Following up on various things I’d seen around the tubes, I was surprised (as US readers may well not be) to discover that most of the Ivy League universities only have around 5000 undergraduate students (altogether, they total around 50 000), and, more strikingly, that this number doesn’t seem to have changed in decades (I found this tablegoing back to the mid-1980s but from what I can tell, the numbers were much the same back in the 1950s). In fact, you could throw in Stanford, Chicago and all the top-ranking liberal arts colleges without reaching 100 000 overall.
A few thoughts about this over the fold