After having spent far too long in an academic institution, whose administration was the most riddled with errors, incompetence, and bloat that I've ever encountered, this article makes me feel happy. It's not an easy problem, but at least someone notices.
Bullshit Jobs by anthropology professor Graeber talks about this a lot, but comes to a different conclusion - that leadership for universities should be from Professors and that we should have a universal basic income so that useless administration will not be forced to spend 8 hours a day pretending to be useful.
This is not a good idea. Let people who are qualified to manage do the managing. There is very little about having a PhD or being tenured that makes one qualified to run a large institution.
Who says that any significant portion of these administrators are "running a large institution?" I'd be willing to be that the average professor manages more people than 99% of these administrators.
This isn't about running an institution, these administrators are employees through and through. They are simply employees sharing 1 meaningless task with several other team members and taking eons to complete anything.
Most administrators aren't in leadership positions, which is what the recommendation from bullshit jobs was about- not general administration positions.
I was maybe too pithy, the book unsurprisingly goes into more depth (and is a good read!) - but if administration has all the control, they will unsurprising favor administration problems. Professors could hire good management if that was useful while keeping the goal in line with education and research and not administration and finance
I would like to introduce as evidence this email I just recieved:
Dear Carolina Community:
I am excited to announce that Michael Andreasen, senior vice president for university advancement at the University of Oregon, has been selected as Carolina’s next vice chancellor for development, beginning Jan. 23. A seasoned leader, Andreasen believes strongly in the mission of public universities, and I am confident he will continue to engage supporters and alumni and build on our recent fundraising success. He will succeed David Routh, who announced in April he would step down at the end of the year.
For the past nine years, Andreasen has overseen all aspects of advancement at UO, including development; state, community and federal affairs; advancement operations; stewardship and public events and alumni relations. During his tenure, he consistently increased annual fundraising totals and secured some of the largest donations to any public flagship university.
Among his accomplishments, Andreasen helped complete a $3 billion campaign at Oregon, raising $3.24 billion, including a final fiscal year fundraising performance of $867 million and maintained fundraising momentum through the transition of five university presidents. He worked in collaboration with campus leaders and a small team of faculty to secure two $500 million gifts to establish and build the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact and helped garner a transformational $425 million gift to establish the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health.
Andreasen began his time at UO as the vice president for development, leading efforts to establish campaign priorities, setting a working goal of $1.2 billion and developing a communications plan for the public launch in collaboration with the president, executive leadership and school deans. Over 12 years, he has served as a member of the University of Oregon Foundation Board, the Alumni Association Board, the Portland Business Alliance Board and the Greater Portland Chamber of Commerce.
Prior to joining UO, Andreasen was at the University of Michigan for seven years – first as executive director and assistant dean for advancement for development and alumni relations and then as executive director and assistant dean for advancement at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. His more than 32 years of fundraising experience includes roles in major gifts and campaign leadership at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the American Film Institute. He began his career as the director of the annual fund for the University of California, Irvine, where he also earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science.
I want to thank the search committee, chaired by Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment, and John Montgomery, executive director for The Rams Club, for the time and effort they have devoted to this search. I’m appreciative for their work in identifying multiple leading candidates for this important role.
Andreasen joins University Development at an exciting time as the Campaign for Carolina comes to a close, and we look to what’s next in Carolina’s future. I’m grateful to David Routh for serving as an incredible leader and ambassador for Carolina throughout his tenure. Please join me in thanking David and offering your congratulations to Mike as we welcome him to Carolina.
Sincerely,
Kevin M. Guskiewicz
Chancellor
Tell me with a straight face that that's not a God of Grift among Gods of Grift
> Tell me with a straight face that that's not a God of Grift among Gods of Grift
What's the problem here? This person has an apparently excellent track record of raising money. This isn't grift! There would be a problem if donors got excessive benefits from their donations, and there appears to be a problem that the money is largely being spent on useless staffing, but at least the latter is not the vice chancellor of development's fault. The VC of development pulls their own weight.
The problem is not that the VPs don't make money (clearly they do, that's their point), it's that they are taking money and using it to make more money and the actual purpose of being an institution for research and education is lost.
Having this type of person on the team isn't bad but if they're calling all the shots then the whole mission of the (non profit) university is destroyed.
I don't understand this comment. Are you saying that the university doesn't benefit from a development operation? That this person's listed accomplishments are not relevant to being hired for this role?
theres also the positive saying about engineering / product driven companies vs finance / marketing driven companies.
Hard to get all nuance in a comment, but meant that ultimate control of direction is from the people doing the work, not that they necessarily were involved in the minutia of management
Idk about you, but the worst managers I've had were _not_ engineers. They had no idea what the actual day-to-day of the projects looked like, would blindly promise deadlines, etc.
I'm not saying that the best engineers make the best managers, but I don't think someone can be the best manager (in tech) without being at least a good engineer.
Sure, but the best manages I've had have not been engineers. Engineers generally don't make the worst mistakes manages can make, but they often don't make the best choices all the time.
Public universities here in Czechia have academic senate, body of representatives elected by academics and students (with 1:1 - 2:1 ratio), which elects university president / rector and votes on university bylaws.
> we should have a universal basic income so that useless administration will not be forced to spend 8 hours a day pretending to be useful
If the problem is that some people are being paid too much to do nothing, the exact opposite solution is to pay everyone too much to do nothing. I'd be 100% supportive of UBI if that meant paying everyone in the world $2 a day, but what UBI actually means is giving exclusive in-groups more money than the median global income for free. We see exactly what happens in the gulf oil nations like Qatar. The citizens outsource all their real work to an out-group that doesn't receive free money, so they have absolutely no incentive to improve working conditions.
If you have a bullshit job you are paid to do nothing. If you have UBI you are paid no matter what you do. Somebody who has to not get fired cannot do anything other than sit in their chair and do their bullshit job. They are actively removed from the pool of useful laborers. But somebody who is paid regardless can choose what to do. Yes, they can watch TV all day. But they can also do something that isn't bullshit.
There is little difference between UBI and useless college administration jobs or useless gulf nation oil administration jobs. Both jobs have high autonomy and very little accountability, so they already have the option to not do bullshit if they really want to. Many Saudis got paid even if they didn't even bother to show up to work and protested when the higher ups demanded attendance. Demanding attendance is even worse than letting them do nothing, but it does go to show that they simply had no expectations to begin with, and that higher ups are also doing nothing all day.
The book covers this much better than any comment can (and is a breezy read!)
But there is absolutely a difference, which you already mentioned: Seat in chair for 8 hrs.
They might be spending it watching YouTube but they can't volunteer or start a band or do whatever they want.
With UBI there is no nominal expectations so nobody does anti-useful things like adding paperwork to justify their existence.
The key part of the book for me is that people really truly want to work and be useful. Case in point why people accept teaching roles despite the bad pay. Even more useful things like firefighters or suicide hotline workers people will volunteer to do for free.
Jobs that are useless can't get people to stay for any reason other than money. In essence, it pays well because it is useless.
One option (UBI) is to pay everyone and then they do what they feel is most useful. People doing jobs they love will happily continue doing them. More people will be teachers or craftsmen, or artists. Jobs that suck but really need to get done will pay more, because the workers will be comparing it to doing something else and not to starvation.
But the incentives for doing useful work are not there, since enough people are willing to be paid in good feelings instead of salary. So if not UBI something needs to change to make real useful jobs worth it
> what UBI actually means is giving exclusive in-groups more money than the median global income for free. We see exactly what happens in the gulf oil nations like Qatar.
This is interesting to me and I wanted to dig in more. You seem to imply that Qatar has some form of UBI, but I can't find any source to that effect.
Qatar doesn't have UBI, but I'd argue that what they haven't isn't very distinguishable from UBI. Qatari citizens are basically guaranteed a cushy government job where they are free to do whatever they want. 75% of Qataris are employed in the public sector [1], but they aren't actually doing the real work. For example, even though Qatar Airways is owned by the government, you'd most likely never see a flight crew member who's actually a citizen of Qatar. Similar jobs exist in Saudi Arabia, but recently they have been transitioning to a form of UBI [2].
Graeber's book talks about this in a much more interesting way that I can, and is very explicit about not trying to be a book about basic income. So me adding that was a little editorial.
But the point is that for a large variety of cultural, political, and economic reasons there are a lot of jobs like university administrators that are simply not useful but get paid nonetheless, in many cases much better than the people doing the actual work. In both public and private spaces (eg. Harvard, a private university).
Even in tech circles we see this argument, like, why does it take 10,000 developers to run a website etc.
I think most people want to be useful to society and have a meaningful job but a lot of jobs that pay well are not that. With UBI those admins would be able to volunteer, teach children, make culture, or all the other useful things that pay terribly.
Note that these admins are already working to support themselves but society is still failing to find something useful for them.
I'm happy to talk abt this more of ya think it would be useful to you :)
Got more to say but comments are hard to fit nuance into
The truth is, and this will be hard for a lot of people to hear because it goes against their preconceived ideas and this authors claim, is both professors and the average arm-chair commentator have no idea what it takes to run a university. They have no idea the amount of work and logistics and everything else that goes into the day-to-day.
The book covers this by interviewing people working those roles - and by and large they consider their own jobs to be useless.
Graeber is not making these claims as an armchair expert, decreeing whose jobs are useless. It's an anthropological study of the people who themselves think they have a bullshit job.
I'd highly recommend reading the book! It's much more nuanced and reasonable than any 5 sentence comment can be
In my direct experience, Harvard's faculty (professors) are a lot more involved in the leadership of the university than at most universities. There's a reason Harvard's arts & sciences school, including the undergraduate College, is called the Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) -- the Faculty really do have a lot of power there.
I worked in the FAS IT department for several years in the mid-to-late 00's. A huge chunk of my team's projects were custom software solutions, necessitated by top professors being extremely picky about random things, which prevented use of off-the-shelf software.
Pretty much nothing in this Crimson article lines up with my experience. Maybe things have changed a lot since I worked there, but I'm skeptical.
This does sound like a real problem, but what does taxation or a large endowment have to do with it? There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit.
The best I can come up with is that universities have enough money and little enough tuition price sensitivity that they aren’t adequately pressured to cut costs.
Alternatively: there is a split between universities and departments. Academic departments have their own budgets (combinations of whatever they can extract from the university, earmarked donations, and grants), and universities have become extremely adept at extracting money from grants. But the departments do most of the useful work! Your amazing math professor doesn’t work for the university per se but is actually part of the mathematics department.
So some of the problem may be a mismatch in where the money is and where it’s needed.
> There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit.
How do you know? It seems like they’re “wasting” this money so they can point to the amount that they “had to spend” when it’s time to collect donations, similar to what wikimedia does. To them, the value all these jobs provide is inflating the operating expenses, which means they can ask for more tax-free money.
If I were ran a university and wanted a good story to tell my donors, I would tell them that I want to spend $X million dollars on hiring professors, improving undergraduate education, offering financial aid, reducing tuition, building genuinely useful buildings, etc. I would also want to optimize the actual bottom line, not the tax-free donation revenue earned for the hell of it.
There would be absolutely no need to spend money on useless things just to say I spent it.
In SF, a similar problem in the public school district (the majority of the budget goes to administration, not teachers or schools) is in part due to tort-happy parents and a huge amount of regulation and compliance needs. Unfortunately, it sort of snowballs, because vital functions like payroll get starved of funding (and thus competence), and that exposes the district to legal troubles and liability, which further costs the district and starves funding from vital functions…
> Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. The Harvard education is certainly not 89 percent better than it was 36 short years ago, nor is it 89 percent more difficult to provide.
The common refrain about higher education costs is state governments have cut back on subsidies, so it's interesting seeing this stat for Harvard since it doesn't get the same level of state support, has an endowment, and still saw tuition double.
Harvard's status as a premium product might be harder to maintain if they didn't inflate their prices to stay above their "standard" competitors (state schools).
They can maintain their elite status while heavily discounting tuition to those with financial need, since the very image of "premium product" means that there will always be people willing to pay for it. It is essentially a self-fulfilling idea.
I recall visiting Harvard during a high school debate tournament, and being utterly unimpressed with the facilities compared to what I had seen at non-ivy-league schools. The money you pay for tuition really isn't going into a better education, it's maintaining the illusion that draws big names as both students and professors, and all the networking opportunities that then manifest as better outcomes for graduates.
The flipside of this is that we are talking about goddamn Harvard. They don't need high prices to signal that they are an elite school, they have a reputation that literally goes back centuries.
Besides, the reputation of a school isn't built on its tuition, it is built on the alumni. The only "positive" signal from a high tuition is that it is a filter to reduce the number of poor students that your child might have to interact with and increase their chances of falling in with some other elite rich kids to fast track their way up to the C suite or some lucrative board seats.
Remember though that if you are a smart poor person (here poor means not filthy rich) Harvard will give you a discount on tuition. I'm not sure how much or how it works, but I'm under the impression that only a tiny minority actually pay the full price.
It subsidizes everyone else's tuition, and is a critical piece of the value proposition for privates schools: access. By subsidizing the the poor-but-outstanding with money from the still-accepted rich-but-dumb, they maintain the opportunity for those two groups to intermingle, granting access to networks that that poorer students would be able to break into otherwise, which the rich also benefit from in the form of having known-competent individuals in their network.
That's the primary reason to go to private school. That's what justifies the 2-4x price gap with public universities. All the niceties (not having to enter into a bi-yearly battle royal for seats in limited space classes, not having to put up with overly impacted class sizes, other little luxuries) are just there to maintain the appearance of prestige. The actual value comes from the admissions department.
> they maintain the opportunity for those two groups to intermingle, granting access to networks that that poorer students would be able to break into otherwise, which the rich also benefit from in the form of having known-competent individuals in their network.
I went to a private school and I saw a lot of friend groups and social structures that find ways to limit those networks to “rich and competent” instead of “just competent”.
Eg Fraternal organizations (bonus: also gender limited) like fraternities, finals clubs, or supper clubs with massive fees and tight cultures are one big common example. I was (embarrassingly) in such a club and there was definitely a riff between incomes (“wanna fly to New Orleans for Mardi Gras this week, we’ll only miss a few days of class?”)
Obviously spring break trips or not having to work a campus job. Eg Yacht week.
