MIT Gets $140M Pledge from Anonymous Donor
wsj.com
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The counterpoint would be that the money could support fundamental research that eventually results in a much larger payoff to the world at large, but I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves.
Of course, all this assumes that donor's primary aim is to make the largest possible impact, when in all likelihood it's motivated more by an affinity for the school, or in the case of other donors, prestige from having their name on the walls.
I highly recommend the three part series about college education that makes up episodes 4,5,6 of the season 1. But, if you have the time, I think the entire podcast is excellent while noting that I am not a huge fan of Gladwell's books.
[0] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
Interesting tidbit: the president of Stanford at the time was John Hennessy. Take any modern CPU, and you'll probably find that much of its internal architecture is built on work by Hennessy and his group at Stanford. He is arguably the greatest computer architect of all time.
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/02/23/haber-patent-trolls-0223...
Shame on you, Stanford! What a sorry college.
:)
Which, of course, is his job. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that he has an entirely separate point of view in private when being candid.
That said, my immediate reaction to reading the first sentence of the GP comment was to think of that same Revisionist History episode. I'm excited that the new season is beginning soon. I will temper that with a caveat that I think Malcom does push his agenda and narrative fairly hard in those podcasts, but that does make for a really compelling story. If you can separate the facts from the portions it feels like he's omitting, you'll likely get more out of the podcasts, but I find the exposure to new ideas particularly fun and useful. I especially liked the Moral Licensing episode, which I only listened to for the first time a few months ago. It's particularly fun to listen to that one and realize that his specifics were all wrong, but the generalities and basics still match perfectly with the new Political reality that was only 6-12 months int the future from that recording (regardless of whether you believe in the premise).
I'm being particularly vague on purpose here, because I truly believe that episode was at least twice as as entertaining and memorable because of that situation, and I don't want to ruin it for anyone. That episode was so good, it's probably worth a re-listen now if you listened to them as they were released.
One obvious thing he misses is the moral hazard of rewarding poor performing schools. Also, the real question is why donate to universities at all? There is no real reason why universities can't support teaching purely on tuition. University can easily charge on a sliding scale based on need and SAT scores. If they want more kids to go to college, they can give to scholarships directly. Giving to university directly just promotes spending them on outspending each other on other axis for attention...
You seem to be implying that it's necessarily a bad thing, though.
Giving students from high income families a tuition discount likely won't change their decision to attend, hence price discrimination. To maximize charitable impact with respect to financial aid, it could be argued that instead the funding should go toward other schools so that these all-star, low-income undergrads have more opportunities closer to home.
[1] http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
With this pledge, maybe MIT can bump up the free tuition level for those from families earning under $80,000 to $125,000 like at Stanford. The number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the sliding window of tuition rate. After all for well-endowed, prestigious schools, tuition is unhinged from services received / amount of spending per student.
There are certainly people that are dissuaded from MIT for cost reasons, and money could be used to solve that problem.
But it is a combination of scarcity and quantity, interestingly.
By any measure that is per-student, Caltech grads for instance are far superior to the average MIT grad.
However, MIT has better name recognition and looks far better in stats like "number of publications in top journals" or "number of Nobel price winning alumni", just because it has five times as many researchers and pumps out five times as many alums every year. So the winning strategy is to get as big as possible - but only as long as the majority of your intake is still in the top half-percent of the bell curve...
That's a pretty broad statement. I can think of a number of measurements where MIT comes out ahead of Caltech - entrepreneurship (measured per-student) would be one particularly relevant to HN.
Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast episode on this very topic: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
Highly recommended.
Maybe it's the unrealistic and the naive opimist in me that is saying this--but imagine any person in the world with an internet connection could have access to study for a world-class degree on whatever schedule suits them?
Obviously there are challenges involved, and there will always be a place for research institutions, but it seems to me like if anyone in the world could earn a degree equivalent in rigor to an MIT degree that a lot more would. That would help a lot of people and also propel advancements science and tech.
It seems most of us in tech learned a lot of our most valuable skills on our own--so in other words, labour-intensive education isn't the only way to do it.
