> To break up elite colleges therefore, all you need to do is break up the endowments. Siphoning resources from school endowments is actually quite easy.
Wow straight up suggesting we steal money from private institutions to give to politicians to decide how to redistribute it. Totally insane.
The government prints $40 billion like it’s nothing. We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. Maybe we should let the few groups and people that managed to actually accumulate money through their own systems keep the money? Highly likely they will be more effective stewards of capital than the money printing politicians.
> We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air.
It's so weird to see memes like this persist. No, no we didn't.
Those spending bills were financed via deficit spending: they were loans. All spending bills are loans. The treasury department raises money by selling bonds. Every deficit dollar the government spends is a dollar it takes in from some investor somewhere who wanted to park money in US treasuries.
Now, that comes with interest obligations. It's not "free". If the money gets spent rapidly vs. being left in a money market fund or whatever, then it can be a Keynsian growth stimulus or an inflationary pressure (which are pretty much the same thing).
But it's not just printing money! That doesn't happen. People need to stop saying that. Why do people keep repeating something that is so clearly incorrect?
This comment highlights the most crucial insight on QE: it is a relatively novel monetary policy innovation that was implemented as an emergency response to the 2008 crisis on a very large scale and, as such, we had no experience using it. 14 years later, we’re finding out what it means for an economy to have the Federal Reserve buy a large amount of US debt.
QE isn't novel by any stretch, even in 2008. The Federal Reserve had a similar program back in 1930s around the Great Depression and the Bank of Japan has had a full-swing QE program since like 2001.
I don't think we are finding out that much. Most other countries are experiencing the same inflation we are and not all of them deficit spent a lot during the pandemic. Nor do most even have that power.
Surely some of the inflation and really low unemployment is due to QE. But it's likely a lot more of it is due to an economy growing while the active workforce is shrinking and external factors like the pandemic and war in Ukraine causing supply issues.
Notably, it's a temporary creation. As those bonds get paid off, along with interest, the fed must either roll that money over to buy more, or simply disappear it off their balance sheet. Which is part of what they are doing now with Quantitative Tightening or QT.
Obviously* it's not printing money literally. But it's increasing the money supply. When governments deficit spend, they deposit money in private sector banks, increasing their balance sheet. The net result of this is more dollars in and flowing through the economy.
Which is... printing money, pretty much. The idea that it's some kind of moral failing or inherently irresponsible is silly, but the description isn't some crazy conspiracy theory.
* I'm sure some people have the idea that Jerome Powell is walking up to a printing press, turning a crank, and literally printing money. But I'm also pretty sure that no one here is under that misconception.
You call it printing but it happened in response to the private sector desiring to increase its net savings which can only happen if another party goes into further debt. By this logic, saving money is printing money because the money in your bank account is taken out of circulation and stagnates on your bank account, that stagnant money is added on top of the usual supply needed to keep the economy running. This is quite literally a conspiracy theory. Don't you see how ridiculous this framing is?
The COVID relief bills were actually a one-time exception to a 100 year old reality.
1) Congress directly modified the Federal Reserve's charter to give money directly to private persons.
2) There were also payments directly from the US Treasury.
3) There were also things that involved that traditional convoluted process of the Treasury selling more bonds to the international market and pretending not to know that the Federal Reserve is the biggest buyer showing up.
In this case, because of 1), we really did create several trillion out of thin air, from the Federal Reserve itself. Basically Congress always could, but didn't. Easiest way to accumulate dollars is to scare people into believing dollars won't be relevant.
Although the US otherwise doesn't simply dilute the money supply with direct issuances for nothing, opting to primarily create dollars in exchange for corporate bonds and treasuries, there is a market tolerance and demand enough for dollars to support a much greater level of it. Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for anything.
Stop that, you are breaking the illusion. People want a petty conspiracy theory.
People approximate this and think they can just reduce it to one government office when the truth is that literally every single participant in the economy is responsible. If I had to dumb it down I would say that the economy tries to be in balance. If the government appears to be doing one thing, it isn't alone, there are private companies and private individuals doing the complement.
In macro economy it is quite common to split an economy into two asymmetric entities. You, and the rest of the economy. If you earn, they spend, if they spend you earn.
If you borrow (known as printing in conspiracy theory jargon), they save (in aggregate), if they save, you borrow. Of course I am assuming that the balance is being maintained. If someone spends less than they earn, they save but if there is no net borrowing the balance is being disrupted. What happens then is deflation but that implies that the economy is in disequilibrium and must shake off some of the people earning more than they spend. It is kind of ironic that savers want deflation because in a perfect market they would get fired and wouldn't be allowed to work more which prevents them building up more savings.
Mention the Federal Reserve once and someone thinks you are talking about a conspiracy theory.
In any case, I think I was incorrect about the nature of the direct lending program, here is the report from Congress about the CARES Act (the first pandemic relief bill) and how its "expanding the Fed’s traditional role beyond lender of last resort to the banking system and even beyond the more expansive role it took in the 2007-2009 financial crisis"
Its really not a simple "treasury does this, federal reserve does that"
I believe the direct lending program consists mostly of the Fed buying corporate bonds, which is loaning money to private corporations. There is also a component where they can loan to small businesses (notably a business with 200 employees is generally considered "small".
These programs are not handouts, they are loans. The Fed did this in 2008 when they bought bonds and even stock in some big companies.
Overall, the Fed made a big profit on all of that when the bonds were paid back with interest and the stock was sold back in tranches over time as the market recovered.
>> The COVID relief bills were actually a one-time exception to a 100 year old reality.
Disagree that QE-2020 was a "one-time event." I can think back 13 years to 2009 and recall both monetary and fiscal stimulus to provide post-2008 relief.
> People need to stop saying that. Why do people keep repeating something that is so clearly incorrect?
Because they have a better understanding of it than you do.
The Fed buys government bonds, aka "Quantitative Easing." That is printing money. They started doing that after the 2007-8 recession, because just lowering the interest rate to zero wasn't doing enough (in their view). They didn't want to have negative interest rates like some countries did, so QE was the only choice.
QE isn't printing money, it is a way to blend treasuries into a finely chopped liquid so that your bank can keep the asset side of its balance sheet just as liquid as it's deposits. Due to liquidity preferences people prefer liquid assets over illiquid assets and therefore demand compensation to give up liquidity. Since the yield on capital is falling, people prefer holding straight up money over investing it themselves in risk bearing assets, this means banks are being flooded with short term demand deposits that can be pulled out at any time. What QE does is effectively make all banks hold treasuries collectively. If one bank sends $1000 to another bank it doesn't have to sell treasuries at the current market rate and instead they just transfer the bank reserves which are a claim on $1000 worth of treasuries. As demand deposits become a greater share of financial capital, the risk of a bank run on a specific bank becomes higher and higher. Basically any bank is at risk of becoming instantly insolvent. The problem here is keeping excessive savings in money instead of capital.
I hate to resort to cliche, but it's just so apropos here:
You are missing the forest for the trees. You know all the details but none of the big picture.
QE is increasing the money supply. Since you object to the pejorative "printing money" we can stop using that phrase. It's increasing the money supply.
So are home mortgages. So is giving your brother $200 to make rent. So is buying the AR-15 you've been saving for. The money supply is elastic, and responds to economic activity. Harnessing that truth as an engine of growth is the fundamental insight of modern economics.[1]
The contention upthread was some ridiculous hyperbole about "minting dollars out of thin air", and the truth is that... nothing of the sort is happening. At all.
[1] And by extension, arguing against it piecewise like this is tantamount to demanding we all go back to a barter economy backed by hoarded treasure.
How much have those endowments grown through tuitions paid (and increased) by the growth of student loan debt? If there is to be loan forgiveness, it should be paid back from the endowments.
It’s not about destruction but equity. Tax-funded student loans should not be used to grow endowments and should be sequestered. Let donors fund the endowments if they care about the research institutions. Return the people’s money to the people.
Pretty much. Tuition is set by willingness to pay. Most large endowments are actually thousand of small endowments that are earmarked for certain things. Also many of the largest endowments are actually used for giving large financial aid. On principle its not of your business where private endowments come from. The government can of course stop giving loans to anyone and everyone for any amount.
I don't care about private endowments, that's the business of donors. There does seem to be conflicting opinions on whether tax money (student loans) flows into endowments and, if so, that should be immediately shut down.
Almost all endowment increases come from donors and stock market gains. Harvard spends 5+ percent of their endowment per year. It would be trivial if it was happening to prevent tuition going to endowments since tuition is a small fraction of spending at rich universities. Your weird obsession will do nothing to lower costs
Not sure how it's a weird obsession to want to know how tax dollars are being spent on universities, especially given the OP. Do you have something to back up what you are asserting, that endowments are not funded (directly or indirectly) by student loans?
Endowments increase the amount that can be spent. All universities spend all the tuition. Feel free to block tuition from going into endowments; doesn’t matter. https://thedailytexan.com/2019/03/08/ut-now-has-the-second-l... Here is interesting journalism
I'll take a look at the article. If tuition and tax money aren't going into endowments, then I don't really have a problem. To date, whenever I would bring this topic up, it was pretty quickly shut down, which always gets my spidey sense going. The problem of increasing tuition costs is a whole topic in its own right but I think we are also on the verge of bursting the education bubble in general, so that will have an impact.
Unfortunately physical metaphors about “bursting bubbles” don’t correspond to reality. People at 18 and their parents are scared to DEATH of failure. They WILL pay exorbitant tuition at any decent university
This is like saying a public school teacher can't buy a cigarette because his money actually came from "taxpayer funds".
The moment the money enters the teachers account it is no longer taxpayer money. The same is the case for the university. How they spend the tuitions is entirely upto them.
Ya, framing the student loan crisis as "forgiving all student loans" is just silly. Go after the predatory loan companies and the colleges that accepted the loan money. Claw it back from colleges that have been egregiously overcharging while lying about things like the average salary of graduates from whatever program.
I honestly don't understand this colloquial language of "printing money" just call it what it is, borrowing money or just plain old debt. There is no need for secret ingroup language or additional indirection, there is no conspiracy here. The real world is more boring than you think.
The government borrowed money and increased its debts by trillions of dollars, that alone is insane enough, there is no need for some mythical "money printing" that is supposed to be the last straw that breaks the camels back.
However you want to phrase it, politicians can pass a bill and get $2 trillion to hand out instantly. They don't need to seize money from private institutions and billionaires to fund their waste.
The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.
