UMass Student Government Endorses Enrollment Cap

Source: Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts

University of Massachusetts-Amherst Student Government Association (SGA) endorsed at their meeting on April 17, capping the University’s enrollment. 

An official limit on enrollment would set a fixed number of students that could attend the state’s flagship university at any given time. This is crucial not only for the wellbeing of UMass’ community but for all other public universities in Massachusetts. The SGA charged that the UMass administration has irresponsibly admitted too many students for the University to handle, resulting in overpopulation that makes the college experience worse for everyone. 

SGA asserted that by enrolling more students without adding new housing, the University has only worsened the existing housing crisis. Facilities from dining halls to gyms to classrooms to the library have seen a similar decrease in quality due to the simple inability to accommodate all of the students that need to use them.  Meanwhile, as universities across he country see wavering enrollment prospects due to escalating costs, Massachusetts’ state universities – the workhorse of Massachusetts’ public university system – are facing an existential crisis due to plummeting enrollment, as the Boston Globe recently reported. An indirect cause of this is UMass over enrolling year after year, such that students who would have gone to a state university instead go to UMass. 

Setting a cap on UMass’s enrollment would both allow UMass to more effectively use its resources and ensure that students continue to enroll in Massachusetts’ essential state universities. It would also force UMass to stop relying on growing enrollments to make up for insufficient funding from the state, and instead confront this problem head-on.