Skool is big
If there was one thing I loved about my undergraduate education, it was the size of the school. My personality type fit in much better at a small engineering school than it ever would have at a large public institution. Not to say that those places are bad, but I’m certainly glad I went to a place with a small, close-knit campus.
However, it bothers me to see that the school is “getting larger”. I read this year that RHIT’s freshman class is at 525, a record over last year’s 490. I believe my freshman year, which was almost 10 years ago, we had a class of right around 400. Since the classes tended to get smaller in size throughout the four years, there were like 1350 students that year. Now they’re getting dreafully close to the 2000 number. That’s a very big increase for small facility.
I don’t like it, and I’m not certain yet if it’s a good thing for the school. Granted, I’m not there on a day-to-day basis, and perhaps they are merely keeping up with high demand for people wanting to go there. But, there certainly was a large percentage of people in my freshman class that never should have stepped foot on that campus (as evidenced by the fact that many of them didn’t make it more than 1.5 years — someone could have saved them that money by not admitting them in the first place. )
Simply, I’m curious when the growth is going to stop. What’s the optimal size for RHIT? 1350 sure felt like a good size to me. 2000 seems highly maximal. And I’m not looking forward to hearing about 2500, or 3000. Someday the growth will have to stop, or RHIT won’t be the same RHIT that I went there for and enjoyed so much. I hope they know what they’re doing.
August 28th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Agreed. I wonder, however, how much of it was due to more kids accepting enrollment offers than in the past. IU had the opposite happen last year, which resulted in one of the smallest classes of the last decade.
August 28th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
That’s one of the great things about Franklin; enrollment is kept as close to 1000 as possible. Although I haven’t keep close tabs on enrollment numbers at U of I, I’m pretty sure they try to grow enrollment every year. I’m not quite sure why though; they don’t have that much room to grow.
August 29th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Yea, I think there were 375 people in our class Freshman year. We have four guys from Rose here and we were all complaining about that last week. We kept telling the Purdue people that before you know it, Rose will be as easy to get into as Purdue. I’m all about exclusionary practices.
August 30th, 2006 at 7:22 am
The goal for total students at Rose-Hulman was 2,000 by the year 2,000. That number was set in the early ’90s. Due to construction not being finished and other delays (funding for said construction), it didn’t happen. Ideally, 525 is a bit larger than Rose would like (the goal being 500 per class), but more people committed than usual based on the number accepted. From my understanding, and I was privy to a couple of these talks, 2,000 is the maximum size of student body the administration would like to see. That is, unless, the new administration decides differently. However, due to campus size constraints, that is doubtful.
August 30th, 2006 at 7:34 am
But that doesn’t make sense. The senior class is always significantly smaller than the freshman class, so a frosh class of 500 means a senior class of something like 330.
500 + 440 + 380 + 330 = 1650
Not enough grad students to make up the difference.
I’d say they’d have to be shooting for around 600 freshmen to get 2000 students. But even then, it seems too big.
August 30th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
i know we had a big friggin’ class my freshman year, but dont’ remember how big. i also agree with the people that should have never stepped foot there. for instance, kevin brannin, great guy, smart guy, lazy guy. before getting accepted to rose, his plan was to go to ivy tech, but he applied to rose because it was free… and how many other people from my class didn’t make it through sophomore curriculum, let alone freshman year…
September 7th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
I knew of a few people in the class after ours that were accepted to Rose but not Purdue. Corbin called it right, I can still think of a half-dozen that never should have been there… and ended up with 25k in loans from a lax admissions policy.