Creating a top tier school would be hard with a large pile of money, but would be a lot easier if you started with a large pile of money and Harvard.
This is an argument against the article. But the article's plan could be used as a threat. Use it or lose it, expand your enrollment substantially or we'll tax your endorsement away.
Creating a top tier university with a big pile of money would be trivial. Match every grant dollar for dollar, provide lab space and free tuition for 30 years and you’d have the most productive faculty and the best students overnight. It would just cost 10s of billions.
"The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking" (from wikipedia)
It is indeed ~free ($1600/year) for Swiss residents at least, and gets most of its funding from the Swiss government.
I would take issue with the "overnight" bit though - the ranking above was not its ranking 30 years ago when I was there (and the EPFL took its current form in 1969). It also took a concerted effort to hire the right faculty, probably recruit the right graduate students, etc, etc.
What's interesting is that, from my experience, they are one of the few schools that don't recruit from the same "pool" of talent as everyone else.
If you want to do engineering in French, it's either score a spot at EPFL, or go to Polytechnique in Paris (very small) or all the way to Polytechnique in Montreal (8 hours flight time?).
> If you want to do engineering in French, it's either score a spot at EPFL, or go to Polytechnique in Paris (very small) or all the way to Polytechnique in Montreal (8 hours flight time?).
It always starts with world class faculty, who want to be paid well, have all the equipment for their labs and want to be surrounded by other top class researchers. That will attract the brightest students, you know those that "want to work with professor X because they are doing excellent research on ....", this will attract tier 2 students those whose only goal is to "want to go to university XYZ" and this will have a cascade effect because those brightest students will go and create companies, do great research and will donate money back to their university and that causes exponential growth. If you had 10 billion, i do think you can create a world renowned institution in 10-20 years.
This is the internet, so I'm willing to let people wildly speculate in interesting ways.
Having said that, I don't know this is as impractical as some seem to think (or at least in the ways some are thinking -- there might be lawsuits about taxation but in terms of establishing a school, less so).
All you have to do is admit students with appealing enough characteristics (GPAs, GREs, whatever you can quantify) and you'll immediately establish a reputation out of the gate. Then you build out your faculty by giving out insane incentives to start, from undervalued individuals in the right places. There's enough oversupply in academics to fulfill this need.
I might be skeptical too except I've seen this work at the high school and college level. Brand new high schools established that immediately have super high test scores; it establishes a brand immediately. At least one university I know of had a windfall and was smart enough to vacuum up undervalued properties and start pulling in whole colleges and departments spontaneously by making remarkable offers to the right people. Their only problem was that they weren't a new university, so they had a sort of existing old reputation to overcome.
> The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem
Is it? The largest university endowment in the world is $50B. That's wouldn't even crack the top 100 US companies by market cap. If it's a problem, it's certainly not a big one.
comparing endowment to market cap is misunderstanding basic finance and accounting. endowments are more directly (but not perfectly) comparable to (long-term) assets on the balance sheet. those are typically a small fraction of the market cap of a company. apple, for instance, has a $2.4T market cap, but it's non-current assets are $216B (of which $128B are investment assets).
How so? Universities don't use their endowments like companies use assets either. Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested. University endowments are for income. If anything they under perform the returns that the broader market would use to assign a market cap. A public company with a total revenue /budget of Harvard's would have a market cap rather less than the endowment size.
I'm still not understanding what the problem with these endowments is, except that they represent money in the hands of people you personally dislike.
> "Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested."
see, you did it again. assets are almost never "returned" anywhere. that's typically profits. you don't need an mba, but to have any credibility, you need to at least use these words reasonably.
in a capital structure, endowments are most similar to (long-term) assets, not revenue, income, or market cap (which is a valuation). i'll leave it as an exercise to work out why.
Good grief, you know perfectly well I meant liquid assets, c.f. the number you cited for Apple. I'm not talking about factories and capital goods, and you know that. The term as you used it is ambiguous[1], but I engaged in exactly the frame you used on the assumption that you'd interpret it in good faith.
This kind of nitpickery isn't winning, it's just deflection. So deflect away. But you know perfectly well that Harvard University isn't 1/4 the size of Apple Computer.
[1] c.f. your own qualification when you had to say "(long term) assets"! Needless to say that Apple number you quoted wasn't an accounting of any kind of long term investment. It was cash!
you keep making the same mistake. it's really easy to look up the balance sheet of apple online, and then look up the line item terms on investopedia (hint: "non-current assets"). luckily it's a random internet board and not a work meeting or something.
That’s not that much to start a school from scratch. You need dozens of buildings and a huge amount of equipment to be competitive, and that’s without mentioning the fact that many academics don’t want to work in Saudi Arabia.
60% of college students are women. Do you think most women would want to study abroad in Saudi Arabia? Teach? Do research? Seems like you'll have a hard time becoming a notable university when you've alienated the most numerous category of academics.
Doing my part here and sharing my experience, as I have done before in this forum.
I was a PhD student there until my little daughter (4yo at the time) was kidnapped by academic staff and I had to negotiate our safe return to our home country. I still can't believe the kind of abuse we went through and it baffles me how the people that orchestrated this are still there, no consequences at all, after committing a very serious crime against me and my family.
I am writing everything down and plan to publish it on a website someday, because I want others to be aware of this, particularly young students like I was at the time.
To set things straight, I don't put the blame on this on the Saudi government or the Saudi people. From my experience, they are well-intended on this and wish to do good to themselves and others; some people I met there are my friends to this day. I honestly believe that not even Saudi authorities know in detail what is actually going on.
Anyway, with regards to this particular university, it is a place thriving with sociopaths, who are not from Saudi, and who run the place as if it was their own personal kingdom.
Due to the special circumstances of the university, the Saudi government has little involvement with it and it behaves like its own self-contained jurisdiction (even though is not). This created a situation where there is a remote, isolated place with almost unlimited money, run by people who have severe psychological issues and have free, unsupervised reign over what happens there and with an artificial hierarchy of directors/VPs/professors/students/workers that dictates your whole life (because that is basically your whole life while you are there). And then, what happened is that they inadvertently created a Stanford prison experiment of an unprecedented scale, and it is really as bad as you can imagine.
I cannot do much more other than telling my story. People are then free to reach their own conclusions. I wish I've read something like this before going there so that is part of the reason why I share it.
A personal anecdote without evidence is barely a valid anecdote, specially with such extraordinary claims. This person is accusing the staff of the university of very serious crimes but no evidence or more details are provided. I would never ever set foot in KSA due to my own principles, so I have no interest in defending them, but strong accusations require strong evidence.
As others have stated, if Harvard university relocated to Saudi Arabia, i would expect it to become a low ranked university in 10-15 years. Harvard became world famous because it was one of the crown jewel university of the most powerful nation on earth for the last 80 years, take it away from this context and it would have been just a good but not special university.
This is what these discussions always miss. Harvard isn't conferring value, its recognizing it. It's not a value add, its a filter.
People think you can create value by creating more elite universities, but it's exactly the opposite. All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide. You can learn just as much at a non-elite university as an elite one.
Attending an elite university just means you were in the top x% of your age cohort. By definition, the top x% is not a group who's membership you can expand.
> Attending an elite university just means you were in the top x% of your age cohort. By definition, the top x% is not a group who's membership you can expand.
This would all be very well if you decided the top x% via an objective and reasonable standardized test.
However, the mention of standardized tests to determine top x% objectively usually sends people running for the hills [1], and they quickly start talking about "holistic criteria" for admission and how they benefit the students.
If the criteria are holistic, i.e. subjective anyway, I don't see why we can't have more elite universities. They will just be holistic along different dimensions.
To some degree you already see this in the Ivy League – Cornell is considered, broadly speaking, nerdier than Harvard. So just create 10 nerdier Cornells and 10 preppier Harvards, problem solved. It will just be harder to automatically rank people based on what school they went to. Good!
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[1] As someone who has seen and felt the downsides of a standardized testing regimen which objectively decides whether you go to a certain college or not, I sympathize with them.
> This would all be very well if you decided the top x% via an objective and reasonable standardized test.
I interpret OP's point to be more cynical:
The arbitrary selection is the point. Harvard, somehow, through a secret process, selects those who are likely to form a good portion of "the ruling class" for the next 3-4 decades.
Past performance so far indicates that they do a good job of it, so Harvard remains very prestigious.
> I don't see why we can't have more elite universities.
Pretty simple really. Why wouldn't existing non-elite universities become elite university. I don't think there is some federal ban on creating elite universities.
Come to think of it University of Phoenix can be elite university as it offers world class online education to students who couldn't get admission elsewhere.
Yeah right. Just like a village of hundred people had one chief, now a village of ten thousand people can have hundred chiefs with same level of power/prestige.
They operate a filter to bring in quality people for the benefit of the other legacy students who pay to get in. It’s like how Google shows and gathers organic results… so they can get eyeballs on their paid results. In fact google doesn’t even need to improve their organic results past a certain point as long as it’s good enough to bring eyeballs.
Elite institutions thus only need to get a good enough sample of extraordinary individuals to bolster their status, but they do not live necessarily to bring an exceptional education to those who deserve an exceptional education.
Yes they do provide that, but also restrict it because they have no incentive to really expand access to those resources. But part of their value offering is also in the selection process (for the merit based part at least). So they select, provide them with resources, and they really only have to do this enough to maintain their position and status to to sell their product: get an education with the best and brightest in our country. Their product is sold to the 1% of legacy admissions and donors who literally buy their way in. Legacy literally means intergenerational wealth preservation here.
But my point is they only have to maintain their core product well enough to serve that purpose of letting the old money rub elbows with the actual best and brightest. Their goal isn’t to help the second, or third, or fourth best and brightest get the education they deserve.
As someone who hires my goal would be to use these elite college filters, but then try to filter out the legacy admits… but that would be unfair to the truly talented legacy admits. It would be disruptive if somehow that high quality education was scaled so anyone could access it, and that stamp of approval from being associated with the elite colleges was also scaled out and handed to only those that are actually exceptional. For the most part the current system serves the exceptional decently well. Where it fails is with the rest of the population. Given two people of equal 50th percentile exceptional abilities, the one that is really wealthy can buy their way into fake exceptionality and get treated by society as if they were actually smarter.
They go because there is value in the stamp of approval. Harvard's role in the economy is to certify people as being in the top x% of quality. If you are in the top x% and qualify for their stamp, it's certainly worthwhile to go get it, unless you think that you are so exceptional that you can do without it. And some people are, and do, but you generally have to be an order of magnitude or two above x to be certain of that working out for you.
