Northeastern University - Institutional Master Plan

shmessy said:
We know two girls who recently were accepted, but on condition that they start first on the "Global Program" - - meaning either first or second semester Freshman year to be done abroad. This is all because of the awful dorm crunch. Northeastern needs to build,build, build dorms. There is a real scarcity situation.
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They could like you know... accept less students. This is a self-afflicted problem.
 
shmessy said:
We know two girls who recently were accepted, but on condition that they start first on the "Global Program" - - meaning either first or second semester Freshman year to be done abroad. This is all because of the awful dorm crunch. Northeastern needs to build,build, build dorms. There is a real scarcity situation.
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They’ve been doing this since at least 2014 (when I was a freshman). It used to be part of their strategy to game the US News reports, I thought, rather than dorm scarcity.

393b40 said:
They could like you know... accept less students. This is a self-afflicted problem.
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Until 2020, they had been accepting fewer and fewer people every year as seen in their falling acceptance rate. I think the problem was that more people would actually say “yes” than anticipated.
 
Blackbird said:
They’ve been doing this since at least 2014 (when I was a freshman). It used to be part of their strategy to game the US News reports, I thought, rather than dorm scarcity.
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That's NUin, which was a first semester program to game the US News reports. Incoming freshmen weren't counted in acceptance rate statistics since they weren't considered enrolled as of the first semester. That is obviously no longer its purpose since US News doesn't consider acceptance rate as a ranking metric anymore. Not sure what the goal of this new program is (assuming the info is accurate, I haven't heard of it yet) where you can choose either first or second semester, though dorm scarcity definitely seems like a possibility.
 
areiss said:
That's NUin, which was a first semester program to game the US News reports. Incoming freshmen weren't counted in acceptance rate statistics since they weren't considered enrolled as of the first semester. That is obviously no longer its purpose since US News doesn't consider acceptance rate as a ranking metric anymore. Not sure what the goal of this new program is (assuming the info is accurate, I haven't heard of it yet) where you can choose either first or second semester, though dorm scarcity definitely seems like a possibility.
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BU does the same thing. All CGS students enter in January so that their stats do not show up in the fall figures.
 
Blackbird said:
They’ve been doing this since at least 2014 (when I was a freshman). It used to be part of their strategy to game the US News reports, I thought, rather than dorm scarcity.



Until 2020, they had been accepting fewer and fewer people every year as seen in their falling acceptance rate. I think the problem was that more people would actually say “yes” than anticipated.
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Exactly this. Their yield was much higher than expected for this current freshman class. NEU expects usually 1 in 4 students who receiver offers to commit to the university, but it was closer to 1 in 3 this year.

The whole notion of yield is a tough one to nail at any university and it's not a problem unique to NEU. It just happened to hit them particular hard the last admissions cycle.
 
True, but CGS students, who have historically lower stats than students admitted to other programs, are now out of the fall stats. Although CGS stats have risen in the last few years.
 
393b40 said:
They could like you know... accept less students. This is a self-afflicted problem.
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Or they could be Boston 2021 and not Boston 1961 and actually GROW???? The real problem is Northeastern has become a far more respected school and higher percentages of the applicants are choosing it.

The answer is to build more dorms. Not to shrink.
 
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For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to choke off the growth of an elite educational institution where innovations and discoveries are being made each year to aid humanity and grow the City of Boston.
 
shmessy said:
For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to choke off the growth of an elite educational institution where innovations and discoveries are being made each year to aid humanity and grow the City of Boston.
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The only real argument against it, and it's a valid one, is that they don't pay taxes. So it's basically turning (potential) taxable property into untaxable property. Maybe my understanding there is too simple, but I don't want to see entire neighborhoods swallowed up by non-taxable entities.
 
DZH22 said:
The only real argument against it, and it's a valid one, is that they don't pay taxes. So it's basically turning (potential) taxable property into untaxable property. Maybe my understanding there is too simple, but I don't want to see entire neighborhoods swallowed up by non-taxable entities.
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LightView and the proposed 840 Columbus dorms do pay taxes. Northeastern has no intention of expanding its footprint beyond its current 73 acre campus. The IMP shows that there is tremendous space on its current campus to build new buildings e. g. demolishing Cabot and Forsyth after a new athletic center is built on the site of the Gainsborough Garage.
 
TomOfBoston said:
LightView and the proposed 840 Columbus dorms do pay taxes. Northeastern has no intention of expanding its footprint beyond its current 73 acre campus. The IMP shows that there is tremendous space on its current campus to build new buildings e. g. demolishing Cabot and Forsyth after a new athletic center is built on the site of the Gainsborough Garage.
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Oh yeah, the independent dorms do pay taxes. All the more reason not to oppose the one at 840 Columbus! I bet it turns out shorter, extremely fat, and doesn't have enough beds to satisfy demand. Our new mayor will probably call that a win. (in case you can't tell I am not bullish about future construction prospects in Boston)
 
DZH22 said:
The only real argument against it, and it's a valid one, is that they don't pay taxes. So it's basically turning (potential) taxable property into untaxable property. Maybe my understanding there is too simple, but I don't want to see entire neighborhoods swallowed up by non-taxable entities.
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Question 1: Is Northeastern University a net economic "plus" or a net economic "minus" to the city of Boston?

Question 2: Are the non-university residents of the area surrounding Northeastern net economic "plus" or net economic "minus" to the city of Boston?

I would agree that there are social arguments to be made for or against Northeastern swallowing up that neighborhood, but economics ain't one of them.
 
Why not build a mixed development on the Tremont Crossing site with lots of subsidized housing? That huge site is sitting vacant while the activists nit-pick and have an existential meltdown about 840 Columbus, a site that Northeastern has owned for over 50 years.
 
HarvardP said:
Question 3: Does treating people as pluses and minuses make you a trashy guy? Yes, yes it does.
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Pardon me. What part of

" I would agree that there are social arguments to be made for or against Northeastern swallowing up that neighborhood, but economics ain't one of them."

-did you not understand?

You also chose to ignore the fact that, in the other part, the word "economic" immediately preceded the words "positive" and "negative".

The better question is what motivates you to keep posting personal attacks. I fear the probable answer deserves our deepest pity.
 
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TomOfBoston said:
" Please note: this meeting is not focused on the proposed 840 Columbus Avenue project. " Any word on this project? Is Mayor Wu holding it up?
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Mayor Wu has been in office less than 90 days. That project has been in the works almost 2.5 years since at least November 2019. I don't think Wu is to blame:

boston.curbed.com

Northeastern University wants to develop another privately built and operated dorm

The Roxbury development would replace yet another surface parking lot in the city and would likely free up a lot of residential space for the general population.
boston.curbed.com boston.curbed.com
 
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shmessy said:
Question 1: Is Northeastern University a net economic "plus" or a net economic "minus" to the city of Boston?

Question 2: Are the non-university residents of the area surrounding Northeastern net economic "plus" or net economic "minus" to the city of Boston?

I would agree that there are social arguments to be made for or against Northeastern swallowing up that neighborhood, but economics ain't one of them.
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For what it's worth, I got this book for my mom (who taught for 30+ years at an elite, albeit highly suburban, campus, responsible for not iota of "gentrification" given the sociological status of the zip code it's embedded in):

https://www.harvard.com/book/in_the_shadow_of_the_ivory_tower/

"Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities."

discuss as you will...
 
DBM said:
They bring diverse ideas and people together
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This isn't true in the case of Northeastern seeing as the school's demographics are less diverse than the city's (last time I checked).
 
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