MIT, Stanford, and a decent amount of other institutions have made their lectures available for free online. Almost anyone can go online now and watch the lectures and do the projects that the students do.
How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway?
It also decreases uncertainty in the outcome of your time investment.
>How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway?
I'm not aware it's even possible to get accepted into a phD program in the sciences without aN undergrad degree.
While it's plausible anyone can discover anything, the only rule of thumb about finding great research is that great researchers generally train great researchers - or, to put another way, it's likeliest to end up doing nobel price worthy research by being trained by a nobel price winner.
The other thing is bad schools do not turn magically into good schools by pooling money into them. Improving education requires human intervention by experts - experienced teachers and so on. Money helps, but if you are sitting on a 140 million dollars, you can't just donate it to some struggling place and imagine it will transform it to a better institution. Or, pick random ten laboratories that have done unremarkable research and imagine a grant of a 10 million dollars will improve the quality of their output.
I think the only rational choices to well spend such a sum of money is to support established high performers, or, to proactively invest the money. If proactive involvement is not what the donor wanted then I can't really fault his decision to go with MIT. Or, well, if we follow the silly "nobel price winners beget nobel price winners" rule of thumb and use nobel prices as metric of research quality which itself is also silly, there would have been other options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...
In my experience researchers that get a lot of grants are able to fund lots of projects, which leads to smart people working for you, which leads to big publications, which leads to more grants. Nobel/Lasker/Name-your-prize winners are just some of the people at the top of the grant pyramid. In fact, I'd argue that who wins a Nobel is a bit of a stochastic/political process, there are tons of scientists who made Nobel-worthy contributions that never won one.
That said, the outcome ends up being the same. Big/well funded labs tend to be started by smart people who had the advantages at big/well funded labs and the cycle continues, but I think the way things are funded is a big part of how that system works, not the inherent smarts/brilliance of the Professor.
Also it's not about pooling money. I think the OP is making a comment on effectiveness for educating people. For example, Cooper Union, an exceptional institution in NY that has a history of training people to an MIT-level for essentially free has come upon hard times and has somewhat abandoned that free-education principle (granted this was due to some financial mismanagement, but a big donor could certainly force changes there). This was an institution that taught many disadvantaged students, particularly from the NY area who couldn't afford MIT and its compatriots. Perhaps the money would have had far more impact there? Or what about offering massive scholarships to people attending community colleges who have a helluva GPA but need help for childcare?
$140M is an incredible gift, I can't help but think there are better ways to spend it than giving it to an institute that already gets massive amounts of grant and other money. Maybe a place that could really use it to help those that need it most?
"Or what about offering massive scholarships to people attending community colleges who have a helluva GPA but need help for childcare?"
That's proactive. But, then again, we know nothing on this donor.
"Maybe a place that could really use it to help those that need it most?"
And what place would that be? Who would exactly be those that 'need help most'? Where I'm from government tries to handle the material well being of those who've had the shortest end of the stick in life - no idea what charities would provide the best bang for buck in US.
I would not call spending money on science wasteful in any case.
I doubt MIT teachers of basic science are the best in the world. Rather MIT attracts some of the smartest most motivated students in the world. More money won't do much for this.
Research lab funding? I think at it's current steady state more money sent to MIT for research would likely find a useful currently unfunded study or group.
Granted, the Ironbound could be a totally different city than the rest of Newark.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-failed-100-m...
I took a "big data" course on Map/Reduce, Hadoop, etc. We had to use VMs on our own laptops because the department couldn't afford to get us temporary AWS instances or similar.
Sure money is not a quick fix for a bad school, but it opens up more opportunities than not.
(Speaking as someone who graduated #1 university in Poland, but nowhere near #200 globally...)
Also #200 out of what? According to this Quora[0] question, there are anywhere between 26,000 and 40,000 universities globally. 200 out of 26,000 puts your university in the top 1%.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-universities-are-there-in-the...