Your assertion about increasing the top x% is only true in absolute terms. If we're talking top x% of college admissions then that changes the picture. There's a big difference between that top x% being 1,000 and that same percentage being 50,000 students.
Ya, it's certainly possible that we have too few elite universities given the population, or that there's a mismatch there for the absolute numbers. I don't mean to suggest the current arrangement is exactly right.
I just meant to argue against the naive view that we can expand eliteness by letting more people into Ivys, or make more Ivy schools.
The US population increased 100 times since 1800s from 5M to 500M. Harvard enrollment increased 4 times since 1800s from 1.5K to 20K.
The number of universities in the US did grew greatly during these 200 years, but the funding distribution to these universities is as skewed as the income inequality in the US. For instance, 60% of NIH funds go to <10 institutes in the country.
The scholarly work at these elite universities might not appear deserving of the preferential treatment from the funding agencies, if we start poking around reproducibility crisis, data hacking etc.
It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.
> Harvard enrollment increased 4 times since 1800s from 1.5K to 20K.
?
You might mean 4 "doublings", but then the other number doesn't make sense. Or 14 times?
> It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.
How do you double elite universities? It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough". Is WUSTL elite? Is Cornell? Is UCLA?
Rate of change:
Enrollment increased by 4 times.
Population increased by 100 times.
> How do you double elite universities?
Doubling elite universities: I mean more outreach from let's say T10 with next 10-20. This doesn't happen.
Ex: Top 5 won't cite papers written by someone in the middle. It happens but that's quite rare.
Ex: Faculty recruitment does not propagates from bottom ranking institution to top ranking institution. It's super rare.
Ex: Research collaborations are very clubby.
> It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough".
Masses opinion doesn't count. Eliteness is determined by elite. Consider an elite club exists at the beginning. Every 5 years new members are inducted into the elite club. Their opinion matters way more than everyone's simply because they are elite.
In most departments, the state of the art is a qualitative measurement. Something is great because a bunch of great people think it's great. There isn't a better approach anyway. But that comes with bad biases.
Ex: It's rare to have a Supreme Court justice coming from outside Harvard and Yale.
Ex: Some departments in Harvard would never hire someone as faculty just because they aren't from Harvard, Yale or a couple of other places.
I think part of it is that competence is much harder to check for than status. Status is inherently very "legible", which can make it useful even if it only kind of correlates with competence.
> competence is much harder to check for than status
Is it? I've always thought that competence is much harder to cheat than status. The way I see it, the whole point of status is to decouple authority from competence.
It's contextual for sure, but one example: it's way easier to see "Harvard" on a resume than to conduct an interview that accurately assesses for skill, which is why you end up with things like resume screens ahead of interviews.
Its not like those schools are demonstrably better its that those schools are exclusive and provide social connections to elite social classes. The whole point of them existing is to be exclusive more than it is to educate.
I don't think there is any proof that the elite connections make any difference on average.
The Dale and Krueger study in fact found evidence that there was no statistical difference in lifetime income for ivy league grads vs less elite schools when controlling for factors like sat scores. In fact, they compared people who were accepted but did not go to an ivy league vs those who did go.
Other subsequent studies by others have seemed to bear that out as well.
So I don't even think that too much can be made of the connections one might make at elite universities.
I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law.
Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities.
I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of suspicious that something's missing from those studies based on prima facie examples I've encountered several times in my life.
It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating avocados.
That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area.
3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.
Big tech offices in London are chock full of Americans - especially at staff/sr manager and above level
Both Stanford and Berkley are isolated from areas they are located in and you have to be student to enjoy cultural life inside. You may visit art gallery/museum in Stanford (it's nice!) but that's pretty much it.
A good senior developer makes 70-90K in London (which is not even close to 80% of Bay Area), a place where a 2-bed flat cost 2K a month and nursery cost 1.5-2K. A junior dev making 50K in Berlin or Munich or Hamburg is much richer, let alone what’s going on in Zurich or Silicon Valley. Italians and Spaniards are better off going to Germany or the Netherlands.
Besides, London has a cultural life that’s not comparable to Paris, Rome or Berlin or even Hamburg (try to get a pint or a coffee at 2AM) and it’s hell if you are not wealthy (try to explain what a section 21 eviction is to a French or a German).
You have to compare apple to apple - eg Google/FB salary in Bay Area vs Google/FB salary in London. Skills of average engineer in Bay Area (due to magnet status of the area attracting best and brightest) is significantly above skills of average engineer in pretty much any other location and comp reflects it.
For Google/FB difference in comp by location is there but not as dramatic as difference in average salary for all engineers per location may suggest.
To enjoy social life in Paris, Rome, Berlin or Hamburg you need to speak local language (otherwise you just meet the same expats) which is not problem in London as everyone speaks English.
And yet the majority of jobs don't require that. Was their any indication that those jobs that do require an elite education actually pay better than those that don't?
I disagree. I went to a "tier 3" school for undergrad and then "elite" schools for post-graduate education. The difference in course and instruction quality, experience level of the professors, student ambition, and caliber of student between the classes of schools was night and day. The "mediocre" undergrads I met during my post-graduate education were as good as the best people I went to school with for undergrad.
This is super interesting, since I had the opposite experience: I learned much more and received more personalized instruction and high-quality material at my low-status undergrad than I did during my top-ten graduate education by a wide margin.
There is a much larger gulf between Tier 3 and large state flagship research university than large state school and a perceived “elite” school (Some Ivies, Stanford, CMU etc). But TBH some of the best education I have ever received in terms of teaching quality came out of a community college.
I don't know about Harvard but Oxbridge is definitely demonstrably better. The courses are more advanced than other unis and where else do you get 1:2 tutorials with world class professors? They basically always come in the top 3 in UK university rankings.
The networking is not a consideration for the majority of undergrads (aspiring politicians are the obvious exception). Prestige is definitely a factor. But that prestige isn't undeserved.
Admissions is an imprecise art. While the majority of elite school students make do with status and connections, some go on to attain global stature.
Global stature is virtually impossible to attain, an unrealistic goal. The world is actually a small place, and global stature is a reasonable goal within one's domain of interest. Both views are indisputably true. One tends to believe the view held by people around you. While it's easy to become a student at an elite school, it's hard to become a professor at an elite school. These are people who have "cracked the code" and naturally see the world as a small place in which one can excel. Most students will never "crack this code", but those in direct contact with good role models are more likely to do so.
Frekanomics did a four part series on this issue (“Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School") and fairly presented the benefits and drawbacks of many of these issues. For me, personally, I think the solution in the US is to fully develop an open university system like they have in the UK, Europe, Canada, and Australia.
To consider: what is the yield per dollar of such experiments?
Side note: Education City might not be the best example because Qatar effectively has to pay 2x for employees and supplies/raw materials to compensate people for moving there, so right away all yields are halved.
Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players.
Here's the solution:
1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer.
2. Stuff it full of standard courseware
3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote (
4. Have them grade tests
5. Declare it an accredited university.
6. Make it free to attend
7. Never expire units accumulated
Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies.
I agree and have had a similar idea for awhile. Have the best lecturers for given subjects create outstanding virtual courses, develop sets of curricula off of those courses, and have TAs (PhDs in your model) provide local instruction and tutoring to augment the standard coursework.
It seems crazy to me that we have thousands of new faculty members and PhDs begrudgingly spending time developing their own way of teaching material (instead of working on research which is what they actually want to do and are good at) when there are people who are clearly the best in the business at teaching their subject matter whose work we should be using instead.
Based on my experience, we'd get better real world results if we abandoned most universities and promoted community colleges to full undergrad level. My best teachers by far were at a community college. Probably because that's all they did. No begrudgingly 'teaching' students while really wanting to do research.
Not that there isn't a place for research teaching, and students along that path, but like 99% of everyone else would get better results from a different academic culture.
Yeah, what could be so hard about buying a 50 billion dollar "big computer" and hiring 10,000 PhDs for an online platform that doesn't exist yet? Ha!
It's real for sure though, this is HN after all. The general idea of free public universities based on an open curriculum is good, but whatever the OP is talking about is not going to get us there.
From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million.
Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced career prospects in academia, since they are not doing any research.
By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse.
Feel free to point out a flaw here, but I don't think this plan will work. Basically, you'll end up doing a MOOC site, but those...already exist?
To be fair, replacing an expensive diploma mill with a free/public diploma mill isn't that bad an idea. Probably just too "socalist" for North America. Imagine if everyone could have access to higher education without going into massive debt!
> By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse.
What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.
Indeed, 300:1 is pretty common in large lecture courses, even ones at relatively high ranked schools in fairly important topics (algorithms, for instance). And that's with the teacher having to give a different lecture to every single section every year, instead of just recording one lecture for everyone for the next several years.
Even more time is saved if we unbundled university education in general, so that the various paths and credentials are their own thing. IE, Intro to Poetry 101 isn't necessary for someone who's pursuing finance credentials.
> Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.
How do you figure that?
Mean class size at a university is probably in the neighborhood of 30 students. Yes, there are some classes that have monster, 200+ class sizes, but this is also balanced out by senior- or grad-level classes that have a dozen students in them.
Students also take several classes, and on average, each instructor only teaches ~1 class a semester (especially consider research professors who may not teach a course every semester). So if students are taking ~5 courses a semester on average, I'd expect to see a ratio somewhere around 6:1, nothing even close to 50:1.
I’ve never had a single class with less than 30 students except for ones where the students dropped out mid-quarter. (Ironically one of my smallest classes was one that was for 65+ students but the instructor was so bad that we had less than 20 by end of quarter)
I went to University of Washington - if it matters.
For the record, OSU lists their student:faculty ratio at 18:1. First year gen ed courses are huge but most upper level classes are a much more manageable size.
It's been a while, but I don't remember any of my upper division CS classes at OSU being smaller than ~30 students. That's why I wondered if perhaps admins were counted somehow, or maybe grad students, to get to a lower ratio.
I guess you can use the same idea to create a national car company, a national cloud service company, a national food company, a national computer store, a national hospital, a national everything company. What a great idea!
This solution is missing the chance at connections made by attending a school teeming with the useless scions of the rich, who will be handed plum jobs upon graduations. You're not going to have a chance to hook up with something like Skull & Bones sitting there doing remote learning the way you will by coughing up the fees to attend one of the Ivy League schools.
