Summer/Fall 1999

A critical strategic choice that St. Lawrence faces, in view of the fact that the number of high school graduates is again growing and will grow slowly for the foreseeable future, involves enrollment size.
As our admissions recruitment continues to improve, should we take advantage and increase enrollment? More students would benefit from a St. Lawrence education, and the University could invest the increased tuition revenue to strengthen the educational experience even further, thereby making us even more attractive.
Or, should the University retain its current size and seek greater admission selectivity which would create a much more stimulating environment? While that should also make the University more attractive to prospective students, it would involve forgoing additional tuition revenue in the short run.
There is much less debate on this issue that I anticipated. My recommendation, and that of my senior staff colleagues, is to resist the temptation to improve revenues by intentionally increasing freshman enrollment. Improving selectivity, we argue, will have a great impact on St. Lawrence’s short-and long-term admissions recruitment success than will investing the additional dollars from higher enrollment in program improvement. If enrollment is to grow, it should be as a result of improvements in student retention and in admission yield (the percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll). In other words, we grow either because we are better meeting the needs of our students after having selected them better (retention goes up) or because we become much more attractive to prospective students. It is intentional growth with its correspondingly lower selectivity that we want to avoid. The trustees agreed with this strategy when we discussed it with them recently.
Why would one make such a decision? There are four important reasons. First, we know from increasingly comprehensive and definitive research that selective residential liberal arts college like St. Lawrence have larger and more positive impacts o their students than do other colleges and universalities because we are more committed to, and can afford financially to, engage in key educational “best practices” such as high levels of student-faculty interaction, emphasis on diversity and on writing, and opportunities for student research. In other words, we are all about providing environments where students and faculty can work together in a kind of mentor/apprentice relationship. Other things equal, increasing enrollment without simultaneously maintaining the richness of the educational environment decreases institutional effectiveness even as financial benefits may accrue at the margin. We worry that pursuit of additional revenue to invest in the program improvements by increasing enrollment is like chasing your tail: you race faster just to stay in the same place.
Second, growing quantitative evidence supports what we have always believed regarding the positive educational and career (including lifetime income) impacts of attending college with classmates who are intelligent and motivated. A recent paper by Caroline M. Hoxby and Bridget Terry Long (“Explaining Rising Income and Wage Inequality Among the College-Educated,” Harvard University, April 1999, unpublished) indicates that “colleges have become more stratified on [student] aptitude over time, [and] within-college variation in aptitude has fallen…” High-ability students are becoming increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of selective and wealthy institutions. These institutions, in turn, can afford to supply more of the educational best practices that affect student outcomes.
In addition, Hoxby and Long show, attending college with other able and highly motivated students adds its own independent impact: High aptitude people who have attended college at a place where the student body is full of other high-aptitude students earn more. To fail to seek greater selectivity, especially with regard to seriousness or purpose and motivation to learn as well as native ability, is to choose not to pursue a critical educational benefit prospective students can find at institutions that are more selective, and those are the institutions we compete with for students.
Third, even beyond the social justice reasons for pursuing student diversity, research indicates positive educational impacts associated with attending a college with a diverse student body. But high-ability students of color gravitate disproportionately to the most selective colleges. Greater selectivity is thus, in my view, of critical importance in attracting a more diverse student body.
Finally, if these reasons weren’t enough, changes in selectivity have quicker market impact than does increasing enrollment to increase net tuition income, investing in improved programs, and then communicating those improvements to prospective students and their families. High school counselors, in particular, watch institutions like St. Lawrence constantly to see how competitive we are. Few people outside on intuition watch with similar devotion to see where programs are improving. Such improvements must be part of business as usual, for in the long run they are recognized by the market. But they can be done with resources found elsewhere, and not via growth in enrollment.
I take you through all of this because “how big is St. Lawrence and how big do you want it to be?” is almost always the first question those unfamiliar with us ask me. Our choice to stay small is not based on mere convenience or inertia. It is based on our belief that staying small and seeking greater selectivity will maximize the educational and lifetime career impacts of a St. Lawrence education on our students.