Also: expensive clubs with extra dues, equipment
A big thing that I didn’t expect, but is something that IMO schools don’t do a good job to address is that many lower-income students just don’t understand that sort of academic world because no one taught them. Eg I met a freshman student who thought professors wanted him to fail and that there was an adversarial relationship. Furthermore, he thought office hours are when the professors shouldn’t be disturbed. Once someone just explained that professors want you to succeed and hold office hours to help you succeed, he became more successful, less stressed, and spent less time studying alone. My parents taught me all this, and my high school held office hours… but many students never learn how this world works!
I think that is a myth, unless the student is paying more than say $100k per year. Elsewhere I read that average fees were about $50k, but I presume there is quite some variation.
Total operating expenses = $5.4 billion[1]
Operating Revenue: Endowment income 36%, Education/Tuition 21%, Research 17%, Gifts 9%, Other 17%[1]
The 21% Education/Tuition income is split: Degree Seeking Education 13%, and Continuing and Executive Education: 7%[3]
Student income 1.2 billion[3]
There are 30,391 students including 8,527 undergraduate and 21,864 graduate students at Harvard University for academic year 2020-2021. By attending status, there are 19,030 full-time and 11,361 part-time students[2]
Assuming teaching the students costs 2.5 billion (rest is research costs) and 25000 full-time-equivalent students, then if each rich student pays enough to fully subsidise a second poor student, the rich student would need to pay $200k, and you trend towards a larger percentage of the students being rich.
Sure, but not all of the subsidized students are paying nothing. Plenty just get enough aid that it works out to being about even with going to a public university, but with the added benefit of a larger percentage of the students being rich (and generally getting a better educational experience). The fact that having those rich kids at the school is actually the primary value proposition for expensive private schools shifts the priorities substantially compared to a "the rich kids aren't paying enough to offset all the other students" rote accounting.
I have reread your comment multiple times, and I am struggling to understand the purpose of both your comments, and the meaning of your recent reply eludes me. Are you are responding at all to the idea that “wealthier full-fee students are not subsidising other students at all”?
The closest I can paraphrase your point-of-view would be “rich students are great”, or potentially that poor students gain by associating with rich students?
Sorry, I made 2 separate points and didn't delineate them clearly.
1) The view that the value given by over charging the rich students should be based on the number of students' tuition they eliminate is not fairly representing the situation, and understates the impact of having, say, a quarter of the student body paying significantly more than the "true" price. If the school spends say 20k/student, they charge some students 60k and others 10k, then each rich student has subsidized 4 poorer students. If a parent donates a large sum to get their kid into the school, that number is likely much greater.
2) Expensive schools using their high tuition offset by discretionarily providing merit (or need chosen by merit) based aide as a filter to distill the student body to only the high-performing, rich, or both is the main value proposition of expensive schools. Every pairing both within and between those two groups are valuable to the students, relative to say an acquaintance with an economically disadvantaged mediocre student. It subtly turns the universal experience of making new friends at university into a massive opportunity for networking, which many students don't even realize while they're engaging in it. It's not egalitarian, but it is extremely valuable to its beneficiaries.
> If the school spends say 20k/student, they charge some students 60k and others 10k, then each rich student has subsidized 4 poorer students. If a parent donates a large sum to get their kid into the school, that number is likely much greater.
My point is that you are misrepresenting the scale of the figures. I suspect the figures are more like $50k fees, and $100k costs? Given those figures as assumptions, rich kids need to pay way way more, and the fees paid by poorer students matters less. Otherwise you just end up with a school with mostly rich kids. I go into my assumptions for the figures in the other post I linked to.
> Expensive schools using their high tuition
Undergrad tuition fees only makes up something like 13% of Harvard income, and some of that is paid for by “poorer” students. I think your argument hinges upon tuition income being the most significant income to the school. Remove 13% of costs (crazy admin staff) and Harvard doesn’t need any tuition income from rich kids any more for undergraduates.
Google result shows “Harvard's 2019 class [snip] a massive 82 percent of those scholars are economically advantaged” i.e. rich kids are obviously not subsidising poor kids.
I am merely trying to point out that you are making deep assumptions, annd your anssumptions appear to be false, although admittedly I have only done some superficial googling.
I presume Harvard is a finishing school, for networking and status signalling. Especially given its 98% pass rate!
> massive opportunity for networking
I would hope that poorer students manage to network into the rich kid networks (I totally agree we should be realistic about how the world works, regardless of how “unfair” it may be). Whether poor students can effectively network is another question. I have certainly seen articles from poor kids explaining how difficult it is to break into wealthy cliques e.g. can’t pony up cash to join sporting events or outings, and don’t understand the social queues.
I admit I don’t really know much about the topic, since I went to a middle class school in a country on the edge of the world, and I have never spent time with wealthy scions. I am relatively wealthy compared with my friends (excluding the friends that I made my wealth with). Note: I’m using undergraduate and graduate in the UK meaning, not the US meaning, which I don’t grok.
The flipside of that is that if Harvard charged $1M a year, they'd still have more applicants than spots.
The sticker price of Harvard is not what the median applicant pays. Some applicants -- e.g. Jared Kushner -- literally do pay millions [0]. Others pay a small fraction of that [1].
My 2c: lowering the sticker price at elite schools would be great because it would lower the perceived barrier to entry. Those perceptions matter, especially to folks who don't come from the Professional Managerial class and don't have a clear understanding of how the system works.
But I also see why they don't -- they do, after all, want to make sure that rich families pony up.
It still raises the barrier to entry since the kids who can't technically afford the school now have to not only qualify to be accepted, but also qualify for the scholarship. The latter is not a guarantee.
Some private schools (not sure Harvard is one) have a "if accepted you WILL go" rule - which boils down to pay as much as you can, take some (usually relatively low) loans, and the college will cover the rest. You may have to go on work-study.
I think the "loans" part should be removed, myself.
I don't know about Harvard (EDIT: now I do, it's the same), but Yale's policy on this is that they do not expect students to take loans, and that the university will provide 100% of the demonstrated financial aid need for an admit.
+1, I attended a relatively endowment-rich private “top school” (not Harvard) and every other student I knew said “it was by far the cheapest school i was accepted to!”
Everyone I knew from high school that attended private schools, or “good schools” out of state paid out the nose (or their family did). I grew up in a relatively affluent area, so most people didn’t get much aid. My family could afford to pay for my schooling too, but I had one of the lowest bill of anyone, excluding some in-state public schools, because private schools with big endowments heavily subsidize almost all students that aren’t rich foreigners, 1%er kids, GI bill/someone-else-pays attendants.
TLDR: Schools know who can write a blank check, and they set the sticker price based on those students. Everyone else is subsidized.
Usually the hard part is the "expected FAFSA parent contribution". If you have children that may consider college, spending some time now to structure things can help (the FAFSA ignores some assets and counts others):
Princeton does the same thing. Ivy League schools are cheeper than state schools for some students.
I think this is the correct route. I don't see anything wrong with wealthy families paying a high sticker price as long as admissions is mostly need-blind, and students with less resources get a break.
"The flipside of this is that we are talking about goddamn Harvard. They don't need high prices to signal that they are an elite school, they have a reputation that literally goes back centuries."
Is this true? My understanding is that Harvard was a finishing school for much of its history. It only began to transform into a world class research university on the German model after WWI.
There are people out there who don't mind paying $200k per annum to get admitted to Harvard (for undergrad, of course). So, it is not about their prices, but their exclusivity. People go to Harvard, because Harvard recruits kids of uber wealthy, kids of powerful politicians--basically kids of the power, of the uber wealth. It is a self-perpetuating machine, which creates misery of everyone, because this machine produces the elite and the secretaries for the elite--thereby colluding among each other to the detriment of everyone else.
Yeah, and their financial aid goes pretty far. I remember when I applied maybe 10 years ago or so, it would have cost around $5k/yr or even less. Coming from a middle-class family in the Midwest.
They seem to make it possible for anyone to afford to go there. (They’re just very selective about who can.) So I would never say they’re overpriced or expensive. Maybe it costs a lot if you come from a rich family, but for them, the price doesn’t matter. And for those of us who aren’t rich, it wouldn’t be expensive.
This is very abnormal for non-elite private schools. If I’d gotten in to any of the elite schools, I think they would have been the cheapest options by far… even compared to state schools.
> The money you pay for tuition really isn't going into a better education, it's maintaining the illusion that draws big names as both students and professors, and all the networking opportunities that then manifest as better outcomes for graduates.
Good professors, students, and networking makes a good education though, so yes it is really going to a better education.
Nah, that's just nepotism. What you learn (i.e. what is on the syllabus) is very much a secondary factor in terms of the actual value you get out of it, at least compared to a decent state school.
Some of the best professors I've had in terms of actually learning things were in tiny departments that had no networking capabilities worth speaking of in terms of post-graduation economic success.
The argument for high tuition private school is to not leave money on the table from rich people who can afford to pay full price. Middle class people pay a big discount, while working class people don’t pay anything. For a state school, you can have a billionaire’s kid enrolled but you are only getting the $14k in state tuition from them and therefore might not be able to support many students at the bottom since you are giving a discount to anyone in state.
The notion that there is "money on the table" is fundamentally flawed. Why are we building every single system essentially to catch whales with a cacophony of bureaucratic stop gaps to help "the poor" navigate this hellscape process, it just leads to an endless cycle of more and more loopholes being topped onto each other. You're basically forcing anyone not rich to do a boatload of extra labor. A streamlined process that doesn't endless sticker shock people and force them to grind for scholarships and financial aid while charging a fair price is easier on the psychology of all involved
Again - a problem at places other than Harvard, which operates a need-blind approach where students will all automatically receive 100% of their demonstrated financial aid requirements.
The thing is, Harvard could very likely fully-fund everybody's tuition from endowment, while continuing to allow the endowment to grow. I can't remember where I read that, I'll try to find a reference this evening.
It's completely impossible for an outsider to know that - you have no idea what constraints are placed on the gifts that make up the endowment - it's not one big fund you can draw down on as needed; it's like 14,000 different funds each of which may be allocated to a specific purpose (like a particular professorial chair or to a library or whatever).
I'm struggling to find the article, mainly because Google is fixating on the generic terms of my search. But, university endowments are effectively hedge funds with a non-profit status. A lawsuit sometime either in the late 80's or early 90's challenged this, and the university successfully argued that because of how much scholarship money they issue they should continue to be considered a non-profit. In particular, the ratio of students on tuition assistance was cited as justification. That established a precedent where universities are incentivized to continually raise tuition while simultaneously appearing to give out more financial aid.
Be warned, though, I may be misremembering. So please do correct me if I am wrong.
I remember this article as well, it was probably on HN, and I can't find it. I think the university in question was MIT and the complaint that was even though MIT gave very generous scholarships due to this ruling they had to increase tuition every year to balance out the numbers. Funnily enough I've also been looking for that article for years now.
As long as it is used to fund the school and individual people don't own the money and withdraw funds into their personal accounts, it is a non-profit. Not all non-profits need to have a charitable purpose to qualify. PACs, campaigns, and political parties themselves are non-profits. University athletic departments are non-profits. The NCAA and all other amateur sports leagues are non-profits.
I'm not at all arguing in favor of this or saying it is moral that these organizations should be tax-exempt, but this is the current status of American tax law.
This is particularly bad when you consider that it is entirely legal for, say, a political campaign to spend most of its money buying a candidate's books that nobody else buys in order to hand them out for free at rallies, or a church to spend most of its money buying a mansion and private jet fleet for the pastor.
The sticker price for Harvard (or any top-tier, high-endowment uni) is not representative of what most students will pay.
70% have aid of some sort, those with parents earning less than $65k/yaer generally pay very little, and majority pay the same or less as they would have in-state.[1]
And this is real reason tuition has sky-rocketed. It takes all of 5 minutes to fill out and qualify for a government loan. There is very little downward pressure on tuition, and the subsequent proliferation of administrators.
Harvard has a pretty steep discount rate these days. People love to point to tuition and compare it to 30 years ago. The way college is priced has changed. Very few people pay full sticker price at Harvard anymore.
Harvard is need-blind (like all other Ivy League schools). If you are admitted and can't pay the tuition they will cover it 100%. In that sense a higher tuition is a good thing, since the elite will pay it no problem and it will be used to subsidize those who cannot.
To illustrate why the argument might be invalid, let me put down some assumptions:
• Harvard gets 20% of its income from students, and the other 80% comes from investments and other sources (matches what link previously posted implies).
• There are two cohorts of students (A) wealthy but undeserving students, and (B) poor but deserving meritorious students.
• The argument made was that we are better off if wealthy undeserving students subsidise the poor but deserving students (paraphrasing).
• I'm going to pick a number that every student costs the university $100k per annum (incorrect, and assuming zero variability between students . . . I'm just picking this number so I can make my point clearly. Edit: actually $100k matches a back-of-the-envelope calculation from other figures).
Then:
Any wealthy undeserving student paying between $20k[1] to $100k actually reduces the number of deserving students. Said another way: wealthy undeserving students need to be paying more than 5[1] times what their fair prorated fees would be before it helps the poor deserving students.
Also the article is talking about excessive overhead costs - maybe Harvard could trim 20% of administrative costs, and then concentrate 100% on teaching those that merit it the most, regardless of their background.
Edit: Let us assume it is okay to buy your way into Harvard if you also pay for one other deserving student (that can't afford it), then with my hypothetical University costs of $100k for a student for a year, the fees for the rich student would need to be $1 million to meet that 1:1 ratio, and that ratio implies (in the limit) that 50% of students are undeserving rich students!!!
[1] Edit 2: low value of $20k here is incorrect. Although 20% of income comes from students, a large percentage of expenses are for research and other non-teaching expenses. See my other comment, with an analysis from a different direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838700
But in fact, every student pays a different amount.
The very high sticker price of tuition exists to let the schools charge each student a customized price by applying discounts (e.g. scholarships and aid) as they choose. They can compete for students this way. The most desirable students (by whatever criteria the school has chosen) are offered more discounts.
This system operates at every level. A student of medium-high desirability, say a well-off white kid with good-but-not-great grades, might be offered discounts from a less well known regional school, but not from a nationally recognized school, even if her family can afford to pay full fare anywhere.
Wow, very similar to healthcare. Sounds like efficient price discrimination suitable for well educated consumers. It's a mystery student loan forgiveness was a thing if nobody pays sticker.
Why is the author focusing only on the supply aspect? I would guess that Harvard is charging the amount that they think will maximise their profit. Or at least factoring that in. Isn't that what happens in a free market?
The admission departments need to be leaner - much much leaner. Coming from India I find American admission process ridiculously bloated. I mean asking an undergraduate to do an essay of what excites them. Interviewing an 18 year old about their plans for life. Seriously, I’ve never seen a bigger fucking waste of time. Run standardized tests and admit based on actual knowledge and ability. The rest is bullshit.