I think this is overrated. I went to a rinky dink community college. It was a very urban school (meaning, no grassy hillside campus, we were in the middle of NYC and students had jobs and families to go) and did not have a campus life, so I didn't make many connections with my other students. I still ended up with a great degree in CS and a great job. For sure if I went to a campus I'd have more opportunities to network and maybe be further in my career, but I achieved success without that.
Aspects of this idea will probably not work out, most especially the math, from the first few answers. The baby that HN has in the bathwater is the infrastructure aspect. The arguments for physically centralized educational institutions as a necessity rather than a luxury good are very weak outside of programs with practical physical components, which I would imagine to be a big chunk of STEM and the fine arts. That sort of physical infrastructure — labs, studios, theaters — is itself much more distributable and interchangeable at the undergraduate level than in the current system. The technology to hold lectures and seminars remotely is fully mature, and even if physical needs remain, those needs can be met by local infrastructure. Pedagogically, development of wider course standards and more sophisticated modes of course credit assignment are both feasible information-architecture level projects, and all these things taken together could transform education from a credential gateway implicitly knitting social networks designed to retain power to a ubiquitous more cloud-like environment focused purely on the learning, scholarship, and research that is needed to actually keep the wheels from falling off society.
A lot of people are less welcoming of OP's style now that the ranks of the very online are less exclusively populated with socially primitive young men jockeying with each other for imagined status, but aside from the ludicrous belief that he might have solved major problems by taking a half-assed crack at them, he's not wrong to be going big on this. Of course everything we come up with is going to be impractical bullshit. At best some posters with real and interesting knowledge will be rustled out of the bushes. But people should be thinking about the gap between what we actually need, what we actually have, and what could be done with the means at our disposal.
Since this is HN I just want to point out that $50 Billion will buy you 50 new exaflop systems [0]. That’s a lot of awfully big computers to use as web servers.
You could probably deploy most of the courseware using Netlify for a few grand per year. Then you could put that 50 billion in an endowment. I don’t really know how those work, but I’m guessing with a 5% return you’re making 2.5B/year giving you an extra 25k teachers at $100K each. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that students who are prepared enough to succeed in the school are entered into the lottery and those who are not sufficiently prepared are not entered.
Then the freshman class is simply selected by choosing the number of available spots by random from those who have passed the threshold and entered the lottery.
It seems this would take a lot of pressure off high school students since meeting this threshold would be a well-defined goal. Once they've met it, they can start investing their time, energy, and resources into other pursuits like passion projects or time with friends, which would be a boon to mental health.
And the admissions process is essentially random anyway for the elite colleges, assuming you have sufficiently high scores. Making it explicitly random would take some (perhaps undeserved) prestige, status, and exclusivity away from the degrees from these schools -- not that the schools aren't good, or that it isn't hard to get in, but that there are many more who are just as well qualified that do not as there are who do; a fact that would be more well-recognized in society if the lottery approach were adopted. Of course, the elite schools don't want their status (and therefore degree value) tarnished so we're unlikely to see this happen of their own accord.
The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible rather than just some elite institution for wealth preservation.
> The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity.
This is assuming it's a problem that can be solved with simple tweaks or "startup disruption". It's an issue very much related to conspicuous consumption as education >in the Ivy League/cohort< is now a luxury good. Modeling a "prestige" factor helps account for the inequality [0].
Freakonomics[1] just did an episode on this, but I've come across similar data points else where. It's a stamp of not just a good education, but a social credential implying you have connections or money.
You can already get an equivalent education to one you might get at Harvard (or better in some majors) at many other public/private universities. The key here is the human connections you form, which go on to pay dividends later given the point above.
MOOCs were the golden child a decade ago, and they are working to some extent, but they're not breaking the elite walled garden of premier higher education.
I’d imagine they work nicely for software engineering, but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and might attribute too much ti the brand of college. Some sort of objective skill evaluation that is also officially recognized must be implemented in addition to actual knowledge acquisition. As I understand it if you are a doctor and capable in every way if you don’t have the degrees you can’t even be tested?
> but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and ...
yes, and that's basically the crux of the problem. this is a social coordination problem, not a problem of education.
the trivial solution is to "outlaw" this by blinding the prestige credentials of the candidate (so only show a standardized thing like 3 year applied maths bsc) and only ask about previous experience (2 years working as data scientist) or whatever
"obviously" people will try to game this (though other universities can then copy what comes out of the fancy universities)
of course this could quickly lead to the rise of alternative prestige/reputation networks, but if the whole job application is standardized (so it becomes very hard to identify the candidate) then at least it gives a chance for folks to get in the door.
then only the usual biases remain, and the usual unfair questions (and typically the most disadvantaged candidates have the least chance to know about what kind of questions are discriminatory, and even if they know most of the time they don't have the time/energy to do anything about it)
Harvard is a good example of artificial scarcity. They have an extension school[1], where they advertise that you'll be given a Harvard education, by Harvard faculty, virtual or at the Harvard campus. It has somewhat open-enrollment, and thousands of people enroll every year. They're happy to take their money, but the students aren't allowed to say they're a Harvard graduate, they have to say they're "Harvard Extension School" graduates.
Harvard knows it's whole mystique is based on elitism and the artificial scarcity it creates by denying people admission.
I'm finishing my masters with Harvard Extension School and it's mostly as you say. It's good curriculum, pretty good professors (in comparison to my Stanford undergrad) but open-enrollment + Harvard's famous grade inflation does make it somewhat of a back door.
> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses
If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures.
Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I very much doubt it.
It can, very easily. Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer.
The only thing that doesn't scale is on campus life, and that's meaningless to the degree that college is nominally about.
What you are describing doesn't really compare. I'm sure it would do a reasonable job, but focused individual attention is really hard to replace. Most of what you've described happens at Oxbridge in addition to tutorials/supervisions.
> Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer
With respect, I don't believe that approach could work for the combination of the type of material covered and the type of (often open-ended) questions and discussions that resulted from it.
One of the questions I recall being asked to solve for a first-year Physics tutorial was "estimate the change in the length of the Earth's day if all the vehicles in the UK were to swap to driving on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left"
Having had small classes undergrad and larger classes where I went to grad school, scaling a class is not simple, the experience changes. With larger class size comes less in interactive lectures, more reliance on TAs (of varying quality) instead of professors, and different kinds of assignments. We don't have an easy way to scale these things yet.
The main reason is that the vast majority of the benefit of the Harvard is not the class but the name on the diploma. Signaling and status do not scale.
no one, especially not some random contemporary, owns the idea of using a lottery once a threshold is met. that concept has been thrown around for millenia to pick lots of all sorts. i've even suggested it as a reasonable approach to hiring right here on hn, and didn't even need to crib the idea off anyone else to do so. it's a rational solution for a decision system under high, but not unbounded, uncertainty.
While I support lotteries in many different applications - I wonder if this may lead to people simply wasting years on trying to get in. Or alternatively, those qualified will keep applying until they get in.
It would also have the merit of distributing the best students to other colleges and eliminating (at least the perception) that those top college short list are a relevant filter when selecting CVs. The focus will be on the student, not the credentials, as it should be.
One thing I have always found wierd is why is the "personal essay" (which is easier to game by folks who have the right connections/support groups/etc) a criteria for getting into a college? It almost feels like this is very hard to establish a transparent bar for, no? Cant colleges does exploit this aspect to get around randomness?
50B is a crazy large endowment. Especially when you realize the top 10 engineering schools that are public universities have literally 1/10th or less the endowment.
Some of these public universities are higher ranked than Harvard for STEM degrees.
I have to assume additional funds has diminishing impact to university success. Similar to business, where over-capitalization does not ensure success where-as under-capitalization can be a root cause of failure.
It would make a lot of sense for the top schools to expand like they did in other countries. Oxford and Cambridge have 12,000 undergrads each. University of Toronto has 44,000. Harvard and Princeton have about 5,000 each and Stanford has like 8,000.
The US has more top schools, perhaps, than other countries, but not as many seats, I think.
The tax code and federal funding is a very big stick to hold over universities to get them to do what you want. If the federal government can force US states to change their drinking laws through highway funding they can do whatever they please.
Remember, the constitution restrains the government exactly as much as it wants to be restrained.
States already do this with their public universities, that’s why they are generally considered less prestigious despite the education being basically the same. Not sure why private universities seem to get a free pass.
> Remember, the constitution restrains the government exactly as much as it wants to be restrained.
No, the American population is unwilling to die for rights any longer, because we're all too comfortable... excepting a few people like the Bundy Ranch standoff situation.
I guarantee you if 50,000 rifle-toting Americans had shown up at the Capitol and told the Federal Government, "Anyone who votes for a federal drinking age of 21 answers to us. Permanently.", we wouldn't have a nationwide drinking age of 21. To an extent, this is even how the Founders expected unlawful conduct by lawmakers would be answered...
They didn't realize we'd become so prosperous that we're no longer willing to die and kill to preserve rights that should be states' rights or local municipality rights.
I think one of the keys issues is the US News ranking criteria. US News took the easy way out with respect to two significant components of the score [1].
- Endowment per student - bonus points for amassing the largest treasure per fewest students
- Selectivity - bonus points for excluding people before they come in which has no bearing on the effectiveness of the school itself in educating
Also a large percentage weight is given to academic peer ratings of the schools prestige which itself is a feedback loop of when US News used to reward pure selectivity (i.e. lowest acceptance ratio per applicants).
The endowment component of the score should be capped so as not to reward stockpiling.
An additional component of the score should be based on the student body of the school system (higher # of students in the school system is better) should also encourage the development of systems of universities (i.e. multiple campuses. The UC School System would rank much higher - as well as it could lead to the development of Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Cornell/Stanford/etc. School Systems.
Interesting piece - How to Game the College Rankings
Amazing how a failed legacy media company from the 1950s managed to stay afloat until today simply by publishing a list of colleges in unscientific and largely arbitrary order.
The amazing thing is US News still pretends to publish news—-likely just to add legitimacy to the college ranking business.
I don’t think the top schools need to expand and perhaps shouldn’t. At all. Instead what we need are employers to stop concentrating their recruiting efforts at these name brand schools (I.e. ladder pulling), at least at the undergraduate level. I’m not sure that there is a different in CS major between Purdue (for example) and MIT. Maybe there is, but expanding MIT just takes engineering students away from Purdue and then employers just recruit at MIT main campus in Cambridge instead of the satellite office. All you’ve really done is changed the logo. Not the dynamics.
