From TFA : The shortage of classroom space is an emergency situation. Of course, athletic facilities can be considered a luxury, but the same cannot be said of classrooms
With an average tuition fees of 50k wtf are they doing? The world is moving on and this is no way to stay competitive in the education market.
Seeing the amount 50k written out like that today, it seems like a pretty good deal. It looks like less the amount of annual equity that an entry level software developer makes. It's the price of a used truck, a kitchen remodel, a really nice family vacation for a month, etc.
Wtf kind of entry level software jobs are you talking about lol? 50k is 11k more than the median family income here in Canada. You're right, though, it's still less than a new truck.
I could see a good argument for making an ivy league school with an enrollment of 100k, simply to break the ivy league elitist bullshit.
This complaint is about reaching one tenth the size of a good UC. (Berkeley: 41k, Davis: 35k, UCLA: 45k) Berkeley's student faculty ratio is 19:1, while the article is complaining about fluctuations between 7.1:1 and 7.5:1. Yes, larger facilities are needed to handle growth to UC size, but capping student population at 19th century levels even as population grows is its own kind of pathology.
Showing up in person is its own kind of pathology. If they offer masters online, why not undergrad? There's a lot of threads here with amazingly tone deaf people who are just "go to school" or "get a masters" when the gating factor is magicing up 4 years of potentially repeat credits to get your undergrad after already being a working professional.
That kind of masters is just credentialism, like the corporate certs people pay for. They are a good moneymaker for the universities.
There are other kinds of masters, like one attached to an extended bachelor’s (more classes, a project and/or do-op) or as a consolation prize for dropping out of a PhD program. These are more academic.
What population growth? The US college age population is flat, and the US grade school age population is dropping. US population growth is mostly old people living longer.[1]
New York City's population is declining. Not the whole metro area, just the city.
New York City grew by 700,000 people between 2010 and 2020, while the metro area grew by 1.15 million. I’m not sure where you’re getting the declining figures from?
Edit: I misread the graph, as the reply points out.
Looking at the linked graphs, looks like you're right over the last five-ish years and quite wrong over the last twenty years: the number of 15-20 year olds grew from 20M to 40M since 2000, and has only been flat for a few years.
I think you may have accidentally clicked on the timeseries for 55 to 64 year olds, which is understandable because the colors for the two are really close.
55 to 64 year olds have increased dramatically over the past 20 years, due to baby boomers getting older. Like the parent comment said, though, the numbers of 15-24 year olds have been more or less flat over the last 40 years.
Yes _and_ ...
the same issues also apply to the UCs. E.g. there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley increasing the size of its incoming class by a third. But my understanding is there was never a plan to increase faculty by the same proportion, or a plan to create 1/3 more classrooms.
After having pushed so hard to bring instruction back to campus, Berkeley is asking a significant share of incoming freshman to do only online classes, which both increases the burden on faculty and removes some opportunities from those students.
In 4 years will we see the graduation rate drop because class registration became more competitive and competent students cannot meet all their requirements? Will the distribution of majors change towards those that are most compatible with a hybrid, "I'm not sure whether I'll get a seat in the room" instruction?
> the same issues also apply to the UCs. E.g. there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley increasing the size of its incoming class by a third.
Well, no, the reason there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley's class size is that a local activist group got a judge to say it was illegal for Berkeley to increase admissions.
Why are NIMBYs not activists? I've always found it odd that the same people whose property is taxed are told they shouldn't have a say in what's built with the money and are wrong for protesting such projects.
The fact that there are local and state political forces involved making arguments you may disagree with does not mean these issues (student:faculty ratios, classroom space, etc) don't apply.
It makes them irrelevant. There's only one issue at play with Berkeley's expansion: they're supposed to file an environmental impact report. Student:faculty ratios and classroom space aren't part of the discussion.
I think they'd not be entirely incorrect in that view. No school will grow 7x-20x and maintain the same standards in admissions, in education, or in alumni achievement per-capita.
They'd instantly become the Ivy League Safety School, which would deter many of the strongest future applicants from applying and deter many of their strong admits from choosing that school if they had multiple Ivy admittances.
Is the quality of education really better? My understanding is it's all just selection or an IQ test - strongest apply, strongest get in, places hire them based on the prestige of the name.
Even if that is the sole and exclusive source of the prestige*, I think that effect would persist among the 7 Ivy League schools who didn't turn themself into a safety school, because the "strongest get in" effect would be strongest at those 7.
I do think education differences would also occur. It's simply not possible to scale undergraduate lectures, recitation, labs, lecture and small group spaces, etc, by a factor of 7-20x and keep the same quality. (At a minimum, it's not possible to do so quickly/in a single step.)
* I think it's a majority of the source of their prestige, but not exclusive.