While you might be right on some of this. I think the colleges are looking for people not based on standardized tests alone. Most standardized tests are just rote learning and memorization.
I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
Can other people do that without going to these schools? Sure. But these schools are looking for those people.
You can make the tests harder. There can be IQ testing to estimate ability to handle out of box thinking. Fwiw - anyone able to fork out $52k/year for their child is wealthy enough so that the child has had enough flexibility for out of box thinking growing up.
A lot of out of box thinking is conditioning to the environment. If you are taught not to have constraints your ability to think out of the box is much better.
Can the universities prove that whatever process they have now (or is trying to do) is better than a pure meritocracy? Obviously we would need to agree on what "better" means here (ie: what outcomes they are measuring).
The question to you is, how do you measure "needs to be more than that". If this isn't something that you can't quantify, it's just going to let administrators pick students to satisfy whatever the current cultural hot button issue is.
That is a good question. I think the university should decide on the "why" and base candidates off of that. And you are are right, much like picking a hire, a best friend, your spouse, there is a lot that isn't quantifiable.
4.0 student who you interview and they come off as a Jerk, they are smart as hell or a 3.93 student who is passionate about learning, wants to be there, and is a humble person. Which do you want affecting your school's culture?
There is so much classism, elitism, and unsupported effect therefor cause reasoning in this comment I don't even know where to start with it.
Which is ironic, because I am also generally against the idea of colleges basing their admissions solely on standardized tests. Those tests have their roots in the eugenics movement, have been shown to be deeply problematic and biased, and have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors.
> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
I would argue that far more people who "think better than most" people come out of public schools than the "elite" schools. What the elite schools do very well is laundering the mediocrity of the upper class. (See "legacy admissions")
> The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
> Our results offer some solace to the traditional recruiters. After controlling for age, gender, and the year of study, we found that graduates from higher-ranked universities performed better, but only nominally and only on some dimensions of performance. Specifically, the overall performance improved by only 1.9% for every 1,000 positions in the Webometrics global university rankings. When comparing the performance of candidates whose universities rank further apart — a graduate from a top university versus a “global average” university — the performance differential jumps to 19%.
> The 19% difference in performance between the top and the average seems significant, but keep in mind that this is for graduates from universities that are 10,000 university ranking positions apart. At a given organization, candidates are likely to be selected from within a much narrower pool, perhaps from universities whose rankings differ by a couple of hundred positions. In this more realistic case, the predicted difference in performance would be closer to 1%.
Keep in mind, this[1] is the ranking they are using. The top 10 includes public universities and omits several Ivy league "elite" universities.
> have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors.
It seems to me that measuring/estimating the scholastic ability/preparedness of a prospective student has value independent of whether that preparedness is correlated with some other variables (wealth, neighborhood, childhood nutrition, other socioeconomic markers).
“Are they prepared/do they have the aptitude to succeed here?” matters much more than the underlying reasons why they might or might not be prepared.
> The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
Yeah, kind of like SBF
> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
I'd counter this and say the insistence on qualitative standards just opens the door for classist decision making. The second you allow people to introduce qualitative standards, it opens the door for discrimination
Training someone to pass a test to get in is not the same as finding the right person to go there. Does this open up the possibility of discrimination? Yes.
Tell me about how many people I know who went to a CISSP bootcamp, passed the test, and walk around not knowing shit? It's the same in a lot of universities too. Elite universities are looking for people who fit their image and who they believe are going somewhere in life. Universities, especially universities are looking for people that are going places. They are looking for people who will bring recognition, money, and fame back to the university.
> Tell me about how many people I know who went to a CISSP bootcamp, passed the test, and walk around not knowing shit? It's the same in a lot of universities too.
So because bootcamps are an insufficient means of testing, standardized testing in general is inadequate? And not just this specific test in particular?
> Training someone to pass a test to get in is not the same as finding the right person to go there.
Only if the test is insufficient. "finding the right person" is just a racist, classist dog whistle from a group of people that feel entitled to the right to discriminate
You want to see a living example of this entitlement? Listen to the audio from the recent Supreme court verbal argument regarding the Harvard case. Specifically the "oboe players" comment. Juxtapose this with the historical racist and antisemitic discrimination and ask yourself whether Harvard should be trusted to "find the right person" in this sort of way
> Most standardized tests are just rote learning and memorization.
Most of the non-standardized test stuff is subjective and lends itself pretty directly to classist and racial prejudice. No one is arguing that standardized tests are the perfect way to test for aptitude, but the pro-standardized-test folks argue that the alternatives are significantly worse.
Harvard admissions are classist on purpose. They want to admit mostly upper class people because they want every single one of their graduates to become upper class, and the easiest way to do that is to start upper class.
The issue with the essay system is coming up with an evaluation criteria that isn't completely biased and prone to manipulation.
The essay system favors people who hire admissions consultants to write them, or who study the online guides about what types of essays get into Harvard. They also tend to chase sensational sob stories - the claims within those stories are never verified by admissions officers.
I can't find the study at the moment on google, but I recall some work asking to end essays in admissions packages since it discriminates against Black and Hispanic applicants who do not have the background resources to write appropriate admissions essays.
You are right, it is not. I totally get that and I think we should work to remove bias out of the process.
Maybe removing names and genders from the essays or similar entry requirements. There are ways to reduce bias without resorting to some kind of standardized test which only shows that they can pass a test.
Elite Universities are looking for people of character, that could be anyone from any walk of life. But it is self-serving, they are looking for people who will end up bringing money, recognition, and fame back to the school. They are looking for people who want to go there, who will go far in life and talk about how X university is where it all started.
I get that this is a difficult topic, and I want everyone in the world to be a lifelong learner, reader, and more.
But not everyone is built the same, that doesn't mean they won't go far in life. And I don't think recognizing that difference is racist or discriminatory. Not everyone will become a Harvard grad, the president, CEO of a company, etc. Some people are dealt a shittier hands in life and get less draws from the deck, we should work to fix that, but we shouldn't lump everyone into one basket.
Remove names, gender, race from admissions. Have a selection board base their decisions solely on a combination of transcripts and essays.
I think standardized testing is gaming the system, what you cannot game are transcripts of life long learners who value their education. If you remove all gendered language, names, mentions of race from essays you will hopefully be able to make your group decisions with less bias. The group should be diverse enough on multiple metrics.
Will it be perfect, no. But I think it's a better start than what we currently have.
It's more like "gave a fuck about high school", so not really. The people that won that game weren't the smartest but rather the best at conforming to expectations. Although perhaps this has changed now that the dreaded Permanent Record has become our reality.
If somebody manages to don't give a fuck (maybe s/he's doing something cool on the side), and yet still manages to top on the exams, then why would it be relevant?
I was under the impression that elite universities first switched to holistic criteria for admissions because too many Jewish students made it through on academics.
The problem is that standardized tests are more a measurement of access to resources and parental support than raw knowledge or future success. It does feel nice to say that everyone is equal, but not everyone has an equal chance.
In theory, squishy admissions processes exist to identify those students who have raw potential, but may not be identified by standardized test scores.
High school GPA and class rank are a more accurate indicator of success in postsecondary (but I could also argue that's really just a measure of how well you 'conform' to standard educational expectations early in life, not really how 'able to succeed' you are, but that's a different conversation).
>The problem is that standardized tests are more a measurement of access to resources and parental support than raw knowledge or future success. It does feel nice to say that everyone is equal, but not everyone has an equal chance.
Feel free to figure out better system.
Tests while not perfect, are in my opinion at least fair and relatively transparent.
>High school GPA and class rank are a more accurate indicator of success in postsecondary
jesus christ - GPA. I honestly don't know any more biased metric than GPA.
Even if GPA is better predictor of how hardworking you are, then I still don't care, there's too much bias in this metric.
Standarized tests are "pure", they aren't your average not 100% emotionally stable teacher
Harvard has. It involves making students write essays and considering all of their accomplishments. Harvard isn't just looking for the smartest people. They're not looking for the most academically successful. They are looking for people who will be powerful and wealthy. Is it fair that harvard admits people just because their parents have money and power? I guess not, but they're not trying to be fair. They're trying to admit people who will have money and power.
standardized tests are best available method (at scale) because they're at least fair and transparent.
Transparent, maybe. Fair? As noted above, test success is largely a measure of a student's access to resources and parental support. And the usual retort to that assertion is that study books are free at the library, to which I'd respond "if it's that easy, what is the test really measuring?"
Anyways, the main discussion was the insane number of admin staff on campus. Admissions staff is only a small slice of that.
> And the usual retort to that assertion is that study books are free at the library, to which I'd respond "if it's that easy, what is the test really measuring?"
Internet and that's not very high bar. I've personally mostly used it when preparing for math exams.
>to which I'd respond "if it's that easy, what is the test really measuring?"
Access to informations at the level of those tests isn't difficult.
What's being measured? how proficient you are at tested topics, how good your knowledge is.
>Transparent, maybe. Fair? As noted above, test success is largely a measure of a student's access
What does fair mean? I'm pretty sure that harvard is fairly putting together the student body must likely to become rich and powerful. Standardized tests have very little impact on ones likeliness to have a successful business or political career.
Just accepting the fastest people might be the fairest way to win NCAA track meets, but that isn't their goal, so it's not how they run admissions.
Ok but if you're just looking for fair and transparent why not take the 2000 fastest 40 yard dash times in world? Certainly a fair and transparent way for poor people to bootstrap themselves into top schools.
Ah so you see my point. Using fair and transparent metrics that don't measure the right thing isn't useful. Harvard isn't looking for learning capabilities, knowledge (in topics related to degrees). They're looking for people that will be successful and accrue money/power.
>I've been arguing that standardized tests are best available method (at scale) because they're at least fair and transparent.
The discussion started in this context - I replied to this.
>The problem is that standardized tests are more a measurement of access to resources and parental support than raw knowledge or future success. It does feel nice to say that everyone is equal, but not everyone has an equal chance.
I'm speaking more broadly - about the whole edu. sys.
Statistically speaking, GPA given how long it takes to accumulate, is a great metric. Also given the type of work you have to do from extra credit, pop quizzes, standardize tests, projects, group work and more, it may be a more rounded metric than a single test -- more in tune with life.
Though I agree GPA is not better than standardized tests. It still is a very useful metric.
GPA as a metric is terrible because there's no standardization of grading across schools. At best, you can use it to compare applicants from the same school, and sometimes even at the same school Professor Birch is a much harsher grader than Professor Elm, so comparing grades of students that took the same course but from a different instructor is tricky.
Standardized tests have difficiencies, but at least the scores are comparable.
The latter statement leads with "But" indicating contradiction but does not contradict the previous statement. A contributing factor for college well-doing may also be determined by "access to resources and parental support." "Predictive power" sounds cool but may just be a statistical artifact, a tautological measure.
Standardized testing is the reason why India – despite its billion strong population and heavy cultural emphasis on science and engineering – is unable to produce a single ounce of innovation. Students are only taught rote memorization from primary school onwards. They spend their formative years in before-school and after-school coaching doing more of the same, all to crack that single test which will determine their future (and a large number are driven to suicide because of it). No curiosity, no outside interests, no social skills, no independent thought. All of these are discouraged in favor of memorizing equations.
Institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford produce leaders and entrepreneurs. India's top engineering colleges (IITs) are meanwhile ranked nowhere globally, and its top graduates dream of getting a cushy job at Google, nothing more.
There are a lot of problems with American universities, but the lack of entrance exams is a feature, not a bug.
I would differ on this. It’s access to capital and connections. For the longest time access to capital in India has been limited and children are expected to support parents in their old age. Hence, the heavy move towards the cushy job at google. To be fair a large cohort of IIT & IISc grads come to top American universities.
I actually think standardized tests create more equality than other methods. The whole recommendation letter/essay/interview is an eyewash.
Those are mostly political freebies. If you have someone using the reservation to gain admission there is no way they will be able to go through with recommendation letters/writing essays/interviews, etc.
Edit: In a way, the standardized testing made that inequality apparent and harder to wave your with a very ambiguous policy on inclusion.
To uphold equality I need to be punished for the sins of my fathers at least 2 generations before me. I have stopped complaining and my children and grandchildren will learn as well.
Connections is key and related to EQ. You can memorize all the works of physics and be horrible at making connections to get stuff done in the real world.
> To be fair a large cohort of IIT & IISc grads come to top American universities.
Why are they coming to American universities when IITs and IISC have GATE exam for post graduate courses and none of the ridiculous process for admission?
Connections and access to capital. Isn’t that why people move or get a job, etc.? And the fact that they can tolerate the ridiculously low PHD stipends.
The trope about successful dropout founders just isn't really true. Most successful founders finished college. That's not to say that college is the end-all and be-all of life (it's barely just beginning), but let's not pretend that a small handful of famous dropouts makes the trend.
It tells me that these universities have an environment that supports students setting up and running companies while still enrolled. Students being successful enough to drop out before graduating is a badge of honor for these universities. Flexibility with schedules, reduced work load, taking semesters off – none of these are allowed by Indian colleges (believe me, I went through it myself). You can't even pick your own subjects or class schedule. Tell me, what was the last success story to come out of the IIT entrepreneurs' club?
You should research a bit before you say there isn’t an ounce of innovation from India. Very mainstream and simple example is UPI (google it). Tell me any system in the whole world which comes close in scale, ease of use and security.
You are discounting Indian institutions, take a look at the Fortune 500 c suite list and tell me how many of them studied at IIT/IIM.
Investment is a key requirement for enterprise. You will be surprised to see the startup ecosystem now since the investment is flowing in.
I 100% agree with the asinine focus on cracking the exam and not anything else. But then the ROI is too good.
Depends on which parts you choose to look at. If you are insinuating that Indian startup ecosystem is more inflated than everywhere else and you strongly believe that Indian startup ecosystem is devoid of innovation, then I don't know what to say to you.
We will just ignore all the Indians working on letting us "google it".
Just like there is a little niche in information theory that I keep up on current research and I pretty much ignore research outside of China at this point. So many Americans just have their head up their ass they literally have no idea what is going on in the outside world.
> Students are only taught rote memorization from primary school onwards. They spend their formative years in before-school and after-school coaching doing more of the same, all to crack that single test which will determine their future (and a large number are driven to suicide because of it). No curiosity, no outside interests, no social skills, no independent thought. All of these are discouraged in favor of memorizing equations.