I’d rather see these “elite” universities not expand. The world seems more interesting with universities like Baylor, Ohio State, Florida, Oregon, and Nebraska than it does with Harvard, MIT, and Stanford copy/pasted everywhere. There isn’t anything wrong with those schools, but given they don’t have expertise in growing maybe a stronger case can be made for the University of California system to take over Stanford, and Penn State should turn Penn into a branch of Penn State University, etc. Else it’s really hard for me to see how you’re (not you specifically) not just trying to advocate for expanding “elite” universities just for the brand name.
I really don't think there's enough difference during your studies for it to be justified. Of course it's nice to have a meeting personally with your professor every week, of course it's nice to have brand new classrooms and free snacks when you get to listen to nobel prize winners giving a lecture about their work. But you can also sit down, anywhere in the world, and just study hard to succeed in your exam. It's not that they have different math at harvard and if you go to a challenging university you get challenging lectures.
This "elite university" brand, is imho, totally overrated. Of course you build great social connections, but if you hire a software engineer you don't hire his connections. But I feel like employers try to derive their prestige from the prestige of the universities. This is different for positions with a social dimension, like entrepreneurs, where your social connections matter.
This, of course, does not say anything about whether the prestige of Harvard itself is justified. I actually think so, because in experience people always overrate the education part of a university. It's a small amount of the total operation, way more money goes into research. Harvard does a lot of world class research, it's very good at it, consistently. Also MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc. This needs recognition and care, it's something special. But just deriving your own prestige because you did your undergrad there is stupid I think.
Nobody would reject an offer from Stanford to go to University of Toronto. There are large midwestern public schools that would be a more appropriate equivalent here.
It's not endowments that makes elite universities elite, it's a combination of social cachet, alumni networks, and brand. Cambridge, Oxford, and Sorbonne have been elite universities for centuries, and it's not mainly from their endowments. It's because if you are [smart|powerful], you want to go to a school with other [smart|powerful] people and you know [smart|powerful] people will be going there. A larger marketing budget isn't going to get people to look at a resume and pick the University of Phoenix over Harvard.
I think it is more vicious than this, as a powerful person, you want your children to continue in the same sphere.
Except that children are not necessarily as good as you. So you create a system where powerful people can put their children and perpetuate the family standing without risks of being overrun by gifted lower class children.
>> For example, Harvard’s endowment is worth something around $50 Billion. If this year, you assessed a tax on Harvard for $40 Billion, you would leave Harvard with a $10 Billion dollar endowment, and enough money to endow four new Harvard caliber schools with $10 Billion dollars each.
Who would get to spend the $40B? How would it even be spent effectively? Wouldnt it just end up on an educational equivalent Bridge to Nowhere, Big Dig, or end up contributed to insider Union projects, or end up disappearing alltogether?
I think it would be wonderful if it ends like the Big Dig or the Webb Space Telescope. Drastically over budget and behind schedule, but fundamentally changing the field after it is finally done. The Big Dig made Boston so much better and would have been worth it even if was more overbudget than it already was.
I'm sure experiences vary but I did all my general ed stuff at a very good community college with excellent teachers and a class size of about 20-30 people max per teacher. Many teachers were professionals with other jobs who taught as well, so it was an excellent educational experience, for the kind of things most people take in their first two years at any university.
Then I transferred to a well-recognized research-centric university, and I have to say, those first-year undergrads had it rough in huge classes with grad students doing most of the teaching. On the other hand, this 'second tier' school had upper-level math and science classes and I got to work in actual research labs with tons of cutting-edge equipment. There were some questionable researchers for sure (borderline frauds), but the majority were top-notch and dedicated to doing good science.
When looking around for a grad school I actually went to one of the 'top elite schools' to check it out - the labs were absolute crap at the one I went to, and the overall snooty attitude was even worse (I don't think they even like grad students at those places, they're more for undergrads). I turned down that offer, and never regretted it.
China's technological boom isn't being fueled by British-style elite schools for the posh to rub elbows at. They're more along the lines of MIT and Caltech from what I understand:
America is going the way of Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th with its class divide, and the elite schools are a good example of why that's a bad idea. We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.
> We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.
While this is a very crass over-generalization, I've found you really see this in the graduates. I've found Ivy league school graduates to be sort of... disconnected from reality? Like experts in education who clearly don't understand any of the on-the-ground realities of teaching (your lesson plan is beautifully structured, but we can't use it because it will make the students cry because they're 7). For the crowd here, imagine reading an academic paper about making improvements to production systems from someone who's clearly never been anywhere near one and is glossing over all the important fiddly details. It's like they've been told that they're smart and going to revolutionize their field and they can do so without ever having to get their hands dirty with more messy details.
To repeat my crass over-generalization, MIT and Caltech style schools seem to do a better job of instilling in students the understanding that if you want to change something you need to understand it, and to really understand it you need to spend time in trenches. I've been consistently more impressed with the results graduates from those schools get.
At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge.
We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.
The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.
But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.
The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.
This all makes sense though for clarity I think I'm discussing something a little different.
I don't generally feel like MIT students aren't particularly less or more well versed in theory than their peers at Harvard. However the approach taken to solving big problems feels very different. I think a story is illustrative.
One of the more impressive people from MIT I know got their degree in electrochemistry. After working in the industry for a while they realized the thing holding back their work was bad software. Their response was to abandon a super senior technical role, take a massive pay cut, and work as a junior software engineer. They worked their way up to senior at a FAANG then jumped back into batteries. They're running a very exciting startup solving some very interesting and important problems.
The attitude that allows for people to both identify that they need to do some pretty unglamorous work to achieve their goals and then do it is what feels more common out of MIT or Caltech.
My experience is that Ivy schools impose more of an attitude of "you're the leaders of society, start solving problems now!" whether or not the students really have the know-how to be proposing solutions.
I read comments like yours with interest because I used to be a hiring manager at a big aerospace company where I ran a department doing some cool stuff - signal processing, novel computer architectures, VLSI and WSI chips. We always recruited at top schools and got a few engineers from MIT. They were brilliant, but good grief they were lousy engineers. One guy was obviously a genius and generated great ideas constantly but he could never get anything done. Week after week he was always two weeks from finishing his next milestone...and never did. Another guy told me that, as his boss, my job was to make sure he was happy to come to work every day. I told him we would both be better off if he did a good enough job to make me happy every day. And another said he didn't think there was any work worth his attention at the company, yet he was still there scraping by year after year. Small data set, but I was discouraged from recruiting there after going 0 for 3. I wish I had hired someone like you knew.
This makes some sense, I've met or worked with easily 100 MIT grads, all of these failure modes feel within the band of the kinds of issues you have. The people who are duds on a purely productive level definitely fit the mold you describe and tend to burn out in low end jobs from what I've seen.
The attitude problems are common enough that managers used to recruiting out of these schools learn strategies specifically for handling them. I've regularly heard comments like "So-and-so is great but they're very green and just... very MIT" and everyone knowingly nods their head and commiserates. Things usually get better once they've been out of school for 4-5 years (though also, some are great straight out of school).
Graduates with none of these problems generally get snapped up by super prestigious positions so you're less likely to interview or hire them if that's not you.
The Imperial kids also do a lot of internships and summer jobs, and are often the kind of alpha nerds who have serious side projects. I interview and work with a lot of interns and graduate hires from Imperial (and a few from Oxford and even other universities), and i'm highly dubious that the work they do during their actual course is whey they are learning to program.
"The impact of this seat scarcity has been higher prices at elite colleges, which has eventually trickled down into higher prices at other schools also. Scarcity of seats leads to systemically higher prices. As we obviously want systemically lower prices, we have to start thinking about reducing the scarcity of seats at elite colleges."
But that belies the whole point of "elite" colleges. They are selling a Veblen good and dilution of the "elite" brand is not what the consumer of higher-ed wants. They are purchasing "elite" status.
Not everyone in the USA needs to go to an elite, great or even good school. What they need is to be taught a little bit about the world, and they need to be taught the value of hard work.
These days all the poor people just want to be fed dreams of "passive income" and have "fulfilling jobs". Most jobs = trading time for money. Harder the job, more money you get. So work hard at school, you get more money at your job, maybe. Or you go into sales, marketing, leadership or business.
Why do people always try to blame someone else for their problem? The "elites". Because they don't realize that the only thing stopping them is the person they see in the mirror.
I think you're out of touch with the realities of being poor. Are you familiar with the ghetto tax?
Let me tell you the situation of an old friend. He was working his ass off to put himself through college even with scholarships because his family was too poor to pay for anything and could not qualify for a loan. He worked one job taking care of his special needs brother, and another job at a brewery while getting his degree. Over the summer, he worked three jobs to cover the bills for college. After college he got a job, but still needed to take care of his brother along with his mom (who has no money, dad's out of the picture) - extra cash went to help his mom. His brother could not get a job because as soon as a special needs person has more than 2k in assets, they no longer qualify for help and the extra cash needed to shepherd him through the time with no help is not available. His mom doesn't really make money, but how many people are going to not take care of the single mom that raised them? _Everything_ is a struggle - constantly. It is exhausting for him, and I dare say that most humans would not match his grit. Passive income is a desperate hope to bridge the gaps.
There are plenty of dumbass florida-man people, but writing off poor people for lack of effort is not a useful generalization.
Your friend accomplished more for his effort. He supported his family and himself during education. Of course it was much harder. So did my father, had no resources from his parents, he had to sacrifice his studies to support his sister and finished university years later.
I don't think money is the real barrier, it's attitude towards learning. Some families are more "educational" even if they are not rich. The best academics do not come from the richest families, I think there is even a negative correlation between wealth and academic achievements at the top.
What does your statement have anything to with private university endowment ? If you believe everyone should bootstrap themselves with no help from the state, then shouldn't your reasoning be equally applicable to federal funding given to elite private universities? If they wish to control number of sets to a minimal number despite significant rise in population, then they can get their own funding too. No need to take the govt money.
Yes, endowed private universities should not be eligible for federal funding. It should be based on a per seat basis, with some scoring on how useful the seats generate employment with some lag to avoid flooding market with education seats that don't result in jobs (ie: what happened during the current student debt crisis where these colleges promising interesting jobs didn't deliver).
San Francisco's Academy of Art University is an example of incentives gone bad. Students can get debt, debt goes into pockets of university, student's get an education that is worth less than the debt.
These days we seem to be obsessed with tearing down any successful institution.
I am skeptical that redistributing endowments will have a large net positive impact.