As someone who went to a state school for undergrad and an ivy for phd (and took some undergrad cs classes there), and I can say that yes, the undergraduate classes are definitely much harder at ivy league schools, at least in stem.
> Is the quality of education really better? My understanding is it's all just selection or an IQ test - strongest apply, strongest get in, places hire them based on the prestige of the name.
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
> "... if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers ..."
That is interesting and surprises me: Certainly many elite jobs are available to Harvard graduates that aren't available to most others. I wonder how that fact (AFAICT) reconciles with the claim about income.
> That’s not “education” directly
Agreed - the market doesn't reward education, but how well you serve their particular corporate needs. Education isn't vocational training, especially at better schools.
Growing rapidly and still no where near a big school. The article even states that with the growth it's not that much bigger than the smallest ivy league as viewed through the context of comparing all schools.
Do you have any evidence of prestige not dropping with increase in size or lower selectability? Can you name a large Ivy League?
This seems to hint at the idea that larger institutions are not as prestigious:
"A serious loss of prestige for French universities : in spite of their 12% of foreign students (rank 2 in Europe after UK) , the French universities no longer attract the best students from the whole world; the recent ranking made by the University of Shanghai of the 500 best universities of the world is awful for the French national pride (the best one ranks 65th) : the good teaching and research centers are too small, and the big universities are not good enough ;"
The point of the essay is buried deep within after a long preamble: facility space at Columbia is an emergency situation. It should rather start out with that fact.
The article clearly objects to mindless growth. It talks about
measuring growth and the effects of growth, over-filled classrooms,
student stress, stretched resources and the strain on teaching staff.
But _nowhere_ do I see a single word on _why_ growth is desirable? It
just doesn't get discussed. It's so baked into the assumptions behind
the article that in fact the word "why" does not even appear in the
text.
This is an ivy-league university falling into the tragic abyss of
modern unreason - the reckless pathology of blind management.
> Yale Provost Ben Polak told the Washington Post, "At no point in the
expansion did we think we'd do it to raise money for the
university. This is about access."
That's Yale. But the the article properly deals with the simple
tradeoff between "access" and quality at Columbia. It's a bad deal.
Nobody benefits.
> President Bollinger in an interview says, "We have to have growth as
the institution evolves."
No we do not! This a bare, unqualified, ideologically rooted and - in
the current milieu - frankly insane statement.
Give me a single good reason why, when all factors considered growth
leads to poorer student and staff experiences, we "have to have" it?
Educational institutions are the rocks on which the endless waves of ignorance crash and are broken. Educational capactiy thus needs to grow with the overall population. And if you don't grow the elite schools - or build new elite schools - you lock the society into oligarchy, as the relative size of the 'elite' grows smaller and smaller, educating the Sackler children while locking out increasing proportions of talented kids from less advantaged class backgrounds.
There is plenty of education already. It's just not Ivy League education. I don't see why we need to increase Ivy League enrollment at the expense of other schools, since the Ivy League is mostly a positional good (it marks you as more qualified than other people, so if more people enjoy it then it loses its value).
Isn’t this the failing of all of economics? Everyone modeling anything always assumes Constant growth is the only acceptable way of survival with very little proof. Often with a very bad underlying assumption that we don’t live in a zero sum game (which we clearly do).
Couldn't embracing remote learning have solved most of these problems? I took a few classes over the last two years and loved remote learning. I don't get why it was so quickly cast away.
Peter Thiel has a fascinating perspective related to top universities and their enrollments:
> "You could say that it's an investment good, where you're investing in the future, or a consumption good, a four-year party. I think that most parents and students think of college as an insurance policy, this ever more expensive insurance so that students don't fall through the growing cracks in our society"
> "It's not an insurance policy at all. It's a crazy tournament. It's a zero-sum tournament. If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we're going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you're really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that's got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It's branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum."
Two, growing class size this much is not easy, as additional housing is required.
Three, part of the value proposition of elite schools is to be surrounded by smart ambitious people, and to have the prestige associates with the school to be more competitive in the future. Thiel is right this is partially bad, but realistically competition is inherently part of capitalism. The same is true of top tech companies - their value proposition is not just an absurd salary, but the prestige of working at eg Google and having that on your resume.
And fourth, Stanford offers a lot of online certificates, and has SCPD admissions. Georgia Tech has a whole online Masters degree that has had thousands if not tens of thousands of admits. The trend is for education to be more accessible, not less.
Granted, I'm biased as someone who went to Georgia Tech and Stanford. But this take by Thiel is entirely reductive, even if it does have a grain of truth to it. Much of life is zero sum (what is job hunting if not that) and while it's not ideal, it's silly to single out elite colleges as being bad for it.
I think your reading a little too much into the quotes. As I understand, he's correcting - or at least explicating - a mistaken assumption commonly promoted by parents to their children, school counselors to their students, and politicians to their constituents. He's not singling out top-tier academic institutions, but doing the opposite by demonstrating that they're no different from the Olympics. Many will enter, few will win.