You do realize that this is the same language that universities like Harvard use to discriminate against Asian Americans (and historically against Jewish people)?
Reading this and knowing that you're talking about South Asians in particular, this comment just comes off as stereotypical and racist
>Standardized testing is the reason why India – despite its billion strong population and heavy cultural emphasis on science and engineering – is unable to produce a single ounce of innovation.
Says someone whose country brain-drains Indian innovators to do the actual work for which nepotistic grifters from Harvard take the credit!
Harvard's freshman class is around 2000 people. They probably get more than that many applicants with perfect test scores.
I suspect if you apply to Harvard and can point to a film you made with your friends that placed well in some film festival or have some success with your music on Spotify or have done some stand up comedy or painted a mural in your city or something else that showcases talents that are more rare than high grades, you have a much better chance at being accepted. They want an interesting and diverse freshman class. To succeed there academically you really don't need perfect test scores. There really isn't any point in focusing solely on that.
I’m glad my daughter doesn’t have to aspire to take a grueling east/south asian style admissions test for her life to not be extreme poverty. It doesn’t measure intelligence or aptitude or ability to conduct research, it measures the ability to take a high stakes test effectively. That’s useless once the test has been taken. I have had a very successful career as a computer scientist, but my standardized test scores were abysmal due to some childhood ADD and a late in life diagnosed bipolar disorder (which is very common in highly intelligent people). While my intelligence tests consistently put me in the 99.9+ percentile, my standardized test scores placed me pumping gas for a living.
I’m certain my daughter will have my challenges, and I am glad for me, her, and all like her we didn’t grow up in India.
> It doesn’t measure intelligence or aptitude or ability to conduct research, it measures the ability to take a high stakes test effectively.
You are being too harsh and dismissive. These high stake tests often are a good indicator of certain characteristics and aptitude in a student. These students work hard, study hard with a consistent methodology to understand the subject of the test. They know they are competing with others and the rewards are high. All this requires a disciplined personality and aptitude (there are different kinds of intelligence). And most of those who succeed in this actually do well in life.
Ofcourse, it doesn't mean that your criticisms against the current model isn't justified or without merit on some aspects, providing you judge it from the right perspective. For example, India is a developing country and our education system isn't looking to identify and groom the next genius. We don't have the resources for that. So it is currently aimed to create an educated working professional class from all sections of our society that can uplift the economy of the country by generating wealth and decrease the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor (to create an egalitarian society). And what do any industry look for - a hard working, consistent performer, who has the capability to understand how a system / process works and can adapt to it well.
That is why indians, and asians in general, are known and respected for their work ethics around the world in most industries.
But yes, people like you and me would struggle in this system, because the system isn't designed to accommodate the needs of those who aren't "normal" / psychologically healthy. (Hopefully that will change with economical growth and development in education). Note though that this doesn't mean that students who fail to adapt to this system all necessarily end up as failures in life. This is where the social culture also comes into picture in many asian societies. The family and social network of person in the society all try to help them too, both in trying to get access to best education they can afford and in trying to professionally help someone. (A good example of this is how parents make sacrifices and pay for their kids education. And thanks to that, the majority of us with a degree enter the professional world debt-free. (If you are in the US, can you afford to pay for your daughter's education and will you?) It's not all black and white as you think ...
You are of course, correct. I think it’s also an issue of overall scarcity and an enormous population scale for too few seats. It’s easier to scale standardized testing vs assessing the person in totality.
Reality is when I grew up standardized testing made or broke a person, and I couldn’t go to school. I was lucky in that I had always programmed and landed a great job at Netscape. But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing. Had I been 5 years older my life would be much different. I later went back to college and graduated highest honors from UIUC CS, but found a side door into the program owing to my standardized testing failures blocking the normal route through. Given my performance above all other students in my class, my standardized test scores had no correlation to my ultimate academic performance.
Now there’s more focus on the total person and that’s both expensive, but I believe leads to overall better academic outcomes by selecting people individually for their ability to excel in the academic environment of the specific school.
But give the sheer scale of the population applying in India assessing each individual is obviously on the surface impractical. This isn’t an inditement of India or it’s people or it’s system. But it’s also a tragedy. The world is sadly full of those.
I would however hold my statement is still true if harsh. While high test scores may indicate an ability to work hard and ambition, low test scores don’t indicate the opposite. I would argue it’s more closely correlated to the ability to acquire funding for tutoring and a family without the need of your time to help the family. To your point my wife is from Southeast Asia and her family was extremely poor, but they had her siblings drop out of school and work to pay for her books and clothes and afford her time to study for the tests, which she passed top of her country. But her siblings paid for it with their future. I’m proud of her, but not of the system. Her siblings aren’t failures per se, they just never got an opportunity.
But if you have applicants >> slots and an inability to scale a more accurate measure, a capricious but difficult criteria works. But I wouldn’t be particularly proud of that.
Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path. My wife’s siblings even if they went back to school and were accepted wouldn’t be able to find jobs because they followed a non traditional path. This is sad, and I wonder how much faster their country would advance if they had a less rigid job path for their people. How many people are disenfranchised because they matured slower, experienced hardships or illness, or weren’t able to afford the costs of education yet? I’ll betcha is a very large number.
> But give the sheer scale of the population applying in India assessing each individual is obviously on the surface impractical.
I forgot to add there's another aspect - fighting corruption. Since there are so few quality educational institutes, and the competition so high, introducing any other additional form of assessment (like based on essays or interviews) would invite criticism of corruption and prejudice (linguistic, religion and caste mostly in India). (And it is a fair criticism - in the US some colleges actually moved away from admission based on standardised testing because they wanted to limit number of Jews in their institute. In ancient India, quality education was limited to the upper caste only.). Common entrance exams are thus perceived as more fair to everyone.
> But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing.
This was something I really admired about American businesses in the past, but feel it has changed a lot - they didn't mind hiring workers having proficient skills who are passionate about their work, even if they didn't have a degree. This has really changed now and I blame Asian American immigrants for this, especially indians who tend to look down on someone who don't have a degree or even tend to scrutinise which college they have a degree from before deciding whether to respect their professional skills (Indian Hindu Brahmins, most of whom now run the BigTech's, in particular tend to be worse about this attitude because they have to compete even harder due to affirmative action policies and thus tend to have a tunnel vision when it comes to judging people through their degrees).
(I do know that the IT industry has always leaned towards hiring qualified professionals because it is a relatively young field).
This also reminds me of someone's struggle in India - he had failed to clear a few subjects in his engineering (from an average indian college) and thus didn't get his degree in the usual 4 years. He cleared those subjects and finally got his degree after 2-3 years. But he had been working in the IT industry, without a degree, right after college. Here's the kicker - Indian companies refused to recognize his work experience (based on which pay negotiations are done) during the period he worked without a degree. So they would subtract the 2-3 years he had worked without a degree, and offer him less pay. This was even after he had worked hard to get additional certifications in the industry to make up for the lack of passing away from a "good" college. He found true professional respect based on his experience only in the USA.
> Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path.
That's is true, but money and social connections also play a great role here. Middle class and rich people have more options for second chances, than the poor. And what you described about your wife's family situation is indeed quite common - some of my classmates had brothers and sisters who couldn't afford a decent college education because they were poor, and instead chose to sacrifice and pay for their siblings education. But again, note that our social culture (unlike the west) lays a lot of emphasis on helping family member, and often, these educated siblings did contribute back financially (if they were decent individuals who didn't succumb to selfishness). One of my friend and classmate ensured that he paid for brother's kids education for the sacrifices his brother made for him.
I'd rather put it this way - it's because our resources are limited that we have so few IITs, IIScs, AIIMSs, NIDs, IIMs etc. As our economy has grown, we have established more of these institutes.
The thing here is that elite universities aren't necessarily "best" at education in all cases, rather their value is in networking which makes them more like clubs/societies with an educational component.
That's an orthogonal point. Even the American system is rife with cheaters, either explicit[1] or legalized cheating aka College Prep industry which helps you with everything including essays if you pay enough.
There’s a larger point about institutionalized unfairness, though. Sure, it may have been an isolated incident of some students pretending to be athletes, but the larger question is why are athletes being given preferential admission to Harvard in the first place?
And whatever the answer to that question is, it’s going to require a bloated admissions department to make it happen.
what? US has legalized cheating in so many ways (athletes, college preps, dean's lists, legacies...). People with enough resources and/or enough motivation will always find a way to get what they want. US gives them a paved road while in the East, they have to cheat. When they can't find a paved road, they cheat in the West as well.
> I feel like one is a cultural problem and one was an isolated incident.
I don't know you, but I'm going to guess the cultural problem is a problem of a culture not your own, and what happens in your culture is the series of isolated incidents.
I just want to say, and I hate that saying this makes me come off as racist because I don't want to speak about a whole country.
I go to a pretty good American school which has a lot of foreigners going on visas, the majority being Indian and Chinese students. The group of Indian students in my under grad got caught cheating all together. They were just hanging out in discord giving each other answers.
In a lot of other countries it's seen as an "Us vs The Man" mentality. So if you are cheating or figure out how to take advantage of a system you are seen as beating "The Man or The System" and you are smarter than it. In a lot of Western counties, that is not the case.
I think it’s a stretch to say that test-based admission causes cheating in Indian university admissions. They co-occur, but I don’t see the causal relationship.
No ? All of the high stakes entrance examinations CAT / JEE / NEET / Civil services are completely cheating free and the systems goes through great troubles to enforce it. I believe it is exactly the same for law schools, accountants and NDA (defense) exams. That about covers all of India's well regarded professions.
Cheating happens in courses once you're in College because of a general apathy towards what is being taught (sadly) and the knowledge that your grades don't matter for much.
That would look like the mass layoffs of the sorts of people whose job is general preventative maintenance, or who are employed at higher cost due to their knowledge. Generally the sorts of things that reduce short term costs immediately, while causing much larger pain in some not-right-now future.
For real-life examples of this, see many private equity buyouts.
That would be a disaster. People would earn those bonuses with things like cutting R&D, making people work more hours for the same pay, and neglecting maintenance/repair, which all show cost savings in the short term and run the organization into the ground in the long run.
As attractive as it is to think there's a quick-and-easy solution here, there is not. It requires constant vigilance from quality leadership to fall into neither the trap of bloat nor the one of foolish cost-cutting.
Is this article bringing any new perspective to the table? I suspect there is a quarterly Crimson tradition of superficial administration-bloat-decrying by Harvard sophomores with nearly-parodic bylines like (in this case) "Brooks B. Anderson, Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House". What's missing is a comparison to other schools, a comparison to corporate bloat or lack thereof, or any reflection on the causes of the cost increase beyond "bureaucracy is bad". I was actually quite surprised to learn that Harvard tuition costs have only doubled in real terms over 36 years. To me that doesn't seem like a lot when considering the increase in demand for college education (UC tuition has increased 4x in the same time period). Is 2x a lot compared to other things? The article doesn't say, choosing instead to quote Josh Hawley and deride easy targets like inclusive signage committees.
> As I made my way to the Parking Office, I had to ask myself: Where did all these people come from? And do we really need them here?
Did you? Instead of yourself, couldn't you have asked someone who actually knows the answer to these questions, like the administrators themselves, or former college presidents or something? Do an actual investigation and write a real article, not a low effort opinion piece.
This is not really specific to the Crimson though, I have this same issue with all opinion writing and I don't understand why newspapers do it. I've never met someone who pays for a publication but would stop if it didn't have op-eds. I don't think it's just about outrage clicks or something, editorials and op-eds have been around forever so there must be some population that loves them for some reason.
I suspect headcount actually makes the situation look better than it actually is. A lot of administrators also get paid a pretty large amount—more than many faculty, sometimes a lot more. So administrative spend may be at ratios even higher than the 3:1 administrator-to-faculty ratio quoted in the article.
FWIW, if you're interested in doing some data analysis of salaries from a large public R1 institution, I've parsed and published publicly-available academic professional salary data for the University of Illinois going back 15 years: https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker
This ends in Gov. Dutton saying "You're all fired."
As the Crimson says: Harvard would keep running if all the administrators were fired and then 10% of those now-closed jobs were reopened to qualified applicants: the jobs that are actually needed.
This piece raises points we've heard before, but I can't tell whether this particular act of expressing them is some kind of shrewd grandstanding maneuver, or a political blunder.
An undergrad (first year?) Government student, fortunate enough to be at Harvard, writes an opinion piece, in Harvard's newspaper, saying that many administrators at Harvard shouldn't be there.
If, at any point in the next three years, the student finds they need the assistance of an administrator, that could be awkward-or-worse for the student.
And maybe they're not planning on trying to get accepted to grad/law school anywhere with administrators.
> I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
I'd expect that this level of rhetoric wouldn't play well at Harvard, and I'm surprised if a student there thinks it would.
Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
Ah yes, good ol’ bureaucratic retribution for questioning the bureaucracy. If Harvard administrators give this student a harder time because of the piece they wrote, aren’t they proving the students point, to a certain extent?
Also, how would this be connected to conservative ideas? Theoretically, liberal ideas are the ideas that are critical of institutions. This all seems so backwards, no?
Now there are all kinds of non-core administrators very ancillary to education whose job is to keep busy having people do things that are again, not core to education/academics.
Yes, they should cut the fat. Yes that will eliminate make-work jobs. That's the whole point.
Maybe they are frustrated that everyone knows this is an issue but it continues to grow none the less so they are taking it upon themselves to speak truth to power. In other words they want someone to take notice and take steps to address the issue at this center of learning and better yet at all centers of learning.
> Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
Or maybe the author was genuinely disturbed by the inequalities and racism currently being perpetuated by said administrative bloat, similar to how Snowden was disturbed by the behavior of the US government?
The fact that you see this situation only in terms of personal gain is disturbing
> Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
This line in particular betrays a lack of working experience. Anybody who has worked at all in their life - even a basic highschool carwash job, knows how hard it is to appropriately identify which employees to let go in an unbiased manner. It's not as simple as knocking on a door and asking them what they do (despite Elon Musk using this method recently at Twitter)
I like the idea of there being some requirement on student spending for these educational institutions to maintain their tax-free status. Not dissimilar from requiring insurance plans to spend a set percentage (say 85%) on healthcare vs. administration. Having said that, I'd want to game it out to see how the institutions would react and what it would do to prices.
The other idea I like is that once an educational endowment reaches a certain size, all students should go for free (or it could be on a scale relative to endowment size) in order for the institution to maintain their tax-free status.