That said, I never attended an "elite" institution and have lamented that they are so revered in our society. The German system of higher education where schools are relatively inexpensive and similar in quality seems to incentivize students to attend in order to learn something whereas the main incentive for attending an elite institution is to open doors to high paying careers.
From a national security perspective, I feel like the flywheel effects of the biggest universities are advantageous. I want to encourage emergent properties at as many universities as possible, and the idea that properties emerge at quasi-stable breakpoints seems pretty defensible. So if I want 10-20 at max emergent level, then I would be happy to also get 50-200 at max-1, 100-500 at max-2, and so on. Why do I care about thenet benefit accrued to any given student or students? At the limit, shouldn't I prefer to bring in as many foreign students as possible, the American students be damned, as long as those foreign students stay in the US after their training? Humans live long enough that education acquisitions approximate a zero sum game, so better to deprive the world, no?
If you have high school students you see how destructive and toxic the marketing machines of these ivy league colleges are to young students. I think they just hired ex-tobacco marketers, or some soulless and evil equivalent. They only care about one thing - pumping up the denominator in their acceptance ratings.
Taking the endowments from these leaches is a fantastic idea.
Freakonomics did another dive into similar issues recently. The take-away was that elite universities aren't work the extra costs unless you are shooting for a specific industry that only down-selects for elite institutions.
Meanhmwhile on hacker news people argue you should be in as much debt as possible. The truth is that the students are the limiting factor. The number of people qualified to be good professors exceeds the number of teaching positions for obvious reasons.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadWow straight up suggesting we steal money from private institutions to give to politicians to decide how to redistribute it. Totally insane.
The government prints $40 billion like it’s nothing. We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. Maybe we should let the few groups and people that managed to actually accumulate money through their own systems keep the money? Highly likely they will be more effective stewards of capital than the money printing politicians.
It's so weird to see memes like this persist. No, no we didn't.
Those spending bills were financed via deficit spending: they were loans. All spending bills are loans. The treasury department raises money by selling bonds. Every deficit dollar the government spends is a dollar it takes in from some investor somewhere who wanted to park money in US treasuries.
Now, that comes with interest obligations. It's not "free". If the money gets spent rapidly vs. being left in a money market fund or whatever, then it can be a Keynsian growth stimulus or an inflationary pressure (which are pretty much the same thing).
But it's not just printing money! That doesn't happen. People need to stop saying that. Why do people keep repeating something that is so clearly incorrect?
Surely some of the inflation and really low unemployment is due to QE. But it's likely a lot more of it is due to an economy growing while the active workforce is shrinking and external factors like the pandemic and war in Ukraine causing supply issues.
Which is... printing money, pretty much. The idea that it's some kind of moral failing or inherently irresponsible is silly, but the description isn't some crazy conspiracy theory.
* I'm sure some people have the idea that Jerome Powell is walking up to a printing press, turning a crank, and literally printing money. But I'm also pretty sure that no one here is under that misconception.
I'm a little less sure every time I read one of these threads.
1) Congress directly modified the Federal Reserve's charter to give money directly to private persons.
2) There were also payments directly from the US Treasury.
3) There were also things that involved that traditional convoluted process of the Treasury selling more bonds to the international market and pretending not to know that the Federal Reserve is the biggest buyer showing up.
In this case, because of 1), we really did create several trillion out of thin air, from the Federal Reserve itself. Basically Congress always could, but didn't. Easiest way to accumulate dollars is to scare people into believing dollars won't be relevant.
Although the US otherwise doesn't simply dilute the money supply with direct issuances for nothing, opting to primarily create dollars in exchange for corporate bonds and treasuries, there is a market tolerance and demand enough for dollars to support a much greater level of it. Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for anything.
People approximate this and think they can just reduce it to one government office when the truth is that literally every single participant in the economy is responsible. If I had to dumb it down I would say that the economy tries to be in balance. If the government appears to be doing one thing, it isn't alone, there are private companies and private individuals doing the complement.
In macro economy it is quite common to split an economy into two asymmetric entities. You, and the rest of the economy. If you earn, they spend, if they spend you earn.
If you borrow (known as printing in conspiracy theory jargon), they save (in aggregate), if they save, you borrow. Of course I am assuming that the balance is being maintained. If someone spends less than they earn, they save but if there is no net borrowing the balance is being disrupted. What happens then is deflation but that implies that the economy is in disequilibrium and must shake off some of the people earning more than they spend. It is kind of ironic that savers want deflation because in a perfect market they would get fired and wouldn't be allowed to work more which prevents them building up more savings.
In any case, I think I was incorrect about the nature of the direct lending program, here is the report from Congress about the CARES Act (the first pandemic relief bill) and how its "expanding the Fed’s traditional role beyond lender of last resort to the banking system and even beyond the more expansive role it took in the 2007-2009 financial crisis"
Its really not a simple "treasury does this, federal reserve does that"
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46329
These programs are not handouts, they are loans. The Fed did this in 2008 when they bought bonds and even stock in some big companies.
Overall, the Fed made a big profit on all of that when the bonds were paid back with interest and the stock was sold back in tranches over time as the market recovered.
Disagree that QE-2020 was a "one-time event." I can think back 13 years to 2009 and recall both monetary and fiscal stimulus to provide post-2008 relief.
Because they have a better understanding of it than you do.
The Fed buys government bonds, aka "Quantitative Easing." That is printing money. They started doing that after the 2007-8 recession, because just lowering the interest rate to zero wasn't doing enough (in their view). They didn't want to have negative interest rates like some countries did, so QE was the only choice.
You are missing the forest for the trees. You know all the details but none of the big picture.
QE is increasing the money supply. Since you object to the pejorative "printing money" we can stop using that phrase. It's increasing the money supply.
So are home mortgages. So is giving your brother $200 to make rent. So is buying the AR-15 you've been saving for. The money supply is elastic, and responds to economic activity. Harnessing that truth as an engine of growth is the fundamental insight of modern economics.[1]
The contention upthread was some ridiculous hyperbole about "minting dollars out of thin air", and the truth is that... nothing of the sort is happening. At all.
[1] And by extension, arguing against it piecewise like this is tantamount to demanding we all go back to a barter economy backed by hoarded treasure.
Unfortunately for you, "printing money" is a meme that sticks.
[1] Magical Monetary Thinking
That may be true but I still think we're headed for a big correction in education long term, both economically and in terms of cultural influence.
The moment the money enters the teachers account it is no longer taxpayer money. The same is the case for the university. How they spend the tuitions is entirely upto them.
The government borrowed money and increased its debts by trillions of dollars, that alone is insane enough, there is no need for some mythical "money printing" that is supposed to be the last straw that breaks the camels back.
This is an argument against the article. But the article's plan could be used as a threat. Use it or lose it, expand your enrollment substantially or we'll tax your endorsement away.
"The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking" (from wikipedia)
It is indeed ~free ($1600/year) for Swiss residents at least, and gets most of its funding from the Swiss government.
I would take issue with the "overnight" bit though - the ranking above was not its ranking 30 years ago when I was there (and the EPFL took its current form in 1969). It also took a concerted effort to hire the right faculty, probably recruit the right graduate students, etc, etc.
If you want to do engineering in French, it's either score a spot at EPFL, or go to Polytechnique in Paris (very small) or all the way to Polytechnique in Montreal (8 hours flight time?).
There's plenty of other engineering schools in France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole#Engineering_...)
And, ironically, one of things the EPFL did to improve its quality is teach partially in English (see https://www.epfl.ch/education/studies/en/rules-and-procedure...). This makes it easier to recruit both students AND faculty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#F...
Having said that, I don't know this is as impractical as some seem to think (or at least in the ways some are thinking -- there might be lawsuits about taxation but in terms of establishing a school, less so).
All you have to do is admit students with appealing enough characteristics (GPAs, GREs, whatever you can quantify) and you'll immediately establish a reputation out of the gate. Then you build out your faculty by giving out insane incentives to start, from undervalued individuals in the right places. There's enough oversupply in academics to fulfill this need.
I might be skeptical too except I've seen this work at the high school and college level. Brand new high schools established that immediately have super high test scores; it establishes a brand immediately. At least one university I know of had a windfall and was smart enough to vacuum up undervalued properties and start pulling in whole colleges and departments spontaneously by making remarkable offers to the right people. Their only problem was that they weren't a new university, so they had a sort of existing old reputation to overcome.
Is it? The largest university endowment in the world is $50B. That's wouldn't even crack the top 100 US companies by market cap. If it's a problem, it's certainly not a big one.
I'm still not understanding what the problem with these endowments is, except that they represent money in the hands of people you personally dislike.
see, you did it again. assets are almost never "returned" anywhere. that's typically profits. you don't need an mba, but to have any credibility, you need to at least use these words reasonably.
in a capital structure, endowments are most similar to (long-term) assets, not revenue, income, or market cap (which is a valuation). i'll leave it as an exercise to work out why.
This kind of nitpickery isn't winning, it's just deflection. So deflect away. But you know perfectly well that Harvard University isn't 1/4 the size of Apple Computer.
[1] c.f. your own qualification when you had to say "(long term) assets"! Needless to say that Apple number you quoted wasn't an accounting of any kind of long term investment. It was cash!
As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage.
1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...
Starting with a $10b endowmwnt in North America, Europe, or East Asia would probably create a noteworthy university inside 15 years.
I was a PhD student there until my little daughter (4yo at the time) was kidnapped by academic staff and I had to negotiate our safe return to our home country. I still can't believe the kind of abuse we went through and it baffles me how the people that orchestrated this are still there, no consequences at all, after committing a very serious crime against me and my family.
I am writing everything down and plan to publish it on a website someday, because I want others to be aware of this, particularly young students like I was at the time.
To set things straight, I don't put the blame on this on the Saudi government or the Saudi people. From my experience, they are well-intended on this and wish to do good to themselves and others; some people I met there are my friends to this day. I honestly believe that not even Saudi authorities know in detail what is actually going on.
Anyway, with regards to this particular university, it is a place thriving with sociopaths, who are not from Saudi, and who run the place as if it was their own personal kingdom.
Due to the special circumstances of the university, the Saudi government has little involvement with it and it behaves like its own self-contained jurisdiction (even though is not). This created a situation where there is a remote, isolated place with almost unlimited money, run by people who have severe psychological issues and have free, unsupervised reign over what happens there and with an artificial hierarchy of directors/VPs/professors/students/workers that dictates your whole life (because that is basically your whole life while you are there). And then, what happened is that they inadvertently created a Stanford prison experiment of an unprecedented scale, and it is really as bad as you can imagine.
