What drives graduate student numbers?
Interesting to sees the levers of scale. This is a piece about expansion at Harvard (the Allston expansion), drives by the shift to science and engineering (the proportion of students choosing applied math, computer science or engineering has gone from 6 to 20% (of the total annual intake of 2000 students)
Harvard’s Allston expansion ‘the next great innovation centre’ | Times Higher Education (THE)
The shift in student preferences towards science and engineering is creating a far greater net need for space than would be created by growth in other fields. More science and engineering students means more academics and classes, which in turn means more graduate students to help teach those undergraduates, which in turn means more lab space to house the graduate students [emphasis mine].