I don't know why the public conversation is always around "Harvard is doing xyz". Yes it is one of the top educational institutions in the country, but it is also private. The number of administrators they have should not be your concern. Putting political pressure on a single elite university (or group of universities) admitting a thousand students per year isn't going to solve the country's problems with higher education.
Instead redirect that anger towards your state's public university system. Ask your elected politicians why funding was cut down to zero during the 2008 recession and never restarted. Ask why football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in the state and they continue to spend billions on stadiums, despite the fact that the sports has a negative return in all but the top ~5 NCAA division I programs. Ask why enrollment and graduation rates continue to decline while administration costs keep going up. Fighting the Harvard boogeyman isn't going to fix any of this.
Your hard working kid isn't entitled to Harvard or MIT, but they should be entitled to a seat at your local state school at a reasonable cost.
Yes I don't have a problem with the article itself, but more with everyone here sitting and debating it like they have any skin in the game. Harvard is a century+ older than the USA and has a larger endowment than the reserves of most countries. They will be just fine. Spend that energy towards your local public school instead and you may see some actual positive change.
Perhaps, but co-mingling a perceived problem at Harvard (high nameplate tuition that few students actually pay) with an actual problem at public universities (disinvestment in higher education by state legislatures causing tuition increases) doesn't help the debate at all, it just muddies the waters.
Even this article doesn't actually address the issue directly; it complains about excessive administrators, then tries to support that complaint with tuition data. Tuition is not the primary funding source of university administrators. Federal research dollars pay for a significant fraction (if not a majority) of them. The data that the author should be leveraging is expenditure data, not income data.
But it's not - because, as is pointed out elsewhere, the amount that Harvard chooses to spend on its administration doesn't have much impact on how much it costs most students to attend, nor does it appear to compete out faculty or other funding.
To that extent, Harvard is precisely non-emblematic of the issue.
Because Harvard gets not-for-profit status and the associated tax breaks, despite having a $51B endowment that keeps growing. I think it's fair game to ask what our public policy should be for providing tax breaks to schools that horde huge amounts of money. On the other hand, if they didn't get tax breaks, then I'd agree with you that's it is none of the public's business.
Each university has a base rate that is tacked on to each grant (F&A) and Harvard has one of the highest overhead rates allowed. This means, relative to other research institutions, every research dollar spent at Harvard has more money "taxed" away for administration. What is the opposite for economies of scale?
Is this really a problem? People are obsessed with Harvard and not seeing the problem as general? Because I've seen these complaints come up tons of times without Harvard.
They take in students who use taxpayer funding to pay some of their tuition, they get large grants for research from the taxpayers, and they have a massive endowment that they're able to invest tax-free while hardworking people are busy paying taxes on our investments. Wha they do is absolutely a legit concern for us taxpayers.
I think the focus is because as a leading institution, Harvard (and the rest of the Ivies) set the trend for how the rest of academia will organize themselves.
If Harvard hired a vice-Provost of Higher Student Satisfactionality, well then surely Directional State U must have one too! So bloat in the private schools leads to bloat in the public as they try to keep up, with, as you mention, diminishing funding.
Same logic applies to business - everyone in Silicon Valley was copying Steve Jobs' best and worst characteristics after the iPhone.
You're argument on the state school is also spot on
>Yes it is one of the top educational institutions in the country, but it is also private.
If they're so private and immune from public feedback, why are they tasked with producing such an overwhelming portion of our political and judicial class, up to Supreme Court justices?
... such a strange choice of words in this context. It's not like the U.S. Government is sitting there, waiting for Harvard to fill its quota of Supreme Court Justices.
It is our concern because Harvard is subsidized by our tax money, in the form of explicit research and teaching grant, student loans, and charity tax status. It is every American’s right to ask if that money might not be spent more effectively elsewhere.
Harvard produces a big chunk of the elite that run other American and global institutions, and less prestigious universities often follow their lead. The culture there and the students that absorb it has disproportionate impact on the world.
Having spent an extended time in the academic milieu in Cambridge, MA, another concern of mine is the extended use of stimulants. For personal choice, I don't much care, but in the context of those making the laws, I observed a definite tendency of students and researchers to expect Joe Random American to be able to output work at the same capacity as hopped-up administrators to be. And the end effect is observable: a meth epidemic among the disenfranchised. Is it any wonder a class of vulnerable people is created who have to take drugs to work the crappiest jobs because large equity and gaps in access to capital prevent them from ever owning a home? Curb stimulant use in the Ivy Leagues.
> why football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in the state
Because they're worth it. Many programs just straight up are profitable, but all of them contribute positively to the bottom line. Sports are the main way universites solicit donations from alumni. They make a university more popular to students by building school spirit. Football and basketball programs bring immeasurable benefits to universities.
University budgets are insanely complicated. I could make a case that the philosophy department is profitable given the minor grant sums it takes in if I ignore all other costs. The sports teams can easily hide the administrative/marketing costs of the program.
Just remember that about 45% of Harvard’s undergrads got to cut in line ahead of your hardworking kid because they were athletes, legacy admits, children of people the deans thought might kick in a few million, or children of Harvard faculty.
> Harvard has instead filled its halls with administrators. Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do?
Why aren't people angry about this? Why hasn't this been regulated away by now?
Anyone who's been through the university system knows about all the trash emails that these people sit around writing. It's like that's all they do (visibly): they either sit on their asses writing emails or they stand on the stage for graduation day.
What are these people for? Just writing emails? Why don't we just automate their jobs away and slice the cost of tuition?
Here's what we need: legislation to cap the percentage of administrative staff and cap their salaries to be no higher than the average salary of a professor at that university
I consider it unsurprising that a bureaucracy gets taken over by bureaucrats. The rest of the faculty is too busy doing research and teaching classes to bother with office politics, climbing the ladder, and increasing staff counts at levels of the ladder beneath themselves. The professors consider the importance of their research and teaching efforts to be self-evident, so there's no need to waste time justifying them, trying to convince people that they're important or that their department budget should be increased.
You see a similar effect in tech companies, where engineers building the company's product get relegated to the sidelines after the technology is proven or the market is captured, and MBAs, management, and sales become the dominant forces within the organization...engineering is still focused on the product, with their careers an issue that they assume will resolve itself, while the MBAs are entirely focused on their careers.
As a former administrative staff member at Harvard (web developer in the IT department) for several years, I can't think of a single coworker who spent their days "just writing emails". This is complete and utter nonsense.
The administration is responsible for the entire operation of the university, outside of teaching. And it's a relatively large university with a lot of different divisions/schools. There's a LOT more to "administration" than writing emails and standing on stage at graduation!
Whenever my EE professor needed to draw a wire to a "current sink" he would refer to it as the "Administrator's Building" and then proceed with a long rant about all sorts of negative things they burden him with.
Not sure how an institution can go about cleaning up such inefficiencies besides going out of business, which is usually not an option.
Likely the education would be similar or even worse at Harvard.
But the main thing you get is graduating from Harvard, and knowing everyone from your class and school. Those connections are huge, depending on the field you're going into.
An MBA from a state school might work if you're staying in-state, but an MBA from an elite school opens the world.
I don’t understand this reasoning. Besides the fact that it just seems logically incorrect, it totally avoids the question of why a CS education from an unknown state school would be better than Harvard’s.
Harvard’s undergraduate CS program is not in the top 10 (if you believe US News’s rankings, which I always take with a huge grain of salt), but that doesn’t mean that it’s worse that State U’s.
Which is why I said "similar or even worse" - there's no guarantee it's better.
And if University of California, Berkley is better than Harvard at CS, then there you go, a state school that is better. The possibility certainly exists.
Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden?
Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it:
> In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost.
I'm assuming this calculation was run using a standard inflation adjustment. However, Harvard is in the Boston metro, which has experienced significantly more housing inflation than the country as a whole. (This matters because housing costs filter through the entire local economy.)
Would be interesting to tease out how much of the price increase is a direct result of the increase in housing costs driven by the failure of housing policy.
Edit: The St. Louis Fed has the Boston housing index increasing from 86.15 in January 1986 to 426.44 in July 2022. BLS's inflation calculator puts $86.15 of buying power in 1986 being equivalent to $232.88 in July 2022. So it would appear that housing alone could be responsible for roughly half of the increase. Given the increase in healthcare costs over the period, it would also be interesting to do a similar analysis around those numbers.
These arguments would have a lot less traction if more people were aware of the mind-numbing levels of paperwork involved in applying for and managing federal research grants. Not to mention running a hedge fund...excuse me, endowment the size of Harvard's.
And a lot of those diversity and student affairs jobs these writers especially love to hate on handle things like compliance and risk management. Kind of important when you're running a highly visible and deep-pocketed organization like Harvard!
This is exactly the point! Though I agree the article misses it slightly.
A university shouldn't be a hedge fund with professors being essentially PR.
Writing and being denied for grants is a huge waste of time and resources and is a problem.
The solution proposed (add a tax???) doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but these administratiors are problematic on a societal level even if they make sense for the university.
I disagree with the comment about endowments, to an extent. Endowments are critical in allowing non-profits to pursue their purpose. Without them, there is no level of independence between the non-profit and their benefactors, turning them into a puppet which is tied to the whims of external forces. With an endowment, non-profits are able to reject "gifts" with too many strings attached, or at the very least possess sufficient leverage to not be yanked around. Now, whether a non-profit chooses to pursue their purpose (or if the purpose is even a good one to begin with) is another matter entirely, but it's largely orthogonal.
Endowments are fine, but the purpose of the university is not hedge fund finance. When it comes to tough decisions, imo. donors should not win but neither should financial people. The faculty should have the final say.
This would be more interesting if it were a) a new position to take or in any way novel, b) free of overt right wing politics. The point is apolitical and paying homage to trump and desantis distracts from a meaningful point. Why has college administration become so enormous? And I think the issue extends well beyond private schools.
Perhaps we need Elon to review the college administration staffs code.
Don't fire them all, but coming close probably wouldn't hurt. As evidence I offer the below.
My rural college and surroundings depended on a student-staffed fire department to for emergency medical services, fire-prevention and protection.
- Because many emergencies need a quick response, volunteering students lived behind the fire-department in a dilapidated college-owned building. ~30 meters door-to-door.
- Housing on-campus attached us to an administrative process. Volunteers registered as a special interest group focused on community service. This was an administrative formality to house firefighters next to their fire station to protect life and property.
- The special interest process occurred before the lottery to allocate block housing. I was confident that volunteers' 1K+ hours of combined community service and recent suppression of a small dorm fire served as proof positive that we were a bona fide community service organization.
- According to the student housing administrator we were not! We did not adequately perform (paraphrasing) on-campus education related to our community service and were to be housed together in a building several minutes instead of seconds from the fire station. All attempts at rational resolution were pointless/ineffectual.
- This standoff persisted for weeks until the mayor and a trustee got wind of it, putting the matter to bed.
Net, a campus administrator wanted to endanger thousands of people by arbitrarily increasing a fire department's response times over a (deliberately?) misguided interpretation of our inadequate provision of on-campus services a few weeks after we put out a fire in a dorm. We also started burning a mock dorm room on the central quad's lawn after this to amply demonstrate our on-campus education efforts.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadThis isn't about running an institution, these administrators are employees through and through. They are simply employees sharing 1 meaningless task with several other team members and taking eons to complete anything.
An academic leader can easily be a bad manager. A manager cannot provide academic leadership.
Dear Carolina Community:
I am excited to announce that Michael Andreasen, senior vice president for university advancement at the University of Oregon, has been selected as Carolina’s next vice chancellor for development, beginning Jan. 23. A seasoned leader, Andreasen believes strongly in the mission of public universities, and I am confident he will continue to engage supporters and alumni and build on our recent fundraising success. He will succeed David Routh, who announced in April he would step down at the end of the year.
For the past nine years, Andreasen has overseen all aspects of advancement at UO, including development; state, community and federal affairs; advancement operations; stewardship and public events and alumni relations. During his tenure, he consistently increased annual fundraising totals and secured some of the largest donations to any public flagship university.
Among his accomplishments, Andreasen helped complete a $3 billion campaign at Oregon, raising $3.24 billion, including a final fiscal year fundraising performance of $867 million and maintained fundraising momentum through the transition of five university presidents. He worked in collaboration with campus leaders and a small team of faculty to secure two $500 million gifts to establish and build the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact and helped garner a transformational $425 million gift to establish the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health.
Andreasen began his time at UO as the vice president for development, leading efforts to establish campaign priorities, setting a working goal of $1.2 billion and developing a communications plan for the public launch in collaboration with the president, executive leadership and school deans. Over 12 years, he has served as a member of the University of Oregon Foundation Board, the Alumni Association Board, the Portland Business Alliance Board and the Greater Portland Chamber of Commerce.
Prior to joining UO, Andreasen was at the University of Michigan for seven years – first as executive director and assistant dean for advancement for development and alumni relations and then as executive director and assistant dean for advancement at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. His more than 32 years of fundraising experience includes roles in major gifts and campaign leadership at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the American Film Institute. He began his career as the director of the annual fund for the University of California, Irvine, where he also earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science.
I want to thank the search committee, chaired by Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment, and John Montgomery, executive director for The Rams Club, for the time and effort they have devoted to this search. I’m appreciative for their work in identifying multiple leading candidates for this important role.
Andreasen joins University Development at an exciting time as the Campaign for Carolina comes to a close, and we look to what’s next in Carolina’s future. I’m grateful to David Routh for serving as an incredible leader and ambassador for Carolina throughout his tenure. Please join me in thanking David and offering your congratulations to Mike as we welcome him to Carolina.
Sincerely,
Kevin M. Guskiewicz Chancellor
Tell me with a straight face that that's not a God of Grift among Gods of Grift
What's the problem here? This person has an apparently excellent track record of raising money. This isn't grift! There would be a problem if donors got excessive benefits from their donations, and there appears to be a problem that the money is largely being spent on useless staffing, but at least the latter is not the vice chancellor of development's fault. The VC of development pulls their own weight.
Having this type of person on the team isn't bad but if they're calling all the shots then the whole mission of the (non profit) university is destroyed.
Hard to get all nuance in a comment, but meant that ultimate control of direction is from the people doing the work, not that they necessarily were involved in the minutia of management
I'm not saying that the best engineers make the best managers, but I don't think someone can be the best manager (in tech) without being at least a good engineer.