I cannot do much more other than telling my story. People are then free to reach their own conclusions. I wish I've read something like this before going there so that is part of the reason why I share it.
People think you can create value by creating more elite universities, but it's exactly the opposite. All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide. You can learn just as much at a non-elite university as an elite one.
Attending an elite university just means you were in the top x% of your age cohort. By definition, the top x% is not a group who's membership you can expand.
This would all be very well if you decided the top x% via an objective and reasonable standardized test.
However, the mention of standardized tests to determine top x% objectively usually sends people running for the hills [1], and they quickly start talking about "holistic criteria" for admission and how they benefit the students.
If the criteria are holistic, i.e. subjective anyway, I don't see why we can't have more elite universities. They will just be holistic along different dimensions.
To some degree you already see this in the Ivy League – Cornell is considered, broadly speaking, nerdier than Harvard. So just create 10 nerdier Cornells and 10 preppier Harvards, problem solved. It will just be harder to automatically rank people based on what school they went to. Good!
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[1] As someone who has seen and felt the downsides of a standardized testing regimen which objectively decides whether you go to a certain college or not, I sympathize with them.
I interpret OP's point to be more cynical:
The arbitrary selection is the point. Harvard, somehow, through a secret process, selects those who are likely to form a good portion of "the ruling class" for the next 3-4 decades.
Past performance so far indicates that they do a good job of it, so Harvard remains very prestigious.
Pretty simple really. Why wouldn't existing non-elite universities become elite university. I don't think there is some federal ban on creating elite universities.
Come to think of it University of Phoenix can be elite university as it offers world class online education to students who couldn't get admission elsewhere.
Elite institutions thus only need to get a good enough sample of extraordinary individuals to bolster their status, but they do not live necessarily to bring an exceptional education to those who deserve an exceptional education.
But my point is they only have to maintain their core product well enough to serve that purpose of letting the old money rub elbows with the actual best and brightest. Their goal isn’t to help the second, or third, or fourth best and brightest get the education they deserve.
As someone who hires my goal would be to use these elite college filters, but then try to filter out the legacy admits… but that would be unfair to the truly talented legacy admits. It would be disruptive if somehow that high quality education was scaled so anyone could access it, and that stamp of approval from being associated with the elite colleges was also scaled out and handed to only those that are actually exceptional. For the most part the current system serves the exceptional decently well. Where it fails is with the rest of the population. Given two people of equal 50th percentile exceptional abilities, the one that is really wealthy can buy their way into fake exceptionality and get treated by society as if they were actually smarter.
I just meant to argue against the naive view that we can expand eliteness by letting more people into Ivys, or make more Ivy schools.
I don't really see what the problem is here. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a signal recognized sounds like a bad thing to me.
Destroying such a signal sound like a benefit.
The number of universities in the US did grew greatly during these 200 years, but the funding distribution to these universities is as skewed as the income inequality in the US. For instance, 60% of NIH funds go to <10 institutes in the country.
The scholarly work at these elite universities might not appear deserving of the preferential treatment from the funding agencies, if we start poking around reproducibility crisis, data hacking etc.
It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.
?
You might mean 4 "doublings", but then the other number doesn't make sense. Or 14 times?
> It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.
How do you double elite universities? It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough". Is WUSTL elite? Is Cornell? Is UCLA?
Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times.
> How do you double elite universities?
Doubling elite universities: I mean more outreach from let's say T10 with next 10-20. This doesn't happen.
Ex: Top 5 won't cite papers written by someone in the middle. It happens but that's quite rare.
Ex: Faculty recruitment does not propagates from bottom ranking institution to top ranking institution. It's super rare.
Ex: Research collaborations are very clubby.
> It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough".
Masses opinion doesn't count. Eliteness is determined by elite. Consider an elite club exists at the beginning. Every 5 years new members are inducted into the elite club. Their opinion matters way more than everyone's simply because they are elite.
In most departments, the state of the art is a qualitative measurement. Something is great because a bunch of great people think it's great. There isn't a better approach anyway. But that comes with bad biases.
Ex: It's rare to have a Supreme Court justice coming from outside Harvard and Yale.
Ex: Some departments in Harvard would never hire someone as faculty just because they aren't from Harvard, Yale or a couple of other places.
But 20,000 / 1,500 is 13x.
Nobody really likes status. Everybody likes competence. Competence increases the pie for everybody.
I think part of it is that competence is much harder to check for than status. Status is inherently very "legible", which can make it useful even if it only kind of correlates with competence.
Is it? I've always thought that competence is much harder to cheat than status. The way I see it, the whole point of status is to decouple authority from competence.
The Dale and Krueger study in fact found evidence that there was no statistical difference in lifetime income for ivy league grads vs less elite schools when controlling for factors like sat scores. In fact, they compared people who were accepted but did not go to an ivy league vs those who did go.
Other subsequent studies by others have seemed to bear that out as well.
So I don't even think that too much can be made of the connections one might make at elite universities.
Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities.
I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of suspicious that something's missing from those studies based on prima facie examples I've encountered several times in my life.
Really? Is there a list?
The university has to be in the top 50 of two or more of certain ranking lists (which are specified):
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/30/visa-schem...
It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating avocados.
3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.
Citation needed. I've seen London attract Europeans but a lot more people are trying to jump from London to the Bay Area than the opposite.
> compared to cultural wasteland of bay area.
Ironically, there are two prominent Bay Area schools listed in the special interest list from the UK government. [0]
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-potential-in...
Both Stanford and Berkley are isolated from areas they are located in and you have to be student to enjoy cultural life inside. You may visit art gallery/museum in Stanford (it's nice!) but that's pretty much it.
Besides, London has a cultural life that’s not comparable to Paris, Rome or Berlin or even Hamburg (try to get a pint or a coffee at 2AM) and it’s hell if you are not wealthy (try to explain what a section 21 eviction is to a French or a German).
For Google/FB difference in comp by location is there but not as dramatic as difference in average salary for all engineers per location may suggest.
To enjoy social life in Paris, Rome, Berlin or Hamburg you need to speak local language (otherwise you just meet the same expats) which is not problem in London as everyone speaks English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_th...
The networking is not a consideration for the majority of undergrads (aspiring politicians are the obvious exception). Prestige is definitely a factor. But that prestige isn't undeserved.
Global stature is virtually impossible to attain, an unrealistic goal. The world is actually a small place, and global stature is a reasonable goal within one's domain of interest. Both views are indisputably true. One tends to believe the view held by people around you. While it's easy to become a student at an elite school, it's hard to become a professor at an elite school. These are people who have "cracked the code" and naturally see the world as a small place in which one can excel. Most students will never "crack this code", but those in direct contact with good role models are more likely to do so.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/freakonomics-radio-goes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sc...
https://www.qf.org.qa/education/education-city
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_City
To consider: what is the yield per dollar of such experiments?
Side note: Education City might not be the best example because Qatar effectively has to pay 2x for employees and supplies/raw materials to compensate people for moving there, so right away all yields are halved.
Here's the solution:
1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated
Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies.
The quality of the education will significantly exceed the average of any of these institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_for-profit_universitie...
It seems crazy to me that we have thousands of new faculty members and PhDs begrudgingly spending time developing their own way of teaching material (instead of working on research which is what they actually want to do and are good at) when there are people who are clearly the best in the business at teaching their subject matter whose work we should be using instead.
Not that there isn't a place for research teaching, and students along that path, but like 99% of everyone else would get better results from a different academic culture.
It's real for sure though, this is HN after all. The general idea of free public universities based on an open curriculum is good, but whatever the OP is talking about is not going to get us there.
Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced career prospects in academia, since they are not doing any research.
By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse.
Feel free to point out a flaw here, but I don't think this plan will work. Basically, you'll end up doing a MOOC site, but those...already exist?
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[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-p...
What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.
Even more time is saved if we unbundled university education in general, so that the various paths and credentials are their own thing. IE, Intro to Poetry 101 isn't necessary for someone who's pursuing finance credentials.
How do you figure that?
Mean class size at a university is probably in the neighborhood of 30 students. Yes, there are some classes that have monster, 200+ class sizes, but this is also balanced out by senior- or grad-level classes that have a dozen students in them.
Students also take several classes, and on average, each instructor only teaches ~1 class a semester (especially consider research professors who may not teach a course every semester). So if students are taking ~5 courses a semester on average, I'd expect to see a ratio somewhere around 6:1, nothing even close to 50:1.
I went to University of Washington - if it matters.
https://oregonstate.edu/about
You've slightly modernized correspondence school.
Just to start with what's missing, the vast majority of students need some degree of individualized attention to learn effectively.
A lot of people are less welcoming of OP's style now that the ranks of the very online are less exclusively populated with socially primitive young men jockeying with each other for imagined status, but aside from the ludicrous belief that he might have solved major problems by taking a half-assed crack at them, he's not wrong to be going big on this. Of course everything we come up with is going to be impractical bullshit. At best some posters with real and interesting knowledge will be rustled out of the bushes. But people should be thinking about the gap between what we actually need, what we actually have, and what could be done with the means at our disposal.
You could probably deploy most of the courseware using Netlify for a few grand per year. Then you could put that 50 billion in an endowment. I don’t really know how those work, but I’m guessing with a 5% return you’re making 2.5B/year giving you an extra 25k teachers at $100K each. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
Update: frontier [1] is faster and cheaper but my point stands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)
Then the freshman class is simply selected by choosing the number of available spots by random from those who have passed the threshold and entered the lottery.
It seems this would take a lot of pressure off high school students since meeting this threshold would be a well-defined goal. Once they've met it, they can start investing their time, energy, and resources into other pursuits like passion projects or time with friends, which would be a boon to mental health.
And the admissions process is essentially random anyway for the elite colleges, assuming you have sufficiently high scores. Making it explicitly random would take some (perhaps undeserved) prestige, status, and exclusivity away from the degrees from these schools -- not that the schools aren't good, or that it isn't hard to get in, but that there are many more who are just as well qualified that do not as there are who do; a fact that would be more well-recognized in society if the lottery approach were adopted. Of course, the elite schools don't want their status (and therefore degree value) tarnished so we're unlikely to see this happen of their own accord.
This is assuming it's a problem that can be solved with simple tweaks or "startup disruption". It's an issue very much related to conspicuous consumption as education >in the Ivy League/cohort< is now a luxury good. Modeling a "prestige" factor helps account for the inequality [0].