With that said, I disagree that much of the world is a zero-sum game. You couldn't have innovation if that was the case.
I think you're misreading your source. Didn't run all the numbers, but the bars represent total applicants and the green lines represent overall admit rate.
Graduating class year 2024: 47498 applicants * 4% admit rate = ~1900 students admitted
Graduating class year 2017: 38828 applicants * 6% admit rate = ~2330 students admitted
Seems to be going in the wrong direction, but that's only two data points.
He is not exactly an example of how to make it without stamp of approval from the elite. Stanford, high level clerkship, high level jobs. He played the game extremely well until he decided to jump. If anything his early career demonstrates that it's worth to build the perfect resume.
I graduated from Columbia College in 2014. Everything about the overcrowding of dorms, classrooms, dining halls, libraries and especially the gym made my undergrad experience far more painful than it should have been.
There was, strictly speaking, enough space. But the space was often low quality: dark, windowless hallways; dorm rooms in old high rises whose windows faced inner air shafts rather than the street. It was comical.
I always assumed it was just a New York problem. But as this article explains, the actual problem is investment in the campus. There would be absolutely no problem academically or culturally with Columbia expanding (doubling, tripling?) undergrad enrollment (obviously this assumes they could find enough new teachers--huge assumption of course). It's already so big you will go through your four years and never meet most of your classmates. What is there to lose?
I don't think Columbia is as worried about prestige or exclusivity as peer schools. What they're worried about is placing as many graduates as possible in high paying jobs in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. As they rightfully should be. I don't think this goal would be harmed by raising enrollment, if the commensurate investments were made.
All of that being said, I personally think the ideal college is something like a Deep Springs, with a low double digit enrollment of students living and learning together in the middle of nowhere and spending a large amount of their time not just studying but working. If I could wave a wand and dissolve the Ivy League and replace it with 1000 Deeps Springs scattered across the rural Northeast, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But universities are big businesses (someone once said "hedge funds with schools attached") so this will most likely never happen.
I recently spent time on Columbia's campus. If you are complaining about the facilities, you might visit some other schools, including community colleges.
Ah, any such "expansion" would need more money, and the main job of the President of a university is to raise money. Soooo, we can conclude that the President of Columbia is trying to raise money. We ever expected something else?
56 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadWell I hope they manage to find it somewhere.
With an average tuition fees of 50k wtf are they doing? The world is moving on and this is no way to stay competitive in the education market.
This complaint is about reaching one tenth the size of a good UC. (Berkeley: 41k, Davis: 35k, UCLA: 45k) Berkeley's student faculty ratio is 19:1, while the article is complaining about fluctuations between 7.1:1 and 7.5:1. Yes, larger facilities are needed to handle growth to UC size, but capping student population at 19th century levels even as population grows is its own kind of pathology.
There are other kinds of masters, like one attached to an extended bachelor’s (more classes, a project and/or do-op) or as a consolation prize for dropping out of a PhD program. These are more academic.
What population growth? The US college age population is flat, and the US grade school age population is dropping. US population growth is mostly old people living longer.[1]
New York City's population is declining. Not the whole metro area, just the city.
[1] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-a...
Looking at the linked graphs, looks like you're right over the last five-ish years and quite wrong over the last twenty years: the number of 15-20 year olds grew from 20M to 40M since 2000, and has only been flat for a few years.
55 to 64 year olds have increased dramatically over the past 20 years, due to baby boomers getting older. Like the parent comment said, though, the numbers of 15-24 year olds have been more or less flat over the last 40 years.
After having pushed so hard to bring instruction back to campus, Berkeley is asking a significant share of incoming freshman to do only online classes, which both increases the burden on faculty and removes some opportunities from those students. In 4 years will we see the graduation rate drop because class registration became more competitive and competent students cannot meet all their requirements? Will the distribution of majors change towards those that are most compatible with a hybrid, "I'm not sure whether I'll get a seat in the room" instruction?
Well, no, the reason there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley's class size is that a local activist group got a judge to say it was illegal for Berkeley to increase admissions.
The elitists would simply view that larger school as inferior.
They'd instantly become the Ivy League Safety School, which would deter many of the strongest future applicants from applying and deter many of their strong admits from choosing that school if they had multiple Ivy admittances.
I do think education differences would also occur. It's simply not possible to scale undergraduate lectures, recitation, labs, lecture and small group spaces, etc, by a factor of 7-20x and keep the same quality. (At a minimum, it's not possible to do so quickly/in a single step.)
* I think it's a majority of the source of their prestige, but not exclusive.
What is your understanding based on?
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That’s not “education” directly, but does suggest an extremely strong applicant pool selection effect is happening.