It's very convenient that those who are "qualified to manage" consistently come from the same stratum of society
If the problem is that some people are being paid too much to do nothing, the exact opposite solution is to pay everyone too much to do nothing. I'd be 100% supportive of UBI if that meant paying everyone in the world $2 a day, but what UBI actually means is giving exclusive in-groups more money than the median global income for free. We see exactly what happens in the gulf oil nations like Qatar. The citizens outsource all their real work to an out-group that doesn't receive free money, so they have absolutely no incentive to improve working conditions.
The problem is that some people are being paid too much to be meddlesome.
If you have a bullshit job you are paid to do nothing. If you have UBI you are paid no matter what you do. Somebody who has to not get fired cannot do anything other than sit in their chair and do their bullshit job. They are actively removed from the pool of useful laborers. But somebody who is paid regardless can choose what to do. Yes, they can watch TV all day. But they can also do something that isn't bullshit.
https://www.newarab.com/opinion/saudi-workers-enraged-five-t....
But there is absolutely a difference, which you already mentioned: Seat in chair for 8 hrs.
They might be spending it watching YouTube but they can't volunteer or start a band or do whatever they want.
With UBI there is no nominal expectations so nobody does anti-useful things like adding paperwork to justify their existence.
The key part of the book for me is that people really truly want to work and be useful. Case in point why people accept teaching roles despite the bad pay. Even more useful things like firefighters or suicide hotline workers people will volunteer to do for free.
Jobs that are useless can't get people to stay for any reason other than money. In essence, it pays well because it is useless.
One option (UBI) is to pay everyone and then they do what they feel is most useful. People doing jobs they love will happily continue doing them. More people will be teachers or craftsmen, or artists. Jobs that suck but really need to get done will pay more, because the workers will be comparing it to doing something else and not to starvation.
But the incentives for doing useful work are not there, since enough people are willing to be paid in good feelings instead of salary. So if not UBI something needs to change to make real useful jobs worth it
This is interesting to me and I wanted to dig in more. You seem to imply that Qatar has some form of UBI, but I can't find any source to that effect.
[1] https://www.psa.gov.qa/en/statistics/Statistical%20Releases/...
[2] https://www.zawya.com/en/economy/gcc/saudi-citizen-account-p...
Or you could make able bodied people work to support themselves.
It takes a ton of work to keep people alive and well. Society will find something useful for them to do.
But the point is that for a large variety of cultural, political, and economic reasons there are a lot of jobs like university administrators that are simply not useful but get paid nonetheless, in many cases much better than the people doing the actual work. In both public and private spaces (eg. Harvard, a private university).
Even in tech circles we see this argument, like, why does it take 10,000 developers to run a website etc.
I think most people want to be useful to society and have a meaningful job but a lot of jobs that pay well are not that. With UBI those admins would be able to volunteer, teach children, make culture, or all the other useful things that pay terribly.
Note that these admins are already working to support themselves but society is still failing to find something useful for them.
I'm happy to talk abt this more of ya think it would be useful to you :) Got more to say but comments are hard to fit nuance into
Graeber is not making these claims as an armchair expert, decreeing whose jobs are useless. It's an anthropological study of the people who themselves think they have a bullshit job.
I'd highly recommend reading the book! It's much more nuanced and reasonable than any 5 sentence comment can be
I worked in the FAS IT department for several years in the mid-to-late 00's. A huge chunk of my team's projects were custom software solutions, necessitated by top professors being extremely picky about random things, which prevented use of off-the-shelf software.
Pretty much nothing in this Crimson article lines up with my experience. Maybe things have changed a lot since I worked there, but I'm skeptical.
The best I can come up with is that universities have enough money and little enough tuition price sensitivity that they aren’t adequately pressured to cut costs.
Alternatively: there is a split between universities and departments. Academic departments have their own budgets (combinations of whatever they can extract from the university, earmarked donations, and grants), and universities have become extremely adept at extracting money from grants. But the departments do most of the useful work! Your amazing math professor doesn’t work for the university per se but is actually part of the mathematics department.
So some of the problem may be a mismatch in where the money is and where it’s needed.
How do you know? It seems like they’re “wasting” this money so they can point to the amount that they “had to spend” when it’s time to collect donations, similar to what wikimedia does. To them, the value all these jobs provide is inflating the operating expenses, which means they can ask for more tax-free money.
If I were ran a university and wanted a good story to tell my donors, I would tell them that I want to spend $X million dollars on hiring professors, improving undergraduate education, offering financial aid, reducing tuition, building genuinely useful buildings, etc. I would also want to optimize the actual bottom line, not the tax-free donation revenue earned for the hell of it.
There would be absolutely no need to spend money on useless things just to say I spent it.
The common refrain about higher education costs is state governments have cut back on subsidies, so it's interesting seeing this stat for Harvard since it doesn't get the same level of state support, has an endowment, and still saw tuition double.
They can maintain their elite status while heavily discounting tuition to those with financial need, since the very image of "premium product" means that there will always be people willing to pay for it. It is essentially a self-fulfilling idea.
I recall visiting Harvard during a high school debate tournament, and being utterly unimpressed with the facilities compared to what I had seen at non-ivy-league schools. The money you pay for tuition really isn't going into a better education, it's maintaining the illusion that draws big names as both students and professors, and all the networking opportunities that then manifest as better outcomes for graduates.
Besides, the reputation of a school isn't built on its tuition, it is built on the alumni. The only "positive" signal from a high tuition is that it is a filter to reduce the number of poor students that your child might have to interact with and increase their chances of falling in with some other elite rich kids to fast track their way up to the C suite or some lucrative board seats.
That's the primary reason to go to private school. That's what justifies the 2-4x price gap with public universities. All the niceties (not having to enter into a bi-yearly battle royal for seats in limited space classes, not having to put up with overly impacted class sizes, other little luxuries) are just there to maintain the appearance of prestige. The actual value comes from the admissions department.
I went to a private school and I saw a lot of friend groups and social structures that find ways to limit those networks to “rich and competent” instead of “just competent”.
Eg Fraternal organizations (bonus: also gender limited) like fraternities, finals clubs, or supper clubs with massive fees and tight cultures are one big common example. I was (embarrassingly) in such a club and there was definitely a riff between incomes (“wanna fly to New Orleans for Mardi Gras this week, we’ll only miss a few days of class?”)
Obviously spring break trips or not having to work a campus job. Eg Yacht week.
Also: expensive clubs with extra dues, equipment
A big thing that I didn’t expect, but is something that IMO schools don’t do a good job to address is that many lower-income students just don’t understand that sort of academic world because no one taught them. Eg I met a freshman student who thought professors wanted him to fail and that there was an adversarial relationship. Furthermore, he thought office hours are when the professors shouldn’t be disturbed. Once someone just explained that professors want you to succeed and hold office hours to help you succeed, he became more successful, less stressed, and spent less time studying alone. My parents taught me all this, and my high school held office hours… but many students never learn how this world works!
I think that is a myth, unless the student is paying more than say $100k per year. Elsewhere I read that average fees were about $50k, but I presume there is quite some variation.
Assuming teaching the students costs 2.5 billion (rest is research costs) and 25000 full-time-equivalent students, then if each rich student pays enough to fully subsidise a second poor student, the rich student would need to pay $200k, and you trend towards a larger percentage of the students being rich.Argued from a different perspective (with a similar outcome): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838201
[1] https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview
[2] https://www.univstats.com/colleges/harvard-university/studen...
[3] https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...
The closest I can paraphrase your point-of-view would be “rich students are great”, or potentially that poor students gain by associating with rich students?
1) The view that the value given by over charging the rich students should be based on the number of students' tuition they eliminate is not fairly representing the situation, and understates the impact of having, say, a quarter of the student body paying significantly more than the "true" price. If the school spends say 20k/student, they charge some students 60k and others 10k, then each rich student has subsidized 4 poorer students. If a parent donates a large sum to get their kid into the school, that number is likely much greater.
2) Expensive schools using their high tuition offset by discretionarily providing merit (or need chosen by merit) based aide as a filter to distill the student body to only the high-performing, rich, or both is the main value proposition of expensive schools. Every pairing both within and between those two groups are valuable to the students, relative to say an acquaintance with an economically disadvantaged mediocre student. It subtly turns the universal experience of making new friends at university into a massive opportunity for networking, which many students don't even realize while they're engaging in it. It's not egalitarian, but it is extremely valuable to its beneficiaries.
My point is that you are misrepresenting the scale of the figures. I suspect the figures are more like $50k fees, and $100k costs? Given those figures as assumptions, rich kids need to pay way way more, and the fees paid by poorer students matters less. Otherwise you just end up with a school with mostly rich kids. I go into my assumptions for the figures in the other post I linked to.
> Expensive schools using their high tuition
Undergrad tuition fees only makes up something like 13% of Harvard income, and some of that is paid for by “poorer” students. I think your argument hinges upon tuition income being the most significant income to the school. Remove 13% of costs (crazy admin staff) and Harvard doesn’t need any tuition income from rich kids any more for undergraduates.
Google result shows “Harvard's 2019 class [snip] a massive 82 percent of those scholars are economically advantaged” i.e. rich kids are obviously not subsidising poor kids.
I am merely trying to point out that you are making deep assumptions, annd your anssumptions appear to be false, although admittedly I have only done some superficial googling.
I presume Harvard is a finishing school, for networking and status signalling. Especially given its 98% pass rate!
> massive opportunity for networking
I would hope that poorer students manage to network into the rich kid networks (I totally agree we should be realistic about how the world works, regardless of how “unfair” it may be). Whether poor students can effectively network is another question. I have certainly seen articles from poor kids explaining how difficult it is to break into wealthy cliques e.g. can’t pony up cash to join sporting events or outings, and don’t understand the social queues.
I admit I don’t really know much about the topic, since I went to a middle class school in a country on the edge of the world, and I have never spent time with wealthy scions. I am relatively wealthy compared with my friends (excluding the friends that I made my wealth with). Note: I’m using undergraduate and graduate in the UK meaning, not the US meaning, which I don’t grok.
Here is a (left-bias?) article that argues that poor kids are not actually being helped: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/28/14359140/c...
I presume it is difficult to find right-bias articles looking at equality of opportunity for expensive universities?
The sticker price of Harvard is not what the median applicant pays. Some applicants -- e.g. Jared Kushner -- literally do pay millions [0]. Others pay a small fraction of that [1].
My 2c: lowering the sticker price at elite schools would be great because it would lower the perceived barrier to entry. Those perceptions matter, especially to folks who don't come from the Professional Managerial class and don't have a clear understanding of how the system works.
But I also see why they don't -- they do, after all, want to make sure that rich families pony up.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-ku...
[1] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...
I think the "loans" part should be removed, myself.
https://admissions.yale.edu/affordability-details
Everyone I knew from high school that attended private schools, or “good schools” out of state paid out the nose (or their family did). I grew up in a relatively affluent area, so most people didn’t get much aid. My family could afford to pay for my schooling too, but I had one of the lowest bill of anyone, excluding some in-state public schools, because private schools with big endowments heavily subsidize almost all students that aren’t rich foreigners, 1%er kids, GI bill/someone-else-pays attendants.
TLDR: Schools know who can write a blank check, and they set the sticker price based on those students. Everyone else is subsidized.
https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/schools/high...
So it can be strangely worthwhile to sell all your non-retirement investments and buy the biggest house you can find.
So for example: for incomes in the $65-100k range, the median net cost is $5,701 with 99% receiving aid.
I think this is the correct route. I don't see anything wrong with wealthy families paying a high sticker price as long as admissions is mostly need-blind, and students with less resources get a break.
pay as much as you and your parents can pay and/or borrow[1]
TFTY
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/type...
Is this true? My understanding is that Harvard was a finishing school for much of its history. It only began to transform into a world class research university on the German model after WWI.
They seem to make it possible for anyone to afford to go there. (They’re just very selective about who can.) So I would never say they’re overpriced or expensive. Maybe it costs a lot if you come from a rich family, but for them, the price doesn’t matter. And for those of us who aren’t rich, it wouldn’t be expensive.
This is very abnormal for non-elite private schools. If I’d gotten in to any of the elite schools, I think they would have been the cheapest options by far… even compared to state schools.
Good professors, students, and networking makes a good education though, so yes it is really going to a better education.
Some of the best professors I've had in terms of actually learning things were in tiny departments that had no networking capabilities worth speaking of in terms of post-graduation economic success.
https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/princeton-university-is...
Be warned, though, I may be misremembering. So please do correct me if I am wrong.
I'm not at all arguing in favor of this or saying it is moral that these organizations should be tax-exempt, but this is the current status of American tax law.
This is particularly bad when you consider that it is entirely legal for, say, a political campaign to spend most of its money buying a candidate's books that nobody else buys in order to hand them out for free at rallies, or a church to spend most of its money buying a mansion and private jet fleet for the pastor.
70% have aid of some sort, those with parents earning less than $65k/yaer generally pay very little, and majority pay the same or less as they would have in-state.[1]
1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/it-costs-78200-to-go-to-harv...
And this is real reason tuition has sky-rocketed. It takes all of 5 minutes to fill out and qualify for a government loan. There is very little downward pressure on tuition, and the subsequent proliferation of administrators.
That puts a bit of a dent in your argument.
• Harvard gets 20% of its income from students, and the other 80% comes from investments and other sources (matches what link previously posted implies).
• There are two cohorts of students (A) wealthy but undeserving students, and (B) poor but deserving meritorious students.
• The argument made was that we are better off if wealthy undeserving students subsidise the poor but deserving students (paraphrasing).
• I'm going to pick a number that every student costs the university $100k per annum (incorrect, and assuming zero variability between students . . . I'm just picking this number so I can make my point clearly. Edit: actually $100k matches a back-of-the-envelope calculation from other figures).
Then:
Any wealthy undeserving student paying between $20k[1] to $100k actually reduces the number of deserving students. Said another way: wealthy undeserving students need to be paying more than 5[1] times what their fair prorated fees would be before it helps the poor deserving students.
Also the article is talking about excessive overhead costs - maybe Harvard could trim 20% of administrative costs, and then concentrate 100% on teaching those that merit it the most, regardless of their background.
Edit: Let us assume it is okay to buy your way into Harvard if you also pay for one other deserving student (that can't afford it), then with my hypothetical University costs of $100k for a student for a year, the fees for the rich student would need to be $1 million to meet that 1:1 ratio, and that ratio implies (in the limit) that 50% of students are undeserving rich students!!!
Also note that 98% of Harvard students graduate: https://college.harvard.edu/resources/faq/what-harvards-grad...
