Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery

The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.

This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.

Deep dive into this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...

> The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US

Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.

There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.