(Source: Claremont McKenna College)According to a recent piece on Inside Higher Ed, several elite liberal arts colleges are hoping to grow their enrollments, sparking debate on campus about ideal size. Some of these institutions aim to increase diversity, including numbers of international students.



Here's a bit:

"It is unquestionably the trend to increase," says Richard H. Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. The enrollment increases can create economies of scale, broaden diversity of students and programs, and make institutions more competitive, he says.

But even if the trend is clear, it is hard to know how much colleges can grow without a loss of identity. "The debate is how far you can go without losing a sense of a small community," he says.

The primary motivations for increasing in size vary from campus to campus. At Amherst, the increase is part of a broader proposal about academic priorities. Key enrollment goals identified in the report were increasing the number of low-income students and the number of international students, for whom Amherst would for the first time be pledging to meet full financial need.

Anthony W. Marx, president of Amherst, says that there won't be any financial gain for the college from having more students because the additional slots are specifically for those groups of students, who will end up getting full scholarships. But admissions slots at a place like Amherst are quite valuable, too, and Marx says that by growing modestly, the college can diversify without creating "a sense that it's a zero sum game."

"Obviously there are concerns about constituencies, whether they are minority students or legacy students or scientists or athletes or artists," Marx says. "If it was possible for us to do what we need to do for education and society without anyone feeling that it came as a cost to them, why wouldn't we do it that way?"Read the rest here.