The admissions office housed in Rosenwald Hall.

In 2018, after two decades of steady enrollment growth, former Dean of the College John Boyer said it would soon be time for the College to stop growing. Once undergraduate enrollment reached 7,000, the number of College students would “plateau.”

Now, nearly a decade after Boyer predicted the end of the College’s years of rapid expansion, the University has abandoned those plans. Last month, Provost Katherine Baicker told faculty at an invite-only town hall that the University hopes to expand the College from its current 7,500 students to 9,000, which she framed as a return to a pre-pandemic growth trajectory.

“Gradually expanding the size of the College over time has allowed more talented students to benefit from the University’s distinctive and rigorous academic experience while strengthening the impact of the University’s educational mission,” a University spokesperson wrote to the Maroon when asked what had changed since Boyer promised a “plateau” in enrollment. “The University will continue to plan for College growth in a way that supports the quality of the undergraduate experience.”

More students should have the opportunity to benefit from a UChicago education. But expanding access while preserving quality might not be so easy.

Our worry is not that UChicago will admit less deserving students, but rather that the experience UChicago offers those new students—and the other students in the College—will be diluted because there are fewer resources to go around. Can this university, with its budget already stretched thin, truly hope to grow the undergraduate population by 20 percent without compromising the quality of the undergraduate experience?

UChicago’s expenses have exceeded revenue every year for more than two decades, and that deficit has only grown over the past few years, reaching a peak of $288 million in fiscal year 2024. Although the University has since managed to cut that deficit nearly in half to just $160 million, administrators remain in the midst of a four-year plan to eliminate it entirely.

Aside from the pleasure of cultivating more of the next generation’s most brilliant minds, the single most obvious thing the University stands to gain from this expansion—and has gained from past expansions—is additional tuition revenue.

In 2025, the College generated roughly $320 million in revenue from tuition and student fees after institutional scholarships and grants. Scaling that figure to 9,000 undergraduates could mean around $60 million in additional revenue.

But expanding the College would also cost money—substantial investments in residence halls, faculty, classroom space, and other academic infrastructure—if the quality of a UChicago education is to remain unchanged at a larger scale. The University has offered few details about what the costs of an expansion might entail—a worrying sign given its financial situation.

Where Will We Put Them All?

The most immediate obstacle to expanding the College is space. Our residence halls simply don’t have the capacity to hold an influx of new students.

UChicago’s seven existing dorms can house roughly 4,600 students. As of fall 2024, 58 percent of undergraduates lived on campus, including about 20 percent of upperclassmen after accounting for the first- and second-year on-campus housing requirement.

The University could theoretically manage to expand the undergraduate population to 9,000 students without also expanding residential capacity or eliminating the on-campus housing requirement—but that would essentially force all upperclassmen off campus. Last spring, the University told the Maroon it aimed to do precisely the opposite and increase the proportion of undergraduates living on campus to 70 percent, which would require substantial additional residential capacity in itself, student body expansion aside.

The University, in other words, is setting itself up to build several potential new dorms, notoriously expensive endeavors—the University’s most recent housing projects have each cost upwards of $100 million. Enterprise Chief Financial Officer Ivan Samstein told the Maroon last year that “the cost of constructing [residence halls] exceeds how much you’re able to charge students”; a University spokesperson further described campus housing as a “net cost.”

Investments in additional residential capacity are not optional, and they are notably inconsistent with the University’s recent rhetoric about wanting to “slow” its spending growth. Even with the additional tuition revenue expansion will bring, an investment on this scale could end up slowing progress toward the University’s more immediate goal of closing its budget deficit on a strict four-year timeline.

The Same Education at a “Fairly Minimal” Cost

Even if the University can find the space to house all of these new students, the question of who will teach them remains.

The College currently boasts a 5:1 student-to-faculty ratio. In order to maintain that reported ratio with 9,000 students, the University would need to hire roughly 300 additional faculty, which would easily cost tens of millions of dollars per year at minimum.

The University did not respond to specific questions about how student-to-faculty ratios would be affected or whether it planned to hire additional faculty—tenure-track or otherwise—to bridge the gap.

Notably, University administrators have previously suggested that enrollment growth need not be accompanied by proportional faculty growth. In 2017, then-Provost Daniel Diermeier reportedly told the Board of Trustees that the “marginal cost” of expanding the student population would be “fairly minimal” if it wasn’t accompanied by a similar increase in research faculty. According to professor Clifford Ando, the University intends to hold research faculty numbers constant even with this most recent expansion, meaning that teaching loads will be further shifted to instructional professors.

