Like elite clubs, elite colleges also refuse to increase number of seats

The cut-off for admissions to the liberal arts and science colleges of Delhi University were published last week.

It turns out that, in order to get admission in the ‘best’ colleges, a student needs at least 99 per cent in the class 12 exam — and even then admission is not absolutely guaranteed. For that 100 per cent are needed.

This is on the supply side of students. But what about the supply side of seats in colleges?

In India, the central and state governments have ensured that the supply of seats keeps expanding, even if the demand is not fully met. That, given our population, is nearly impossible anyway.

As a result of this, intervention colleges whose classroom and teaching capacity is, say, for 1500-2000 students now cater to twice or even thrice that number.

However, there are a few colleges, protected by Article 30 of the Constitution, that have single mindedly refused to increase the number of seats.

The worst offender in this regard is an elite college in Delhi University. It admits less than 1,000 students to less than 10 courses!

But it’s academic standing since the mid-1990s no longer matches the social prestige attached to it. In that sense it is more like a club than an educational institution.

Same in the US

A research paper by Peter Q Blair & Kent Smetters (NBER Working Paper No 29309) published in September says this is exactly the case in the US also.

The authors, who have dug deeply, say “while college enrollment has more-than doubled since 1970, elite colleges have barely increased supply, instead reducing admit rates.” 

This has happened even though the quality of students has improved. It seems the difference between those who are given admission and those who are denied it is virtually non-existent or indistinguishable.

They then go on to show that “colleges compete on prestige, measured using relative selectivity or relative admit rates.” The key determinant, they say, is prestige. Thus, the greater the weight given to it, the lower the number of seats on offer. 

In India this is achieved by keeping the number of seats and courses on offer more-or-less constant.

For the US, the authors have constructed a model that takes prestige into account. They have looked at declining admission rates and find that if you take prestige out of the equation, the decline is inexplicable.

Admit rates at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale, they say are “today around 5 percent or one-quarter of their 1990 values. Similarly, admit rates at The University of Chicago and Penn, which exceeded 40 per cent as late as 1990, stand at less than 10 per cent today. In contrast, admit rates among non-elite colleges have increased over time. Falling admit rates is unique to elite colleges.”

The usual explanations don’t suffice to explain this difference between elite and non-elite colleges.

To quote the authors, “we show that the decisions of elite colleges is consistent with a model where colleges value prestige, which is measured either as their selectivity… or by their relative admit rates.”

In a nutshell, in the US the demand for seats and their supply are inversely related to prestige.

To ensure that this doesn’t result in a steady reduction in the number of seats on offer, in Europe the governments fix the number of seats in the elite colleges. This leads to a steady increase in the number of such seats.

In India, we do this for all non-minorities run colleges. In that sense our democracy is more advanced, a fact that the US vice president should note.