Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards and the Water Underneath | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards and the Water Underneath

wsj.com

214 pointslaurex113 comments

The aquifer depletion was caused by irrigated agriculture in the first place. It's pretty rich hearing vineyard owners like the Steinbecks complain about Harvard buying land to take the underlying water. Until very recently [1], profitable vineyards could deplete water under their neighbors' property without limits or compensation. Profitable vineyards could afford deeper wells and larger pumps; if it hurt shallower wells on nearby properties, tough luck. My grandparents' land neighboring vineyards owned by the Steinbecks and others underwent a distressed sale in 2013 because the groundwater had been badly depleted.

The Paso Robles groundwater crisis is just the end-stage symptom of an unsustainable process that has been going on for decades.

https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Case...

Irrigated agriculture came to dominate this region only in the last decades of the 20th century. Relatives on my father's side started dryland farming on a property near Paso Robles in the 1910s. That property enrolled in a well-monitoring program in the 1970s. The trend line was clear by the 1980s: water levels dropping over time. But irrigated crops like grapes were more profitable -- at least as long as growers didn't have anyone pricing or otherwise limiting groundwater withdrawal to sustainable levels. Now the same growers who fought water limits are alarmed that Harvard might take the water they counted on claiming. I hope that it's a wake-up call for growers to support truly sustainable water usage plans, lest they lose at their own game to even richer out-of-state entities.

[1] It appears that there are new limits on groundwater extraction for agricultural use in California, but if I read the article correctly they're not really enforced yet.

The "I drink your milkshake" approach to life.

While the scene from the movie was evocative, I prefer to use the original term, parasitism.

what was interesting to me was the "milkshake" phrase is quoted verbatim from something said by senator Albert B. Hall. He was jailed for accepting bribes to sell US-owned oil reserves for cheap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal

Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_B%2E_Fall

If readers are curious about the challenges with groundwater and other common pool resources, Elinor Ostrom's book, Governing the Commons [1] is an excellent resource.

[1] https://www.semcoop.com/governing-commons-evolution-institut...

Financially, Harvard is a hedge fund that also happens to own a university

And they’re somewhat of an underperformer in that regard. “...its overall natural-resources investments have done poorly.” University funds generally don’t pay well enough to compete for top talent. They shouldn’t be making exotic bets like this.

I don't really think statements about "university funds generally" apply to Harvard or, say, Stanford.

I honestly think I wouldn't have a problem with this if they zeroed out tuition for students. That is the glaring absurdity of the Ivy Leagues.

I was in a program that more or less guaranteed some portion of its graduates to be perpetually in debt because the skills imparted, while taught by some of the most brilliant practitioners in the world, did not translate into real world earnings. I hate the idea of college being purely an exchange of money for future earning potential, but programs like mine I think are unethical at cost even as they are virtuous in learning.

Our culture needs non-STEM genius, that keeps the republic alive. Forcing people into a cauldron of debt for it is reprehensible.

I think we need to rethink the concept of a university from first principles: How much does it actually cost to provide the best education in the world? A sizable library, an old building with empty rooms, and professors? I'd bet you could make instruction 5x better with 5x lower costs than we have today. The real problem isn't building/finding a campus, though, it's figuring out how to make the cheap version of Harvard more prestigious than Harvard itself. Universities run on prestige and people pay vast amounts of money for social signaling (to others and even themselves).

You need large grants and already renowned professors. I'm guessing that's what is really expensive. The problem we have today is that the gap between academia research jobs and the industry is possibly the widest ever, at least in some professions. Deep learning is just one example, but the generic Data Science trend in the industry has been syphoning people away from research on a larger scale.

Depends on the domain.

Undergrad humanities? Sure a community of professors and books is sufficient.

If it's graduate education in the sciences or engineering, then world class research laboratories are required.

Not really. The research is expensive. The education isn't. Grad students are employees of research labs, not guests.

Part of the problem is that it isn't just the best education. One person might have the most brilliant idea in the history of mankind, but if enacting it requires collaboration, they'll need a network of people to help them. Smart people, if the idea is counter-intuitive. So any solution would have to include the development of strong ties between the students.

Back when I was in school in the early naughties, it was a given that, if you were a humanities student, your tuition largely subsidized the STEM students, because your degree required virtually no specialized equipment, just a building, a professor, and some administrative overhead.

STEM students required all sorts of wild equipment, some so specialized and sensitive that the buildings had to have extra protections built in so they weren't bothered by vibration or electromagnetic interference from nearby lightrail trains. Their tuition wouldn't cover that.

Of course, the school also splurged on pointless real estate expansions, a relatively empty, but massive, student "union" building, intense administrative overhead, sports stadiums paid for by adding on hundreds to student fees (which of course weren't part of tuition, but you had to pay them anyway), and so forth.

If you're a humanities student, you get the short end of the stick from many different directions- paying more than your education costs to support others, for a degree that will earn substantially less than others, which likely has fewer industries that specifically require your degree (putting you in more competition for said jobs against students with other similar degrees).

Funny I started in electrical engineering and eventually got a degree in physics; don't remember any "wild equipment" -I remember a few diodes, some breadboards and some oscilloscopes from WW-2 era. Pretty sure you could buy all the 'wild stuff' I ever saw as an undergraduate for less than a year's salary and use it for the whole school forever.