There is every indication that Ando’s concerns are well founded. Despite decades of student population growth, the number of tenure-track faculty at the University has remained remarkably stable since the 1970s, hovering at around 1,150. Meanwhile, Baicker said last month that a new faculty committee has been considering how to best allocate teaching responsibilities, even suggesting that instructional faculty might be better suited than research faculty to teach some classes.

Administrators’ comments and past practice together suggest that if the University does attempt to salvage its student-to-faculty ratio, it will almost certainly rely on hiring instructional and other non-tenure-track faculty—staff the University hires only to teach, not to research, and who are paid far less than their tenured counterparts—rather than expanding its research faculty.

That would represent a further departure from the educational model the University has historically prided itself on. In 2010, Boyer told UChicago Magazine that the expectation had “always” been for tenure-track faculty to teach the majority of all classes, in the College or otherwise. Yet, over the past two decades, the number of instructional faculty at the University has nearly tripled, climbing from 214 full-time non-tenure-track faculty in 2002 to 604 in 2024.

The consequences of those hiring decisions have already been felt in the classroom. In 2021, Faculty Forward—the union that represents non-tenure-track faculty—estimated that non-tenure-track faculty taught “roughly half of all classes in the College,” up from 35 percent just three years prior.

We are not arguing that instructional faculty are inherently inferior—many of them are exceptional researchers and dedicated educators in their own right—but the University’s increasing reliance on them speaks to changing institutional priorities.

One of the defining aspects of any research university, UChicago included, is that undergraduate education is intertwined with research. Directly below a tally of its most prestigious faculty research awards, the College’s admissions page notes that over 80 percent of undergraduate “choose to engage in research”; the College’s homepage emphasizes the University’s mission to connect “the field-defining expertise of our faculty” with undergraduate students; and the University regularly showcases undergraduate research projects across its communications. Research, and the faculty producing it, is central to UChicago’s undergraduate experience, at least according to its public-facing websites.

But those opportunities depend on having enough research faculty for students to learn from and conduct research alongside. Replacing research faculty with teaching-only appointments fundamentally alters the relationship between education and research that UChicago was built upon and dilutes the undergraduate experience.

A Return to the Plateau

Promoting expansions to the College as efforts to make UChicago more like its peers is something of a tradition.

In the late ’90s, University President Hugo Sonnenschein justified plans to enroll an additional 1,000 students to the College—then just over 3,600 students—as a means of bringing UChicago closer to its peer institutions. Two decades later, Boyer said that the College wanted to expand to 7,000 students—“about the same size as Harvard.”

At its current 7,500 students, the University has achieved that goal, which is perhaps why it has not explicitly cited any peer institutions this time around. But if peer institutions have historically informed the University’s thinking about enrollment, perhaps they should also inform its thinking about what makes expansion feasible.

Columbia University offers a useful case study. Last year, it enrolled its largest-ever undergraduate first-year class, with 1,806 students—a roughly 20 percent increase in enrollment, not unlike the one UChicago hopes to embark on.

In order to accommodate the expanded first-year class, some students were evicted from on-campus housing weeks before the start of the term and some courses in Columbia’s Core Curriculum saw increased class sizes and shortened lectures.

Clearly, enrollment can easily outpace the infrastructure required to support it. If the University intends to avoid similar disruptions, it must be prepared to invest in the housing, classrooms, faculty, and other resources those students will require well ahead of time.

Allowing more talented students access to a UChicago education—as the University says this expansion is intended to do—is, objectively, a good thing. But the University has yet to explain how it’s going to do that while preserving the close faculty engagement that has long defined a UChicago education.

Now, the University faces two diverging paths: either it can make the costly investments in faculty and housing necessary to preserve the quality of a UChicago education at this scale, thus diminishing much of the financial upside of expansion; or it can forgo those investments entirely and condemn future undergraduates to a worse college experience. The University’s track record suggests it will choose the latter.

Until it can somehow demonstrate that growth will actually strengthen this institution, the University should abandon its plans to expand the College to 9,000 students—and stick to Boyer’s plateau.

Olin Nafziger and Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon have recused themselves from this editorial due to reporting conflicts.