How Stanford Took on the Giants of Economics | Hacker News Reader

How Stanford Took on the Giants of Economics

nytimes.com

I like Stanford, but as I read this article I couldn't shake the feeling that all of these gigantic academic dinosaurs are headed for extinction and simply don't realize it yet.

The very force that has fueled Stanford's prestige — the dynamism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — may ultimately strike the fatal blow against the existing university system. Anyone who bothers to look can recognize the gross waste and inefficiency in the existing arrangement that the federal government subsidizes through student loans: Education is more expensive than ever, and there are cheaper and cheaper alternative sources of information.

We have already reached the point at which you can educate yourself outside of the legacy institutions. In the future, someone smart will devise a better way to demonstrate the existence of the relevant skills to employers. The residual prestige of schools like Stanford or Harvard may seem durable, but it could evaporate overnight if suddenly all of the smartest kids in the country realized that ____ education startup was providing them a better opportunity for future advancement.

I predict that once this cultural phase shift occurs, the field of economics will also begin to decline, because so much mainstream economics research offers zero actionable insight for private actors. The parts that thrive will presumably be those with practical applications, like finance.

You're conflating the educational and research objectives of universities. Much of the tech industry's disdain for academia stems from negative personal experiences with taking courses at top universities, typically due to a lack of caring on the part of instructors, who are more interested in working on their research (that disdain is then compounded by experiencing the rapid social/economic impact software engineering in the tech industry can have, particularly when compared to the slow progress of academic research). This perspective is understandable, and top universities should hire dedicated instructional faculty for all the lower-level undergrad classes, and leave the researchers to their own devices.

In any case, the presence of undergrad students on campuses has surprisingly little to do with the goings-on of academic research, although they may occur in the same geographic locales and have some common actors. The widespread success of MOOCs (which now seems quite unlikely) would have a negligible impact on academic research.

Stanford and Harvard are in the business of creating new knowledge. They are largely funded by donations and grants. They could survive without any undergraduates.

The schools that have to be worried are the private, four-year colleges that rely almost exclusively on tuition to pay the bills.

Edit: Harvard has 6700 undergrads[1] and Stanford has 7000[2]. Kansas State (where I work) has about three times as many.

[1] http://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance [2] http://stanford.edu/about/

It's not like Stanford had a sub-100 program and then started recruiting the best faculty. Some might even argue that Chicago (including its business school) has been just as influential as either Harvard or MIT. The top programs are Stanford, Chicago, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. Penn, Berkeley, Yale and a few others are also in the conversation. Good for Stanford that they made a couple of senior hires, as they've strengthened one of their fields, but this isn't big news. Stanford has never been an underdog.

This might be a little off topic but I heard on the other hand that Stanford's business school was an underdog pre 1990s. Do you know if there's any truth to that?

I'm not old enough to say. I started grad school in 1997, and they had a lot of good economists at that time.

In the early 80's when I graduated Wharton, Stanford wasn't even on the radar at all at least from my recollection.

Stanford picked up steam post Internet because of it's relation and proximity to Silicon Valley.

If that wasn't the case, they wouldn't have to raid to attract talent now. You don't see Harvard or MIT raiding anyone in the fields that they are dominant in after all.

Newspapers only know how to tell a few different narratives, so they feel the need to hammer everything into one of them.

In this case it's "plucky underdog takes on established titans", which you have trouble hammering into the narrative when your "plucky underdog" is Stanford.

Are you saying there is no story here?

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