Increasing student enrollment is not a sustainable plan to help offset the budgetary shortfall. Though an easy way to generate funds in the form of tuition dollars, the plan, according to the Student Enrollment Task Force Report, would “place significant strain on the core of the University” and therefore should not be enacted.

The administration hastily added an additional 100 students to the incoming class that arrived on campus this fall. This move, which generated some spare change for the University before long-term cost-cutting plans were devised, was a quick fix. But relying on increased enrollment when times are tough is not a sustainable plan for the future.

We applaud David Harris, deputy provost, and Susan Murphy ’73, vice president for student and academic services — co-chairs of the student enrollment task force — for so candidly presenting their findings to the community in two open forums that discussed the task force report on student enrollment. At a brown-bag lunch in Duffield Hall and at a later public forum, the two administrators pointed out that Cornell could net an additional $20 million by increasing the number of students.

But the Cornell that would come of this plan, they conceded, is not the Cornell that exists today.

Housing, for one, is a current problem that would only be exacerbated by a greater number of students. Freshmen are already being displaced to alternative housing — be it the program houses or the dorms in Collegetown — and many transfer students were denied the opportunity to assimilate to on-campus living by being housed downtown in Schuyler House. Dining halls would be forced to cater to hundreds of extra patrons. Services like Gannett would be over-burdened. And class sizes would only swell.

We firmly believe that the two administrators had the student’s best interests in mind when they drafted this report. Financial aid, they assured, would go unaffected. And raising tuition was deemed an unreasonable plan.

Harris and Murphy recommend that such a plan only be implemented if — and only if — the University would otherwise have to turn to reducing faculty in order to generate an additional $20 million. If this is the case, and the provost deems this “next-to-last resort” necessary, we strongly suggest that graduate student enrollment be increased as well, so that the burden does not exclusively fall on the undergraduates.

The ripples felt by the graduate student community as a result of increased enrollment would be far less in magnitude than the effects on the undergraduate community, as the latter cohort is much more dependent on student services like dining and housing. The task force report for the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, for example, suggests the creation of new masters programs that would utilize existing resources — professors, facilities, etc. — while providing more money for the College and University in the form of tuition. The report suggests that such masters programs could span multiple departments and in this way distribute the associated costs across the University. Further, these new programs would not detract from undergraduate programs or reputation.

We strongly urge Provost Kent Fuchs to cut administrative costs before resorting to increased student enrollment. If the financial situation is so dire that tuition dollars must be increased, we hope the University looks to a model similar to the one put forth by AAP. Implementing such programs University-wide to service both undergraduates and graduates alike could increase enrollment while preserving the undergraduate experience.