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Ask HN:You have $1b to found your own university. What do you do?

8 points by biznerd ↗ HN
I love blue sky thinking, I just wanted to hear your thoughts.

A friend of mine just left a prestigious auditor job in accounting. I asked him how much of his degree was useful to him. He said that he could have been fine with a class or two and maybe some hand holding for the first six months. That really struck me.

How much of getting a degree is just signaling?

12 comments

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ckluis
I'd focus on skills.

There is an interesting development where a couple states are playing with the concept of a no-upfront costs for education system, but a % of income for a period of time. If that could be applied to society at large via a for-profit private university. I might consider building a university which focused on marketable engineering/tech skills which collected revenue based on an increase of salary.

Say you are making 30-40k when you enter and you would be willing to give 10% of anything above that for 10 years.

It would seem the university would now be directly incentivized to teach you skills which increase your pay. Moreover they would be more incentivized to get you a good job/jobs/promotions over the years to create a better return for themselves. You’d probably end up with a career coach…

just some random thoughts.

onion2k
A friend of mine just left a prestigious auditor job in accounting. I asked him how much of his degree was useful to him. He said that he could have been fine with a class or two and maybe some hand holding for the first six months. That really struck me.

Why did you assume he's right?

biznerd
Because I have a job related to accounting right now. Most of the knowledge is on-the-job training. How much you can learn in a class room setting is limited.
pskittle
build a online diverse university where you bring people together from different ethnicities, races, and ages. Get them to work together on problems they face, faced , or will face. build a future you wanto be a part of.

The eligibility criteria should be based on how effectively you solve a problem or what you learned from trying to solve it . Not your country of birth

smeyer
I'd just give it to my alma mater. I learned a lot in college, greatly increased my analytic skills, learned from courses, research, and peers, and believe I came out a smarter and more capable person because of it. I don't doubt that a better university could be created, but I'm not sufficiently convinced of any particular idea to want to put my backing behind a new university. My alma mater has a lot of money, but a billion dollars could still make a big difference and be used to push them towards new ideas without starting from scratch.
FiatLuxDave
There is definitely a bizarre market dynamic in higher education right now. That doesn't mean that a degree is useless for learning (some more than others, I'm sure). However, because of the effect of 'prestige' on school values, there are a lot of undesirable effects on the academic market. It is a weird economic conundrum that colleges are putting out more producers (graduated possible professors) than can find work, while at the same time college prices are rising. It's like farms breeding too many dairy cows and at the same time there is a milk shortage, because only milk from a few non-expanding dairies is considered good enough.

Since the perceived value of a degree when it comes to the job market has much more to do with a school's reputation than it does with the actual educational accomplishments of the degree holder, what I would do is use the $1 billion to create a new university which would do all it could to spread the prestige away from the schools where it is centralized.

In other words, there are only a few Harvards or Cambridges in the world. If there were 1000 schools of this perceived quality, no one would bother even knowing their names. You might look one up to see if it was on the 'list of quality schools'. In theory, accreditation is supposed to be like that. But in the real reputation market, Harvard and say, Eastern Carolina might both be accredited schools, but there are significant differences in reputation. I would gladly wager that the best student at ECU is a better student than the worst at Harvard, but the Harvard fellow will benefit from his schools reputation in a way that the ECU fellow will not. And this is why schools with less prestige cannot offer effective price competition with more prestigious schools, regardless of actual quality of education per dollar.

This is a problem when it comes to the ever-increasing cost of college, because the reputation effects keep faculty from just going off and making their own new college to compete with their current employer. If the Harvard biology department all took jobs with Example State, this would increase the prestige of Example State, but the professors would feel more of a loss of prestige than Harvard would. Even though it's the same department, with the same professors!

So, I'd hire a bunch of prestigious faculty in a specialized area, to create a school which could compete with the Ivys for e.g. 5% of their student body. I'd build reputation for the school by sponsoring contests and conferences which accentuate the dominant position of the new school in its chosen area. And I'd aggressively recruit the best students in that area from other schools, by offering easy credit transfer, better student aid, etc. Until people in one particular field say, "Harvard? It's not like you went to Fiat Lux Dave University".

Rinse and repeat (with as many $billions as available), until sanity returns to higher ed costs.

jtfairbank
Project based learning. Students propose projects as a team, relevant faculty mentor them. For example, to learn web dev a student might propose building a SaaS app. He would ask relevant faculty to mentor him and peers to work on it with him (devs, admins, designers, ). The team would elect a leader and have regular checkins with their mentors. The only job the mentors have is to help the team succeed. If they want to do their own research or work, then they should encourage a student to find a team and propose it as a project.

Each student could do 8 projects over 4 years. If one takes off, they're in a position to take a break and try to make it as a startup. That'd be encouraged by their mentors, and ownership / IP would be structured to benefit the students with a slight stake for the mentors and university (< 5%).

This would provide many real world skills (what you're doing in the project, leadership, working with others, etc). It'd also help the students build a track record of independence and success.