- science impact is a decelerating function of funding amounts
- science impact plateaus around $700k for a lab or project
- ancillary impact benefits include more diversity by funding more groups with smaller amounts instead of fewer groups with larger amounts
In all of this, science impact is measured in publication rates, citation rates, and most cited articles over a four year period.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Also, I love your username :)
The reason why they measured impact in that way is because that's what most funding agencies today are speculating in for their decision making processes. And as data shows, most funding agencies are getting it wrong.
ITER, Wendelstein-X, LIGO, Planck, I could go on. In all those cases any results happened >10 years after the funding started or might still only happen in the future. In the case of the LHC, but also many other Detector experiments individual grants to research groups were typically (not just anecdotally) way beyond 700000€.
According to wikipedia the project costs about $9B, but I doubt that includes all supporting efforts and researcher salaries. That would fund 12 thousand of these smaller $700k projects.
If we first invested in research to make building the LHC cheaper, we'd get more benefit for less cost. That's the only reasonable criteria for allocation of resources.
But there are plenty of schools (my alma mater CMU is one such example) that have mind share but a very small endowment. CMU has made a point of building its endowment over the last few years -- there was a single $250M donation, a few others in the $50-100M range, and calls for much more.
Endowments are important to the long-term financial health of an educational system. They help schools borrow money at very cheap rates to fund large infrastructure projects that otherwise would need to be built by donor / grant money alone. A school like CMU with a small endowment ends up having sky-high tuition to compensate (indeed, CMU has the highest tuition in the country across nearly every degree program they offer) and limited scholarship opportunities. They also have to accept a greater percentage of foreign nationals who otherwise might not qualify (and who can usually pay the tuition out of pocket no problem, since the wealthy across the world want at least one degree from a US school on their resume).
But essentially, the endowment is a nest egg that the school uses to ensure its long-term survival and academic independence. If you feel your alma mater made you the person you are today, and you want to encourage that to continue into the future, a large endowment gift goes a long way to ensuring its continued existence, independence and prosperity. Agree that there are a few schools that don't really need more (Harvard being the prime example) but the vast majority of schools really do need that much money sitting in the bank. You're donating to a school of thought more than anything else.
Obviously, the funds for these projects weren't fungible, but taken as a whole, this spending in the face of real problems is profane.
For example, UMass Boston.
rather a firm belief on part of the donor that the only way for his huge sum of money to do any good to this world, is to go to MIT.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced that it had received a $140 million pledge from a graduate of the school—with no name, and no strings attached.
An unrestricted gift of that size is rare in higher education, as donors often want a say in how their dollars are spent. Unrestricted donations can be used for things like facilities upkeep, as well as to pursue early-state scientific research.
In the past, MIT has put unrestricted funds toward online learning and Alzheimer’s research, as well as scholarships.
MIT said in a news release Wednesday that it would “invest in daring, high-risk ideas; address some of the world’s most urgent challenges; and sustain support for students, faculty, and the physical campus.”
MIT is in the second year of the public phase of its $5 billion fundraising campaign, and has already brought in $3.4 billion. So far, roughly 20% of that is unrestricted.
“No one has ever made it through life without someone else’s help. As a past recipient of MIT’s generous financial aid, I benefited tremendously from the opportunity to pursue my MIT education and am extremely appreciative of all the ways that MIT has shaped me,” the anonymous donor said in a statement shared by MIT. “I am blessed to be able to give back to the Institute so other students can experience what I did, and so that the Institute can continue to excel in groundbreaking achievements.”
The largest gift to MIT was pledged in 2000, when International Data Group founder and chairman Patrick McGovern Jr. , and his wife Lore Harp McGovern, committed $350 million over 20 years for a brain research institute.
That is the most important part. He is saying: use that money to help others like you helped me.
In fact, the vast majority of MIT undergraduates receive financial aid. About a third of MIT undergraduates attend without paying tuition, and over half of undergraduates receive a need-based scholarship (i.e. they are not rich).
Wasn't the the donation of the majority share in Bose much larger than $350 million over 20 years?
Wouldn't it be nice if instead of being spent on a new academic facility, or administrators' salaries, that it was instead used to offset tuition or directly fund research?
Actually -- and I really hesitate to mention this, but it seems sufficiently intellectually interesting -- has anyone noticed that after the last election cycle, outrage has ceased to matter altogether? United Airlines stock price is up 12% despite their behavior, for example.