[1] Edit 2: low value of $20k here is incorrect. Although 20% of income comes from students, a large percentage of expenses are for research and other non-teaching expenses. See my other comment, with an analysis from a different direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838700
Brain fart: I mean $200k. I had originally re-edited values proportionally and I didn’t correct that.
No, nothing about whether students deserved to be there was part of the argument.
The very high sticker price of tuition exists to let the schools charge each student a customized price by applying discounts (e.g. scholarships and aid) as they choose. They can compete for students this way. The most desirable students (by whatever criteria the school has chosen) are offered more discounts.
This system operates at every level. A student of medium-high desirability, say a well-off white kid with good-but-not-great grades, might be offered discounts from a less well known regional school, but not from a nationally recognized school, even if her family can afford to pay full fare anywhere.
I have only ever heard that it was the availability of non dismissible loans that inflated the price.
I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
Can other people do that without going to these schools? Sure. But these schools are looking for those people.
A lot of out of box thinking is conditioning to the environment. If you are taught not to have constraints your ability to think out of the box is much better.
The question to you is, how do you measure "needs to be more than that". If this isn't something that you can't quantify, it's just going to let administrators pick students to satisfy whatever the current cultural hot button issue is.
4.0 student who you interview and they come off as a Jerk, they are smart as hell or a 3.93 student who is passionate about learning, wants to be there, and is a humble person. Which do you want affecting your school's culture?
Which is ironic, because I am also generally against the idea of colleges basing their admissions solely on standardized tests. Those tests have their roots in the eugenics movement, have been shown to be deeply problematic and biased, and have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors.
> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
I would argue that far more people who "think better than most" people come out of public schools than the "elite" schools. What the elite schools do very well is laundering the mediocrity of the upper class. (See "legacy admissions")
> The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
...
https://hbr.org/2020/09/graduates-of-elite-universities-get-...
> Our results offer some solace to the traditional recruiters. After controlling for age, gender, and the year of study, we found that graduates from higher-ranked universities performed better, but only nominally and only on some dimensions of performance. Specifically, the overall performance improved by only 1.9% for every 1,000 positions in the Webometrics global university rankings. When comparing the performance of candidates whose universities rank further apart — a graduate from a top university versus a “global average” university — the performance differential jumps to 19%.
> The 19% difference in performance between the top and the average seems significant, but keep in mind that this is for graduates from universities that are 10,000 university ranking positions apart. At a given organization, candidates are likely to be selected from within a much narrower pool, perhaps from universities whose rankings differ by a couple of hundred positions. In this more realistic case, the predicted difference in performance would be closer to 1%.
Keep in mind, this[1] is the ranking they are using. The top 10 includes public universities and omits several Ivy league "elite" universities.
[1] https://www.webometrics.info/en/world
It seems to me that measuring/estimating the scholastic ability/preparedness of a prospective student has value independent of whether that preparedness is correlated with some other variables (wealth, neighborhood, childhood nutrition, other socioeconomic markers).
“Are they prepared/do they have the aptitude to succeed here?” matters much more than the underlying reasons why they might or might not be prepared.
The research I've seen claims the opposite.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-...
Yeah, kind of like SBF
> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
I'd counter this and say the insistence on qualitative standards just opens the door for classist decision making. The second you allow people to introduce qualitative standards, it opens the door for discrimination
Tell me about how many people I know who went to a CISSP bootcamp, passed the test, and walk around not knowing shit? It's the same in a lot of universities too. Elite universities are looking for people who fit their image and who they believe are going somewhere in life. Universities, especially universities are looking for people that are going places. They are looking for people who will bring recognition, money, and fame back to the university.
So because bootcamps are an insufficient means of testing, standardized testing in general is inadequate? And not just this specific test in particular?
> Training someone to pass a test to get in is not the same as finding the right person to go there.
Only if the test is insufficient. "finding the right person" is just a racist, classist dog whistle from a group of people that feel entitled to the right to discriminate
You want to see a living example of this entitlement? Listen to the audio from the recent Supreme court verbal argument regarding the Harvard case. Specifically the "oboe players" comment. Juxtapose this with the historical racist and antisemitic discrimination and ask yourself whether Harvard should be trusted to "find the right person" in this sort of way
Most of the non-standardized test stuff is subjective and lends itself pretty directly to classist and racial prejudice. No one is arguing that standardized tests are the perfect way to test for aptitude, but the pro-standardized-test folks argue that the alternatives are significantly worse.
The essay system favors people who hire admissions consultants to write them, or who study the online guides about what types of essays get into Harvard. They also tend to chase sensational sob stories - the claims within those stories are never verified by admissions officers.
I can't find the study at the moment on google, but I recall some work asking to end essays in admissions packages since it discriminates against Black and Hispanic applicants who do not have the background resources to write appropriate admissions essays.
Maybe removing names and genders from the essays or similar entry requirements. There are ways to reduce bias without resorting to some kind of standardized test which only shows that they can pass a test.
Elite Universities are looking for people of character, that could be anyone from any walk of life. But it is self-serving, they are looking for people who will end up bringing money, recognition, and fame back to the school. They are looking for people who want to go there, who will go far in life and talk about how X university is where it all started.
I get that this is a difficult topic, and I want everyone in the world to be a lifelong learner, reader, and more.
But not everyone is built the same, that doesn't mean they won't go far in life. And I don't think recognizing that difference is racist or discriminatory. Not everyone will become a Harvard grad, the president, CEO of a company, etc. Some people are dealt a shittier hands in life and get less draws from the deck, we should work to fix that, but we shouldn't lump everyone into one basket.
How would you remove the biggest bias of money? People with money will throw it at gaming anything used by college admission process.
I think standardized testing is gaming the system, what you cannot game are transcripts of life long learners who value their education. If you remove all gendered language, names, mentions of race from essays you will hopefully be able to make your group decisions with less bias. The group should be diverse enough on multiple metrics.
Will it be perfect, no. But I think it's a better start than what we currently have.
What does it even mean?
Grades only hint that you gave a fuck about school.
But a math test is a pretty accurate test of someone's mathematical skill.
An essay about life is a much more dubious and lacks a quantitative rubric for comparing candidates.
In theory, squishy admissions processes exist to identify those students who have raw potential, but may not be identified by standardized test scores.
High school GPA and class rank are a more accurate indicator of success in postsecondary (but I could also argue that's really just a measure of how well you 'conform' to standard educational expectations early in life, not really how 'able to succeed' you are, but that's a different conversation).
Feel free to figure out better system.
Tests while not perfect, are in my opinion at least fair and relatively transparent.
>High school GPA and class rank are a more accurate indicator of success in postsecondary
jesus christ - GPA. I honestly don't know any more biased metric than GPA.
Even if GPA is better predictor of how hardworking you are, then I still don't care, there's too much bias in this metric.
Standarized tests are "pure", they aren't your average not 100% emotionally stable teacher
Harvard has. It involves making students write essays and considering all of their accomplishments. Harvard isn't just looking for the smartest people. They're not looking for the most academically successful. They are looking for people who will be powerful and wealthy. Is it fair that harvard admits people just because their parents have money and power? I guess not, but they're not trying to be fair. They're trying to admit people who will have money and power.
so I don't think that Harvard "figured it out"
I've been arguing that standardized tests are best available method (at scale) because they're at least fair and transparent.
Transparent, maybe. Fair? As noted above, test success is largely a measure of a student's access to resources and parental support. And the usual retort to that assertion is that study books are free at the library, to which I'd respond "if it's that easy, what is the test really measuring?"
Anyways, the main discussion was the insane number of admin staff on campus. Admissions staff is only a small slice of that.
Internet and that's not very high bar. I've personally mostly used it when preparing for math exams.
>to which I'd respond "if it's that easy, what is the test really measuring?"
Access to informations at the level of those tests isn't difficult.
What's being measured? how proficient you are at tested topics, how good your knowledge is.
>Transparent, maybe. Fair? As noted above, test success is largely a measure of a student's access
What's more fair then?
Those tests are as possibly fair as we can get.
Just accepting the fastest people might be the fairest way to win NCAA track meets, but that isn't their goal, so it's not how they run admissions.
For example with 0 or as little human factor as possible, without biases.
>Standardized tests have very little impact on ones likeliness to have a successful business or political career.
I'm not saying standardized tests are good proxy for being businessman or politician.
They're fair and transparent way that allows people to bootstrap themselves.
Even if you're poor ass, then you have access to Internet and can learn all those things good enough to get to the top schools.
So I'm using fair and transparent metrics proxying for learning capabilities, knowledge (in topics related to degrees) , etc, etc?
>I'm not saying Harvard needs to change.
>I've been arguing that standardized tests are best available method (at scale) because they're at least fair and transparent.
The discussion started in this context - I replied to this.
>The problem is that standardized tests are more a measurement of access to resources and parental support than raw knowledge or future success. It does feel nice to say that everyone is equal, but not everyone has an equal chance.
I'm speaking more broadly - about the whole edu. sys.
Though I agree GPA is not better than standardized tests. It still is a very useful metric.
Standardized tests have difficiencies, but at least the scores are comparable.
Maybe for lulz/curiosity, definitely not when it comes to accepting somebody into college.
How to compare GPA of people who didn't gave a fuck about "lame"/"easy" subjects and outperformed at maths, physics, etc
with people who didn't outperform at e.g maths, physics, but were putting effort into the lame subjects?
But they do have predictive power for how well you'll do in college, independent of high school GPA and class rank.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-...
Institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford produce leaders and entrepreneurs. India's top engineering colleges (IITs) are meanwhile ranked nowhere globally, and its top graduates dream of getting a cushy job at Google, nothing more.
There are a lot of problems with American universities, but the lack of entrance exams is a feature, not a bug.
I actually think standardized tests create more equality than other methods. The whole recommendation letter/essay/interview is an eyewash.
If that was actually the case then India wouldn't have a quota system where >50% of seats are reserved for certain castes and religions.
Edit: In a way, the standardized testing made that inequality apparent and harder to wave your with a very ambiguous policy on inclusion.
Why are they coming to American universities when IITs and IISC have GATE exam for post graduate courses and none of the ridiculous process for admission?
You are discounting Indian institutions, take a look at the Fortune 500 c suite list and tell me how many of them studied at IIT/IIM.
Investment is a key requirement for enterprise. You will be surprised to see the startup ecosystem now since the investment is flowing in.
I 100% agree with the asinine focus on cracking the exam and not anything else. But then the ROI is too good.
Do you mean copycat chumps getting bloated on Softbank money as example of startup innovation?
We will just ignore all the Indians working on letting us "google it".
Just like there is a little niche in information theory that I keep up on current research and I pretty much ignore research outside of China at this point. So many Americans just have their head up their ass they literally have no idea what is going on in the outside world.
You do realize that this is the same language that universities like Harvard use to discriminate against Asian Americans (and historically against Jewish people)?
Reading this and knowing that you're talking about South Asians in particular, this comment just comes off as stereotypical and racist
I'm not sure it's a good thing, mind you.
Says someone whose country brain-drains Indian innovators to do the actual work for which nepotistic grifters from Harvard take the credit!
btw. did you have an opportunity to study using those two "approaches"?
As if the innovation from silicon value has nothing to do with people born in India. What planet are we on again?
I suspect if you apply to Harvard and can point to a film you made with your friends that placed well in some film festival or have some success with your music on Spotify or have done some stand up comedy or painted a mural in your city or something else that showcases talents that are more rare than high grades, you have a much better chance at being accepted. They want an interesting and diverse freshman class. To succeed there academically you really don't need perfect test scores. There really isn't any point in focusing solely on that.
I’m certain my daughter will have my challenges, and I am glad for me, her, and all like her we didn’t grow up in India.
You are being too harsh and dismissive. These high stake tests often are a good indicator of certain characteristics and aptitude in a student. These students work hard, study hard with a consistent methodology to understand the subject of the test. They know they are competing with others and the rewards are high. All this requires a disciplined personality and aptitude (there are different kinds of intelligence). And most of those who succeed in this actually do well in life.
Ofcourse, it doesn't mean that your criticisms against the current model isn't justified or without merit on some aspects, providing you judge it from the right perspective. For example, India is a developing country and our education system isn't looking to identify and groom the next genius. We don't have the resources for that. So it is currently aimed to create an educated working professional class from all sections of our society that can uplift the economy of the country by generating wealth and decrease the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor (to create an egalitarian society). And what do any industry look for - a hard working, consistent performer, who has the capability to understand how a system / process works and can adapt to it well.
That is why indians, and asians in general, are known and respected for their work ethics around the world in most industries.
But yes, people like you and me would struggle in this system, because the system isn't designed to accommodate the needs of those who aren't "normal" / psychologically healthy. (Hopefully that will change with economical growth and development in education). Note though that this doesn't mean that students who fail to adapt to this system all necessarily end up as failures in life. This is where the social culture also comes into picture in many asian societies. The family and social network of person in the society all try to help them too, both in trying to get access to best education they can afford and in trying to professionally help someone. (A good example of this is how parents make sacrifices and pay for their kids education. And thanks to that, the majority of us with a degree enter the professional world debt-free. (If you are in the US, can you afford to pay for your daughter's education and will you?) It's not all black and white as you think ...
Reality is when I grew up standardized testing made or broke a person, and I couldn’t go to school. I was lucky in that I had always programmed and landed a great job at Netscape. But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing. Had I been 5 years older my life would be much different. I later went back to college and graduated highest honors from UIUC CS, but found a side door into the program owing to my standardized testing failures blocking the normal route through. Given my performance above all other students in my class, my standardized test scores had no correlation to my ultimate academic performance.
Now there’s more focus on the total person and that’s both expensive, but I believe leads to overall better academic outcomes by selecting people individually for their ability to excel in the academic environment of the specific school.
But give the sheer scale of the population applying in India assessing each individual is obviously on the surface impractical. This isn’t an inditement of India or it’s people or it’s system. But it’s also a tragedy. The world is sadly full of those.
I would however hold my statement is still true if harsh. While high test scores may indicate an ability to work hard and ambition, low test scores don’t indicate the opposite. I would argue it’s more closely correlated to the ability to acquire funding for tutoring and a family without the need of your time to help the family. To your point my wife is from Southeast Asia and her family was extremely poor, but they had her siblings drop out of school and work to pay for her books and clothes and afford her time to study for the tests, which she passed top of her country. But her siblings paid for it with their future. I’m proud of her, but not of the system. Her siblings aren’t failures per se, they just never got an opportunity.
