This meeting was envisaged by the organisers as the first of a continuing series of short, informal conferences within the general area of applied stochastic processes. The twenty-seven participants were drawn mostly from statistics and mathematics departments of British Universities, but also included a small number of biologists and geographers. The meeting was notable for its pleasantly informal atmosphere, and the consequent lively interchange of ideas, although for future meetings in the series a better balance between statisticians and applied scientists should, we feel, be effected.

The paper explores three different aspects of spatial modelling for systems in statistical equilibrium; that is, systems which are both mean and covariance stationary. Attention is primarily directed at models relating to observations for a single time period.

The slogan which forms the title of this note was coined in the 1960s by the opponents of large scale university expansion. It was maintained that an increase in student numbers could only lower academic standards. The purpose of this note is to show that more can mean better or worse according to the criterion used. The theorems proved in the main part of the paper give formal statements of intuitively obvious results, but the amount of misunderstanding generated on this topic suggests that such an exposition is worthwhile. The conclusion of the note must be that comparisons of academic achievement, based on varying proportions admitted to higher education, should be interpreted with great care.