(04-09-2018 04:38 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  Contrary to your statement, there isn't a slowdown in applications at Swarthmore - it had a 14% increase in applications this year and had its lowest acceptance rate ever at 9%:

You're right. I'm still thinking this is 2010, when they started a deliberate admissions increase, with an increase in international students (while the national rate declined). It helped boost the applicant numbers; Swarthmore is taking more people. Still hard as heck to get into. Still not so generous with need-based aid.

To read it from their student paper, the operational budget is seeing some strain against the return of the endowment. Whatever is going on there, they are a whiny bunch. And, it seems what their own say from the inside runs at a contradiction to what other data is out there.

So, bad example. My bad.

There are others like Oberlin out there, but seem to bounce around and back. And it's especially rough when your enrollment isn't very high to begin with. All it takes is a bad recruitment cycle; a bad admissions and recruiting team that isn't super-aggressive in achieving targets (and it's brutal to begin with; it's probably the most thankless role in all of higher ed), and your numbers plummet.

I'm sure heads are rolling at Oberlin for it, or will soon. And, that, too, cuts more than once. It's not uncommon for faculty to kick a place when it feels it's down, and that's obviously happening at Oberlin now. Even for the common sense things, like trimming budgets. It's a class completely out of touch with reality, and they help nobody airing their opinions about it.