Freakonomics[1] just did an episode on this, but I've come across similar data points else where. It's a stamp of not just a good education, but a social credential implying you have connections or money.
You can already get an equivalent education to one you might get at Harvard (or better in some majors) at many other public/private universities. The key here is the human connections you form, which go on to pay dividends later given the point above.
MOOCs were the golden child a decade ago, and they are working to some extent, but they're not breaking the elite walled garden of premier higher education.
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29309
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...
yes, and that's basically the crux of the problem. this is a social coordination problem, not a problem of education.
the trivial solution is to "outlaw" this by blinding the prestige credentials of the candidate (so only show a standardized thing like 3 year applied maths bsc) and only ask about previous experience (2 years working as data scientist) or whatever
"obviously" people will try to game this (though other universities can then copy what comes out of the fancy universities)
of course this could quickly lead to the rise of alternative prestige/reputation networks, but if the whole job application is standardized (so it becomes very hard to identify the candidate) then at least it gives a chance for folks to get in the door.
then only the usual biases remain, and the usual unfair questions (and typically the most disadvantaged candidates have the least chance to know about what kind of questions are discriminatory, and even if they know most of the time they don't have the time/energy to do anything about it)
Harvard knows it's whole mystique is based on elitism and the artificial scarcity it creates by denying people admission.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Extension_School
If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures.
Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I very much doubt it.
[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e... [1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/how-will-i...
The only thing that doesn't scale is on campus life, and that's meaningless to the degree that college is nominally about.
With respect, I don't believe that approach could work for the combination of the type of material covered and the type of (often open-ended) questions and discussions that resulted from it.
One of the questions I recall being asked to solve for a first-year Physics tutorial was "estimate the change in the length of the Earth's day if all the vehicles in the UK were to swap to driving on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left"
The social connections and the culture are the key parts of elite colleges. I don’t think you can scale that with online classes.
Some of these public universities are higher ranked than Harvard for STEM degrees.
I have to assume additional funds has diminishing impact to university success. Similar to business, where over-capitalization does not ensure success where-as under-capitalization can be a root cause of failure.
The US has more top schools, perhaps, than other countries, but not as many seats, I think.
Remember, the constitution restrains the government exactly as much as it wants to be restrained.
No, the American population is unwilling to die for rights any longer, because we're all too comfortable... excepting a few people like the Bundy Ranch standoff situation.
I guarantee you if 50,000 rifle-toting Americans had shown up at the Capitol and told the Federal Government, "Anyone who votes for a federal drinking age of 21 answers to us. Permanently.", we wouldn't have a nationwide drinking age of 21. To an extent, this is even how the Founders expected unlawful conduct by lawmakers would be answered...
They didn't realize we'd become so prosperous that we're no longer willing to die and kill to preserve rights that should be states' rights or local municipality rights.
More's the pity, if you ask me.
- Endowment per student - bonus points for amassing the largest treasure per fewest students
- Selectivity - bonus points for excluding people before they come in which has no bearing on the effectiveness of the school itself in educating
Also a large percentage weight is given to academic peer ratings of the schools prestige which itself is a feedback loop of when US News used to reward pure selectivity (i.e. lowest acceptance ratio per applicants).
The endowment component of the score should be capped so as not to reward stockpiling.
An additional component of the score should be based on the student body of the school system (higher # of students in the school system is better) should also encourage the development of systems of universities (i.e. multiple campuses. The UC School System would rank much higher - as well as it could lead to the development of Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Cornell/Stanford/etc. School Systems.
Interesting piece - How to Game the College Rankings
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-...
The amazing thing is US News still pretends to publish news—-likely just to add legitimacy to the college ranking business.
I’d rather see these “elite” universities not expand. The world seems more interesting with universities like Baylor, Ohio State, Florida, Oregon, and Nebraska than it does with Harvard, MIT, and Stanford copy/pasted everywhere. There isn’t anything wrong with those schools, but given they don’t have expertise in growing maybe a stronger case can be made for the University of California system to take over Stanford, and Penn State should turn Penn into a branch of Penn State University, etc. Else it’s really hard for me to see how you’re (not you specifically) not just trying to advocate for expanding “elite” universities just for the brand name.
This "elite university" brand, is imho, totally overrated. Of course you build great social connections, but if you hire a software engineer you don't hire his connections. But I feel like employers try to derive their prestige from the prestige of the universities. This is different for positions with a social dimension, like entrepreneurs, where your social connections matter.
This, of course, does not say anything about whether the prestige of Harvard itself is justified. I actually think so, because in experience people always overrate the education part of a university. It's a small amount of the total operation, way more money goes into research. Harvard does a lot of world class research, it's very good at it, consistently. Also MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc. This needs recognition and care, it's something special. But just deriving your own prestige because you did your undergrad there is stupid I think.
Nobody would reject an offer from Stanford to go to University of Toronto. There are large midwestern public schools that would be a more appropriate equivalent here.
Who would get to spend the $40B? How would it even be spent effectively? Wouldnt it just end up on an educational equivalent Bridge to Nowhere, Big Dig, or end up contributed to insider Union projects, or end up disappearing alltogether?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_nowhere#United_State...
https://nypost.com/2019/02/28/de-blasio-and-co-mayor-wife-ha...
https://nypost.com/2019/02/27/mccrays-thrive-initiative-on-t...
Then I transferred to a well-recognized research-centric university, and I have to say, those first-year undergrads had it rough in huge classes with grad students doing most of the teaching. On the other hand, this 'second tier' school had upper-level math and science classes and I got to work in actual research labs with tons of cutting-edge equipment. There were some questionable researchers for sure (borderline frauds), but the majority were top-notch and dedicated to doing good science.
When looking around for a grad school I actually went to one of the 'top elite schools' to check it out - the labs were absolute crap at the one I went to, and the overall snooty attitude was even worse (I don't think they even like grad students at those places, they're more for undergrads). I turned down that offer, and never regretted it.
China's technological boom isn't being fueled by British-style elite schools for the posh to rub elbows at. They're more along the lines of MIT and Caltech from what I understand:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2140178/new-...
America is going the way of Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th with its class divide, and the elite schools are a good example of why that's a bad idea. We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.
While this is a very crass over-generalization, I've found you really see this in the graduates. I've found Ivy league school graduates to be sort of... disconnected from reality? Like experts in education who clearly don't understand any of the on-the-ground realities of teaching (your lesson plan is beautifully structured, but we can't use it because it will make the students cry because they're 7). For the crowd here, imagine reading an academic paper about making improvements to production systems from someone who's clearly never been anywhere near one and is glossing over all the important fiddly details. It's like they've been told that they're smart and going to revolutionize their field and they can do so without ever having to get their hands dirty with more messy details.
To repeat my crass over-generalization, MIT and Caltech style schools seem to do a better job of instilling in students the understanding that if you want to change something you need to understand it, and to really understand it you need to spend time in trenches. I've been consistently more impressed with the results graduates from those schools get.
We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.
The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.
But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.
The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.
I don't generally feel like MIT students aren't particularly less or more well versed in theory than their peers at Harvard. However the approach taken to solving big problems feels very different. I think a story is illustrative.
One of the more impressive people from MIT I know got their degree in electrochemistry. After working in the industry for a while they realized the thing holding back their work was bad software. Their response was to abandon a super senior technical role, take a massive pay cut, and work as a junior software engineer. They worked their way up to senior at a FAANG then jumped back into batteries. They're running a very exciting startup solving some very interesting and important problems.
The attitude that allows for people to both identify that they need to do some pretty unglamorous work to achieve their goals and then do it is what feels more common out of MIT or Caltech.
My experience is that Ivy schools impose more of an attitude of "you're the leaders of society, start solving problems now!" whether or not the students really have the know-how to be proposing solutions.
The attitude problems are common enough that managers used to recruiting out of these schools learn strategies specifically for handling them. I've regularly heard comments like "So-and-so is great but they're very green and just... very MIT" and everyone knowingly nods their head and commiserates. Things usually get better once they've been out of school for 4-5 years (though also, some are great straight out of school).
Graduates with none of these problems generally get snapped up by super prestigious positions so you're less likely to interview or hire them if that's not you.
But that belies the whole point of "elite" colleges. They are selling a Veblen good and dilution of the "elite" brand is not what the consumer of higher-ed wants. They are purchasing "elite" status.
These days all the poor people just want to be fed dreams of "passive income" and have "fulfilling jobs". Most jobs = trading time for money. Harder the job, more money you get. So work hard at school, you get more money at your job, maybe. Or you go into sales, marketing, leadership or business.
Why do people always try to blame someone else for their problem? The "elites". Because they don't realize that the only thing stopping them is the person they see in the mirror.
Let me tell you the situation of an old friend. He was working his ass off to put himself through college even with scholarships because his family was too poor to pay for anything and could not qualify for a loan. He worked one job taking care of his special needs brother, and another job at a brewery while getting his degree. Over the summer, he worked three jobs to cover the bills for college. After college he got a job, but still needed to take care of his brother along with his mom (who has no money, dad's out of the picture) - extra cash went to help his mom. His brother could not get a job because as soon as a special needs person has more than 2k in assets, they no longer qualify for help and the extra cash needed to shepherd him through the time with no help is not available. His mom doesn't really make money, but how many people are going to not take care of the single mom that raised them? _Everything_ is a struggle - constantly. It is exhausting for him, and I dare say that most humans would not match his grit. Passive income is a desperate hope to bridge the gaps.
There are plenty of dumbass florida-man people, but writing off poor people for lack of effort is not a useful generalization.
Your friend accomplished more for his effort. He supported his family and himself during education. Of course it was much harder. So did my father, had no resources from his parents, he had to sacrifice his studies to support his sister and finished university years later.
I don't think money is the real barrier, it's attitude towards learning. Some families are more "educational" even if they are not rich. The best academics do not come from the richest families, I think there is even a negative correlation between wealth and academic achievements at the top.
San Francisco's Academy of Art University is an example of incentives gone bad. Students can get debt, debt goes into pockets of university, student's get an education that is worth less than the debt.
I am skeptical that redistributing endowments will have a large net positive impact.
That said, I never attended an "elite" institution and have lamented that they are so revered in our society. The German system of higher education where schools are relatively inexpensive and similar in quality seems to incentivize students to attend in order to learn something whereas the main incentive for attending an elite institution is to open doors to high paying careers.
Taking the endowments from these leaches is a fantastic idea.