An Abundance Agenda for Harvard

Debates over the admissions policies of Harvard and other elite universities are all the rage, particularly as the Supreme Court is hearing arguments today in a case that will likely spell the doom of race-conscious affirmative action. Many at Harvard have reacted with opprobrium to this case’s hearing and to the potential decision, arguing that Harvard’s current admissions regime is necessary to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But the hot, ongoing debates over the substance of Harvard’s admissions policies — whether race or socioeconomic status should be taken into account, whether or not legacy applicants deserve a leg up — are not truly questions of inclusion. Advocates for affirmative action are not attempting to make Harvard broadly inclusionary — a tall order for an institution that is, by its very nature, highly exclusive, most recently accepting fewer than one in 25 applicants. Instead, they wish to alter the distribution of an extraordinarily scarce good: a spot at Harvard. Those on both sides of the debate take this scarcity as a given, moving not to accept more applicants, but instead to engineer precisely which lucky few may access a Harvard education with all its lifelong benefits.

We don’t have to take scarcity as a given. Instead of locking horns over which group of students deserves preference in admissions, we can give up the zero-sum game entirely. We can let more brilliant young people walk through Harvard’s hallowed gates. We can make Harvard abundant.

It’s time to expand Harvard’s undergraduate enrollment.

The unchallengeable assumption that Harvard only has so many spots to hand out limits what Harvard can achieve as an institution. Harvard’s problem with equity and inclusion in the admissions process is not that Harvard admits the wrong set of students — too privileged, too wealthy, too white — but that it admits too few.

Harvard promises from the very beginning a “transformative college experience.” And, at least in the economic sense, it succeeds beyond its wildest dreams. Underprivileged students who attend top universities like Harvard experience extraordinary upward mobility, reaching nearly the same level of income as their wealthy peers. One admissions decision — a “yes” or “no” from Harvard or another top school on the admissions portal screen — might make a large difference in lifetime earnings for a significant group of hopeful teens.

However, it is impossible for Harvard to be this engine of opportunity, mobility, equity, and inclusivity when its admissions numbers have remained at similar levels for the past 20 years, even as application numbers have surged. Expanding enrollment will spread the fruits of a Harvard education far and wide, rather than confining it to a worthy elect.

Still, this proposal would come with some necessary sacrifices. It would require us to let go of the American tendency to see exclusivity as the stamp of prestige and scarcity as the stamp of value, defining our “elite” universities as necessarily small and highly selective. There is no reason they must be: Canada’s top-ranked institution of higher education, the University of Toronto, enrolls over 70,000 undergraduates. Harvard enrolls about 7,000, one-tenth of that number.

There is no tradeoff between the quantity of students and the quality of education, especially with no shortage of potential faculty to hire. A larger community is not a lesser community. It is a more abundant community. What we might lose in the allure of prestige-by-exclusivity is made up for tenfold by the fundamental character of the people and the institution. As Harvard grapples with the scourge of elitism — from competitive club comp processes to a social scene dominated by exclusive final clubs — perhaps a paradigm shift in what creates a valuable college experience is necessary. We can start to define Harvard’s excellence by true excellence of outcome, not simply the artificial excellence implied by exclusivity.

As long as we assume that the aggregate amount of opportunity Harvard can provide is limited to its current level of enrollment, Harvard will never be the force for equity that it tells us it wants to be — and that it easily can become. Open the gates. There is so much more we can do.

Sam E. Meacham ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.