AVELLINO: Rutgers is not big enough
Before I came to Rutgers in 2022, I was a student at Northeastern University. Northeastern has a lot of unique qualities that did not quite work for me, which is why I write for The Daily Targum and not The Huntington News, but I respect that it is a good fit for many students not named Noble Avellino.
It also had a severe housing shortage. During my year at Northeastern, the school accepted more students than it thought would enroll, a record-breaking 4,504 students.
As a result, it had to upsize a lot of its residence halls. It rented, then purchased, hotel rooms as a substitute for traditional residence halls. And, though nominally a solution for air travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, it added a Boston branch to its study abroad program. Suffice to say, for a medium-sized university, we were pretty snug.
It definitely felt silly to say that a chunk of your students are lodged in the Sheraton or that you were studying abroad in Massachusetts. On top of this, discovering you have two more people to potentially cause you grief and trouble instead of just one is a justifiable anxiety.
But I also think about the 4,504th student, the one who just squeezed in at the end of the acceptance list and was able to live and study in Northeastern because the school made that "mistake." Maybe they really wanted to benefit from the school's co-op program. Maybe they really love losing to Rutgers. Who knows? I cannot possibly understand every student's situation.
The Rutgers community was murmuring about similar issues at the beginning of the semester. Though exact apples-to-apples comparisons for the Class of 2028 enrollment are difficult because Rutgers only lists combined enrollment for Rutgers—New Brunswick and Rutgers Health, we know the following:
The Rutgers Class of 2025, my class, had 7,283 enrollees for the New Brunswick campus
The Rutgers Class of 2027, students enrolling just two years later, jumped to more than 9,900
Combined enrollment for the Rutgers Class of 2028 in New Brunswick and Rutgers Health topped 10,000.
We also know that Rutgers hit 99 percent capacity earlier in the semester and had to convert residence hall lounges into living spaces.
Since then, I have heard many anecdotal complaints about the number of students on campus and how many Rutgers will continue to enroll. The University just joined the Common Application and hit a record 76,900 applicants, according to the Targum. Students I have spoken to are uncomfortable with the idea that the buses will get a little more packed, classes a little tighter and the housing a little less comfortable.
I want to reach higher than saying it is bad to complain about over-enrollment. I do not yet think Rutgers is reaching enough students, and we should constantly ask ourselves how big we can feasibly be.
Universities are places where we go to study, get a degree and make more money than we otherwise would. More so than other types of schools, large public colleges drive this kind of economic mobility.
The Wall Street Journal's Social Mobility Index, a similar ranking identifying how schools help their poorest students, finds similar results: of the top 20 schools for social mobility, 17 are public.
The U.S. News and World Report has a more narrow metric that only looks at statistics related to Pell Grant recipients. But do you want to guess what type of schools dominate that list for which schools are actually lifting up people's incomes? (Rutgers—Newark is No. 6!)
It should not surprise anyone that schools like Rutgers drive economic mobility in the U.S. They offer relatively cheap tuition rates, especially for in-state students. They receive lots of funding from state and local governments, and because they are not definitionally elitist institutions like the Ivy Leagues, they have lower application thresholds.
It makes our national obsession with the admissions process for a handful of schools seem stalkerish. As of 2023, the U.S. had north of 20 million undergraduates, only a tiny fraction of whom are at schools like Yale, Princeton or Harvard. We should be focused on increasing university accessibility, which means paying attention to schools like Rutgers.
Can we accept every student? No. It is sad but true that there is only so much space. But that should not be a catalyst for getting upset at the number of students here. It should not even be a reason to tell Rutgers that they are accepting too many people.
There are never enough people.
I want us to discuss ways to constantly grow and allow more people into our school. I want a dynamic debate about whether we need this parking lot space and what additional residence halls could look like. Maybe, just maybe, a couple more doubles from singles might be worth it to give more kids a chance at a world-class education.
Complaining about overcrowding and too many people is small potatoes. We should think big.
Noble Avellino is a senior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and minoring in political science. Avellino’s column, “Noble’s Advocate,” runs on Mondays.
*Columns, cartoons, letters and commentaries do not necessarily reflect the views of the Targum Publishing Company or its staff.
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