larger class. Its nothing against all the unbelievably qualified applicants we dont have space for, and I certainly dont intend to convey the impression that Im an elitist who wants to keep out riff-raff or something. But MIT is a small school, and I (and all the other students) love that small-school quality.