No one affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh should have been surprised when it overenrolled the first-year class again this year. One of the primary goals for the University’s Plan for Pitt 2028 is increasing enrollment — from 20,220 students in fall 2023 to 22,000 by 2028. The University is a business, and they are doing what businesses do — making money and finding ways to make more. As tuition and fees are the second-largest source of income, overenrolling may help balance out the $25 million lost in research funding since the beginning of 2025.
The administration saw this coming. The class of 2025 marked the largest graduating class of high school seniors due to a birth rate spike in 2007. Therefore, it made sense when Pitt’s 2025-26 first-year class had almost 1,300 more students than the year before, with Dietrich alone growing by 476 students.
A logical solution is to make the campus larger, but as Pitt students know, there is little room in Oakland for that — the neighborhood is already overflowing with people, academic buildings and traffic. As a student myself, when Pitt chooses to prioritize construction projects like Victory Heights — a six-year, $240 million athletic center — and the new recreation center, instead of housing — which has not started construction yet — it can feel as though the student body itself is not a priority. It would have been possible to start construction on new dorms or apartments years ago when the University released plans to increase student enrollment in the Plan For Pitt…