I'm not sure outrage has ever mattered much, but internet outrage in particular has gone from "effective when focused" to "this is a normal day." The rise of justice-porn subreddits has fueled this obsession. Everyone has a grudge. In fact, they have multiple grudges categorized by computers and aimed at faceless, nameless ideas.
I'm reminded of 1984. It's so cliche, but remember the "daily hate"? When did we all start falling for this 24/7 outrage cycle?
It's made all the more dangerous by the fact that in nearly all of these cases, the outrage is deserved. In fact, that's what makes it work at all. Everyone's feelings are valid, and the grudges are justified. But what kind of world is it when your grudges are handed to you? Aren't grudges supposed to be personal? I'd rather not have them at all, but a personal grudge is at least better than being told what to think.
This article has a clear slant, but I think it has some serious merit for health, awareness, and activism. Excuse the absolutely horrid title as well.
https://thecoffeelicious.com/how-to-stayoutraged-without-los...
What going on is more like the opposite - not accepting reality; instead trying to fit the facts into an inconsistent (and hence imaginary) worldview. This causes cognitive dissonance which leads to frustration. Outrage is one way people cope with that frustration.
2. Awareness can most certainly lead directly to frustration.
Some of it could be that, but there are plenty of issues where they are mostly independent of worldview. The frustration comes from the solution that is not yet known or cannot be implemented. Have that on dozens of big issues and frustration is understandable.
Frustration is "understandable" but that's because many people do have worldviews that don't match up with reality.
It's times like these that I start to get why populism is becoming so popular in the west.
that's somehow both more and less significant than I had expected
Or that you expected the 1% to be higher and the 13 billion to be lower, which is the same thing. (Or the reverse of this last thing.)
But one of the claims for this argument that a huge donation suddenly doesn't turn a bad school into a good one is a strawman argument. Things don't have to be so extreme. There are plenty of middle tier schools specially state schools where amazing research is happening, and there are brilliant researchers who can also make use of that money having huge impact on the world. These schools already have very advanced infrastructure to utilize additional research money.
But as a graduate student in a state school, I might be biased.
Yeah, but it sounds like you're also making the assumption that state schools don't get endowments either. I'm from a state school and the last campaign we had raised ~$20M. Admittedly, it's not even close to the pledge, but it's not like state schools are getting absolutely no funding either.
Is there any reason to think that research at MIT has been limited by lack of funding? That seems highly implausible to me. And if the answer is that MIT could hire additional researchers to do more research with that money, those researchers can do the same research with that money at many other schools.
It's not clear to me that giving the money to MIT will result in any more research, and a good chance that it will result in less, because researchers at other universities currently are limited by financial constraints.
As an undergrad at a middle tier state school that at times does cool research, I'm with you here. Ivory tower elitism is a hell of a drug, and it just makes me sad.
Finally, I'll note that your post is a mis-inference of the point of my own.
I really wonder how many BTC are permanently tied into wallets that the owners have lost the keys to.
I would much rather them show me some adverts at the side than have to pay to read one article by them every month or so.
Credit: a HN news poster from a few months noticed that by prefixing: http://facebook.com/l.php?u= You can avoid the paywall
Nothing against MIT, but most kids don't go to MIT. They have a shitload of money. Give it to a community college if you want more impact.
Another false dilemma between MIT and XYZ Community College. There's all sorts of Universities and probably some community colleges with teams that are doing great work with way, way less than billions in funding. There's chances for great impact if they likewise get the piles of money MIT has been using to do great impact on top of brand name and connections. It will take time for the smaller players to develop the latter but they can use the former immediately.
Also, most donors making gifts of that size are interested in both the academic and research portfolios of the institution, since that much money will necessarily go into many different projects across the university.So while a large gift to a CC, if they have the means to administer it sounds great, it probably doesn't feel that compelling to a donor.
javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2016/09/12/mits-13-2b...
So, lets give MIT more money they don't need while smart people everywhere else continue to get anywhere from less to near nothing depending on institution or area.