That is interesting and surprises me: Certainly many elite jobs are available to Harvard graduates that aren't available to most others. I wonder how that fact (AFAICT) reconciles with the claim about income.
> That’s not “education” directly
Agreed - the market doesn't reward education, but how well you serve their particular corporate needs. Education isn't vocational training, especially at better schools.
The OP says Columbia is growing rapidly, yet there has been no such reaction. Who are these "elitists"? Can you cite such a reaction?
This seems to hint at the idea that larger institutions are not as prestigious:
"A serious loss of prestige for French universities : in spite of their 12% of foreign students (rank 2 in Europe after UK) , the French universities no longer attract the best students from the whole world; the recent ranking made by the University of Shanghai of the 500 best universities of the world is awful for the French national pride (the best one ranks 65th) : the good teaching and research centers are too small, and the big universities are not good enough ;"
http://www.understandfrance.org/France/Education.html
You made the claim, so it is up to you to prove it.
The article clearly objects to mindless growth. It talks about measuring growth and the effects of growth, over-filled classrooms, student stress, stretched resources and the strain on teaching staff.
But _nowhere_ do I see a single word on _why_ growth is desirable? It just doesn't get discussed. It's so baked into the assumptions behind the article that in fact the word "why" does not even appear in the text.
This is an ivy-league university falling into the tragic abyss of modern unreason - the reckless pathology of blind management.
Well no. In this case the universal answer fails.
> Yale Provost Ben Polak told the Washington Post, "At no point in the expansion did we think we'd do it to raise money for the university. This is about access."
That's Yale. But the the article properly deals with the simple tradeoff between "access" and quality at Columbia. It's a bad deal. Nobody benefits.
> President Bollinger in an interview says, "We have to have growth as the institution evolves."
No we do not! This a bare, unqualified, ideologically rooted and - in the current milieu - frankly insane statement.
Give me a single good reason why, when all factors considered growth leads to poorer student and staff experiences, we "have to have" it?
It's all money regardless of what they say.
Isn't that at the top of the article?
> "You could say that it's an investment good, where you're investing in the future, or a consumption good, a four-year party. I think that most parents and students think of college as an insurance policy, this ever more expensive insurance so that students don't fall through the growing cracks in our society"
> "It's not an insurance policy at all. It's a crazy tournament. It's a zero-sum tournament. If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we're going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you're really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that's got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It's branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum."
For one, Stanford admissions are growing over time (even if admit rate is dropping) - https://ivyleagueprep.com/stanford-university-class-of-2024/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-...
Two, growing class size this much is not easy, as additional housing is required.
Three, part of the value proposition of elite schools is to be surrounded by smart ambitious people, and to have the prestige associates with the school to be more competitive in the future. Thiel is right this is partially bad, but realistically competition is inherently part of capitalism. The same is true of top tech companies - their value proposition is not just an absurd salary, but the prestige of working at eg Google and having that on your resume.
And fourth, Stanford offers a lot of online certificates, and has SCPD admissions. Georgia Tech has a whole online Masters degree that has had thousands if not tens of thousands of admits. The trend is for education to be more accessible, not less.
Granted, I'm biased as someone who went to Georgia Tech and Stanford. But this take by Thiel is entirely reductive, even if it does have a grain of truth to it. Much of life is zero sum (what is job hunting if not that) and while it's not ideal, it's silly to single out elite colleges as being bad for it.
With that said, I disagree that much of the world is a zero-sum game. You couldn't have innovation if that was the case.
Graduating class year 2024: 47498 applicants * 4% admit rate = ~1900 students admitted
Graduating class year 2017: 38828 applicants * 6% admit rate = ~2330 students admitted
Seems to be going in the wrong direction, but that's only two data points.
There was, strictly speaking, enough space. But the space was often low quality: dark, windowless hallways; dorm rooms in old high rises whose windows faced inner air shafts rather than the street. It was comical.
I always assumed it was just a New York problem. But as this article explains, the actual problem is investment in the campus. There would be absolutely no problem academically or culturally with Columbia expanding (doubling, tripling?) undergrad enrollment (obviously this assumes they could find enough new teachers--huge assumption of course). It's already so big you will go through your four years and never meet most of your classmates. What is there to lose?
I don't think Columbia is as worried about prestige or exclusivity as peer schools. What they're worried about is placing as many graduates as possible in high paying jobs in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. As they rightfully should be. I don't think this goal would be harmed by raising enrollment, if the commensurate investments were made.
All of that being said, I personally think the ideal college is something like a Deep Springs, with a low double digit enrollment of students living and learning together in the middle of nowhere and spending a large amount of their time not just studying but working. If I could wave a wand and dissolve the Ivy League and replace it with 1000 Deeps Springs scattered across the rural Northeast, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But universities are big businesses (someone once said "hedge funds with schools attached") so this will most likely never happen.