But if you have applicants >> slots and an inability to scale a more accurate measure, a capricious but difficult criteria works. But I wouldn’t be particularly proud of that.
Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path. My wife’s siblings even if they went back to school and were accepted wouldn’t be able to find jobs because they followed a non traditional path. This is sad, and I wonder how much faster their country would advance if they had a less rigid job path for their people. How many people are disenfranchised because they matured slower, experienced hardships or illness, or weren’t able to afford the costs of education yet? I’ll betcha is a very large number.
I forgot to add there's another aspect - fighting corruption. Since there are so few quality educational institutes, and the competition so high, introducing any other additional form of assessment (like based on essays or interviews) would invite criticism of corruption and prejudice (linguistic, religion and caste mostly in India). (And it is a fair criticism - in the US some colleges actually moved away from admission based on standardised testing because they wanted to limit number of Jews in their institute. In ancient India, quality education was limited to the upper caste only.). Common entrance exams are thus perceived as more fair to everyone.
> But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing.
This was something I really admired about American businesses in the past, but feel it has changed a lot - they didn't mind hiring workers having proficient skills who are passionate about their work, even if they didn't have a degree. This has really changed now and I blame Asian American immigrants for this, especially indians who tend to look down on someone who don't have a degree or even tend to scrutinise which college they have a degree from before deciding whether to respect their professional skills (Indian Hindu Brahmins, most of whom now run the BigTech's, in particular tend to be worse about this attitude because they have to compete even harder due to affirmative action policies and thus tend to have a tunnel vision when it comes to judging people through their degrees).
(I do know that the IT industry has always leaned towards hiring qualified professionals because it is a relatively young field).
This also reminds me of someone's struggle in India - he had failed to clear a few subjects in his engineering (from an average indian college) and thus didn't get his degree in the usual 4 years. He cleared those subjects and finally got his degree after 2-3 years. But he had been working in the IT industry, without a degree, right after college. Here's the kicker - Indian companies refused to recognize his work experience (based on which pay negotiations are done) during the period he worked without a degree. So they would subtract the 2-3 years he had worked without a degree, and offer him less pay. This was even after he had worked hard to get additional certifications in the industry to make up for the lack of passing away from a "good" college. He found true professional respect based on his experience only in the USA.
> Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path.
That's is true, but money and social connections also play a great role here. Middle class and rich people have more options for second chances, than the poor. And what you described about your wife's family situation is indeed quite common - some of my classmates had brothers and sisters who couldn't afford a decent college education because they were poor, and instead chose to sacrifice and pay for their siblings education. But again, note that our social culture (unlike the west) lays a lot of emphasis on helping family member, and often, these educated siblings did contribute back financially (if they were decent individuals who didn't succumb to selfishness). One of my friend and classmate ensured that he paid for brother's kids education for the sacrifices his brother made for him.
Run standardized tests and admit based on actual knowledge and ability. The rest is bullshit.
Isn't that what India does, and isn't the system rife with cheaters?
Yes.
> and isn't the system rife with cheaters?
That's an orthogonal point. Even the American system is rife with cheaters, either explicit[1] or legalized cheating aka College Prep industry which helps you with everything including essays if you pay enough.
So again, what is the US achieving exactly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal
And whatever the answer to that question is, it’s going to require a bloated admissions department to make it happen.
what? US has legalized cheating in so many ways (athletes, college preps, dean's lists, legacies...). People with enough resources and/or enough motivation will always find a way to get what they want. US gives them a paved road while in the East, they have to cheat. When they can't find a paved road, they cheat in the West as well.
I don't know you, but I'm going to guess the cultural problem is a problem of a culture not your own, and what happens in your culture is the series of isolated incidents.
I go to a pretty good American school which has a lot of foreigners going on visas, the majority being Indian and Chinese students. The group of Indian students in my under grad got caught cheating all together. They were just hanging out in discord giving each other answers.
In a lot of other countries it's seen as an "Us vs The Man" mentality. So if you are cheating or figure out how to take advantage of a system you are seen as beating "The Man or The System" and you are smarter than it. In a lot of Western counties, that is not the case.
No ? All of the high stakes entrance examinations CAT / JEE / NEET / Civil services are completely cheating free and the systems goes through great troubles to enforce it. I believe it is exactly the same for law schools, accountants and NDA (defense) exams. That about covers all of India's well regarded professions.
Cheating happens in courses once you're in College because of a general apathy towards what is being taught (sadly) and the knowledge that your grades don't matter for much.
1. it's easier to hire people than to fire people
2. more budget is better than less budget
3. performance is, for the most part, irrelevant as long as the process is followed
These three simple laws can account for pretty much all the issues with bureaucracies in general.
For example: You get a bonus of 10% of whatever budget you manage to trim.
You'd have to balance your greed against your desire to continue to have your organization function well.
For real-life examples of this, see many private equity buyouts.
As attractive as it is to think there's a quick-and-easy solution here, there is not. It requires constant vigilance from quality leadership to fall into neither the trap of bloat nor the one of foolish cost-cutting.
You need some sort of external pressure to keep it down, otherwise companies and organizations end up obese.
> As I made my way to the Parking Office, I had to ask myself: Where did all these people come from? And do we really need them here?
Did you? Instead of yourself, couldn't you have asked someone who actually knows the answer to these questions, like the administrators themselves, or former college presidents or something? Do an actual investigation and write a real article, not a low effort opinion piece.
This is not really specific to the Crimson though, I have this same issue with all opinion writing and I don't understand why newspapers do it. I've never met someone who pays for a publication but would stop if it didn't have op-eds. I don't think it's just about outrage clicks or something, editorials and op-eds have been around forever so there must be some population that loves them for some reason.
FWIW, if you're interested in doing some data analysis of salaries from a large public R1 institution, I've parsed and published publicly-available academic professional salary data for the University of Illinois going back 15 years: https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker
This ends in Gov. Dutton saying "You're all fired."
As the Crimson says: Harvard would keep running if all the administrators were fired and then 10% of those now-closed jobs were reopened to qualified applicants: the jobs that are actually needed.
An undergrad (first year?) Government student, fortunate enough to be at Harvard, writes an opinion piece, in Harvard's newspaper, saying that many administrators at Harvard shouldn't be there.
If, at any point in the next three years, the student finds they need the assistance of an administrator, that could be awkward-or-worse for the student.
And maybe they're not planning on trying to get accepted to grad/law school anywhere with administrators.
> I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
I'd expect that this level of rhetoric wouldn't play well at Harvard, and I'm surprised if a student there thinks it would.
Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
Also, how would this be connected to conservative ideas? Theoretically, liberal ideas are the ideas that are critical of institutions. This all seems so backwards, no?
Now there are all kinds of non-core administrators very ancillary to education whose job is to keep busy having people do things that are again, not core to education/academics.
Yes, they should cut the fat. Yes that will eliminate make-work jobs. That's the whole point.
Look at all these jobs and compare against admin jobs in the 1980s: https://www.higheredjobs.com/admin/
I'm more interested in the intent of a Harvard Government major (and nominal editor), in saying this, and in how they said it.
This. Or they're planning to drop out and get a job in the Thiel universe.
Or maybe the author was genuinely disturbed by the inequalities and racism currently being perpetuated by said administrative bloat, similar to how Snowden was disturbed by the behavior of the US government?
The fact that you see this situation only in terms of personal gain is disturbing
With that said, this is definitely a problem even to people on the left.
Universities are now run by administrators for the purposes of securing more funds and less for teaching and research.
This line in particular betrays a lack of working experience. Anybody who has worked at all in their life - even a basic highschool carwash job, knows how hard it is to appropriately identify which employees to let go in an unbiased manner. It's not as simple as knocking on a door and asking them what they do (despite Elon Musk using this method recently at Twitter)
The other idea I like is that once an educational endowment reaches a certain size, all students should go for free (or it could be on a scale relative to endowment size) in order for the institution to maintain their tax-free status.
Instead redirect that anger towards your state's public university system. Ask your elected politicians why funding was cut down to zero during the 2008 recession and never restarted. Ask why football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in the state and they continue to spend billions on stadiums, despite the fact that the sports has a negative return in all but the top ~5 NCAA division I programs. Ask why enrollment and graduation rates continue to decline while administration costs keep going up. Fighting the Harvard boogeyman isn't going to fix any of this.
Your hard working kid isn't entitled to Harvard or MIT, but they should be entitled to a seat at your local state school at a reasonable cost.
But fair to ask why everyone on HN (including the two of us...) are reading and talking about it.
Even this article doesn't actually address the issue directly; it complains about excessive administrators, then tries to support that complaint with tuition data. Tuition is not the primary funding source of university administrators. Federal research dollars pay for a significant fraction (if not a majority) of them. The data that the author should be leveraging is expenditure data, not income data.
This is the best aggregate dataset I have on university expenditures, showing a modest increase in spending on a per-student basis: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_334.10.a...
To that extent, Harvard is precisely non-emblematic of the issue.
It’s now at the point where people want debt forgiveness.
Something is definitely wrong. And this isn’t the first time administrative costs has come up.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/administrative-bloat-i...
If Harvard hired a vice-Provost of Higher Student Satisfactionality, well then surely Directional State U must have one too! So bloat in the private schools leads to bloat in the public as they try to keep up, with, as you mention, diminishing funding.
Same logic applies to business - everyone in Silicon Valley was copying Steve Jobs' best and worst characteristics after the iPhone.
You're argument on the state school is also spot on
If they're so private and immune from public feedback, why are they tasked with producing such an overwhelming portion of our political and judicial class, up to Supreme Court justices?
... such a strange choice of words in this context. It's not like the U.S. Government is sitting there, waiting for Harvard to fill its quota of Supreme Court Justices.
Because they're worth it. Many programs just straight up are profitable, but all of them contribute positively to the bottom line. Sports are the main way universites solicit donations from alumni. They make a university more popular to students by building school spirit. Football and basketball programs bring immeasurable benefits to universities.
Just remember that about 45% of Harvard’s undergrads got to cut in line ahead of your hardworking kid because they were athletes, legacy admits, children of people the deans thought might kick in a few million, or children of Harvard faculty.
Why aren't people angry about this? Why hasn't this been regulated away by now?
Anyone who's been through the university system knows about all the trash emails that these people sit around writing. It's like that's all they do (visibly): they either sit on their asses writing emails or they stand on the stage for graduation day.
What are these people for? Just writing emails? Why don't we just automate their jobs away and slice the cost of tuition?
Here's what we need: legislation to cap the percentage of administrative staff and cap their salaries to be no higher than the average salary of a professor at that university
I consider it unsurprising that a bureaucracy gets taken over by bureaucrats. The rest of the faculty is too busy doing research and teaching classes to bother with office politics, climbing the ladder, and increasing staff counts at levels of the ladder beneath themselves. The professors consider the importance of their research and teaching efforts to be self-evident, so there's no need to waste time justifying them, trying to convince people that they're important or that their department budget should be increased.
You see a similar effect in tech companies, where engineers building the company's product get relegated to the sidelines after the technology is proven or the market is captured, and MBAs, management, and sales become the dominant forces within the organization...engineering is still focused on the product, with their careers an issue that they assume will resolve itself, while the MBAs are entirely focused on their careers.
The administration is responsible for the entire operation of the university, outside of teaching. And it's a relatively large university with a lot of different divisions/schools. There's a LOT more to "administration" than writing emails and standing on stage at graduation!
Not sure how an institution can go about cleaning up such inefficiencies besides going out of business, which is usually not an option.
But the main thing you get is graduating from Harvard, and knowing everyone from your class and school. Those connections are huge, depending on the field you're going into.
An MBA from a state school might work if you're staying in-state, but an MBA from an elite school opens the world.
If it is, then it should be worth any reasonable amount.
If it is not, then there is some other college somewhere that is better at at least one major.
Harvard’s undergraduate CS program is not in the top 10 (if you believe US News’s rankings, which I always take with a huge grain of salt), but that doesn’t mean that it’s worse that State U’s.
And if University of California, Berkley is better than Harvard at CS, then there you go, a state school that is better. The possibility certainly exists.
Then I found they already had! https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/042103580
Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden?
Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it:
https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...
If anyone wants to dig through all this, have a big time.
I'm assuming this calculation was run using a standard inflation adjustment. However, Harvard is in the Boston metro, which has experienced significantly more housing inflation than the country as a whole. (This matters because housing costs filter through the entire local economy.)
Would be interesting to tease out how much of the price increase is a direct result of the increase in housing costs driven by the failure of housing policy.
Edit: The St. Louis Fed has the Boston housing index increasing from 86.15 in January 1986 to 426.44 in July 2022. BLS's inflation calculator puts $86.15 of buying power in 1986 being equivalent to $232.88 in July 2022. So it would appear that housing alone could be responsible for roughly half of the increase. Given the increase in healthcare costs over the period, it would also be interesting to do a similar analysis around those numbers.
And a lot of those diversity and student affairs jobs these writers especially love to hate on handle things like compliance and risk management. Kind of important when you're running a highly visible and deep-pocketed organization like Harvard!
A university shouldn't be a hedge fund with professors being essentially PR.
Writing and being denied for grants is a huge waste of time and resources and is a problem.
The solution proposed (add a tax???) doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but these administratiors are problematic on a societal level even if they make sense for the university.
Perhaps we need Elon to review the college administration staffs code.
My rural college and surroundings depended on a student-staffed fire department to for emergency medical services, fire-prevention and protection.
- Because many emergencies need a quick response, volunteering students lived behind the fire-department in a dilapidated college-owned building. ~30 meters door-to-door.
- Housing on-campus attached us to an administrative process. Volunteers registered as a special interest group focused on community service. This was an administrative formality to house firefighters next to their fire station to protect life and property.
- The special interest process occurred before the lottery to allocate block housing. I was confident that volunteers' 1K+ hours of combined community service and recent suppression of a small dorm fire served as proof positive that we were a bona fide community service organization.
- According to the student housing administrator we were not! We did not adequately perform (paraphrasing) on-campus education related to our community service and were to be housed together in a building several minutes instead of seconds from the fire station. All attempts at rational resolution were pointless/ineffectual.
- This standoff persisted for weeks until the mayor and a trustee got wind of it, putting the matter to bed.
Net, a campus administrator wanted to endanger thousands of people by arbitrarily increasing a fire department's response times over a (deliberately?) misguided interpretation of our inadequate provision of on-campus services a few weeks after we put out a fire in a dorm. We also started burning a mock dorm room on the central quad's lawn after this to amply demonstrate our on-campus education efforts.