The December 26, 2007 New York Times reports that Harvard and Yale and a number of other elite institutions have become breathless at the growing number of outstanding candidates for admission that they receive each year and are thinking of expanding. There have been murmurs of this in The Chronicle and in Ivy alumni magazines as the idea has been spun out over the past half year.

During my tenure as president of two universities I grew them both. There seems to be no principled reason why if a university wants to get bigger it shouldn’t. What I don’t understand is the justification that institutions are giving for their proposals. They fret that the size of their campuses are finite, the applicants of outstanding aptitude almost infinite, and they are depressed by the thought of having to turn remarkable young people away. Surely, even if they expand, this will continue to be true. Harvard cannot open its doors wide enough to accommodate all the valedictorians in America and from around the globe that want to matriculate in Cambridge. Will adding a couple of hundred seats be transformational? Surely not. They confront an ever-retreating horizon.

And, more to the point, where do these potential students, when denied admission, go presently? If they are right now on the edge of being admitted to Yale and Stanford, it is hard to believe they are homeless when the academic year begins. Some institution has found a place for them. Are they any the worse for having enrolled for their degrees a cut below the purple?

As someone who has chaired the Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee for the District of Columbia and Maryland for half a dozen years, I have seen candidates who were remarkable, brilliant youngsters from a wide range of institutions, some of which I confess I never heard of. They seem to have been well served by colleges large and small, universities modest and grand, from New York to California. They are principled, articulate, clearheaded, appropriately ambitious, well read and prepared; in a word, they are sound. The thought that unless one has earned a degree at one of 20 name brand institutions is just silly. And offensive.

This is easily demonstrated by looking at where students who enroll at medical schools and law schools and graduate programs have done their undergraduate work. They come from everywhere. And they go on to have distinguished scholarly and professional careers serving their own aptitudes, their professions, their communities and the nation. If universities want to enroll more students, they ought to feel free to do so as long as the integrity of their mission is not compromised. But they ought not feel obliged to utter rationalizations that suggest that unless you take a degree at one of the handful of US News & World Report’s chosen, you are doomed to a life of despair.