Most of the money goes to salaries, and at this point, most of the salaries go to administrators who add no value. There's also a lot of duplication and nonsense in modern curricula; someone could easily do a better job.

It's bad enough the Thiel Fellowship looks pretty good; you have to assume modern college has nothing to do with actually educating people; seems to be more of a codpiece than anything else.

at my school EE had a full semiconductor fab, nuclear engineering had a nuclear reactor, CS had a full networked computer system with 512x512 UI that predated the internet, super computers, astronomy had an observatory etc.

Currently I think they have an offsite particle accelerator in physics, but Im sure they had sensitive measuring equipment of all kinds when I was there.

But that's still consistent with what GP was writing: that expensive stuff is research, not teaching, funded by grants, not tuition. Some students will take a role in experiments running at those facilities, but many will never see those places from the inside.

There is a simple thought experiment to tell research facilities from teaching facilities: if they increased the number of admissions, would they need another particle accelerator?

Grinnell?

For large institutions this is completely backwards. Tuition is negligible part of the income - much more comes from grants that are granted mainly to STEM faculty, and that money (through "overhead" payments into a common pot) is then used to subsidize the humanities (and the more theoretical STEM fields which are also fairly cheap).

To be clear, I am not against this: I do want the money granted to my STEM department to be used to subsidize the humanities, because they have their importance as well. However, it is not true that the humanities students "get the short end of the stick" when it comes to subsidizing.

Ivy Leagues are clubs. People are not paying for education, but for the price of participating in the club.

Most Ivy League schools are "need-blind" for admission and have great financial aid. You do not need to pay to join the club if you can not afford it.

On the other hand, if your family is wealthy, you probably went to a great high school which does correlate with getting into an Ivy.

Ivy League undergraduates are paying for participation in the club. Ivy League grad students are paying (in the case of masters) for access to research institutions with top PIs and vast resources, as well as connections in their field.

In the last few years most of the Ivy League schools have quietly gone to a complete coverage for students in need of financial aid. Harvard is among those who do. Turns out the problem is now further down the academic scale.

Source: https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...

Your point is valid, but most Ivy Leagues are need-blind for U.S. citizens (Harvard is need-blind for internationals too) at the undergraduate level and are known for relatively generous financial aid policies [1].

I think these schools are a drop in the proverbial ocean of generating crippling student debt, even for kids graduating from humanities majors.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/15/student-borrowers-from-these...

Just to be clear.

While, Harvard has some great financial aid policies, the concept of "need blind" applies to a decision to admit, not about the availability or generosity of financial aid (in general).

> I think these schools are a drop in the proverbial ocean of generating crippling student debt, even for kids graduating from humanities majors.

I may have been unclear, but I was talking about my experience in a graduate program, not undergrad.

Obviously the Ivy Leagues are not the only ones guilty here, but my original point was that I have no problem with their giant endowments provided they actually liberate undergraduate and post-graduate students from debt obligations. I think the Ivies could actually become a great model for the U.S. with a little more effort here.

According to Harvard (https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance):

"The Harvard College financial aid program requires no contribution from Harvard families with annual incomes below $65,000; asks from 0 to 10% of income for those with incomes up to $150,000; and expects proportionally more from families with incomes above $150,000."

If your family makes <$150k, it sounds like Harvard costs up to about as much as the (public) University of Minnesota charges in-state residents. (Depending on your situation, Harvard may cost substantially less.) If you borrowed half of the $15k annually (the max 10% of $150k income), that's not an insane burden when paid over 30 years.

This seems fairly balanced. Granted they could zero out fees for families further up the income scale, but on the other hand "rich kids go to Harvard free" is maybe not the best use of the money.

This seems to be undergraduate only. Am I mistaken? I was talking about graduate students as well.

PhD tuition is covered. Masters' students usually have to pay.

Yeah, this is the #1 thing people get wrong about STEM grad school. Not only is tuition 100% covered, you get a stipend that's usually 20-30k per year depending on local cost of living. Masters is completely covered too if you go in to a program that's expected to continue on to a PhD, and will as likely as not be covered even for a plain masters in some pure science fields.

Non-STEM too for Harvard and Yale, I have friends who are art history PhDs at both places.

However, it's a long slog without a big money payoff after graduation, in fact it is better to be a student in most cases.

The stipend is even north of 30k in STEM at places like Harvard and MIT.

It's even north of 30k at places like John's Hopkins in super cheap Baltimore (and this was more than 10 years ago when I left)

Could be a private school vs public school distinction. UC stipends were < 30k in the early 2010's.

Perhaps, but our stipends were determined by NIH training grants.

It was <20 at UCSB in chemistry then.

It really depends on how well the program/department is funded. Computer Science usually is. I was in a program (Environmental Engineering) where most masters degree students had to pay full price. Grants or graduate student positions wouldn't kick in until year 2. Even then, full tuition was never a guarantee. This was UC Berkeley.

You said "college," which means undergraduate in the US.

First: nobody is forced to get a graduate degree. In many fields (like programming), it's nothing like a requirement to earnings maximization. Since grad students already have degrees, they are also free to work and save until they can pay for fees outright or reduce their loan burden.

I don't have total stats in front of me, but it looks like the Law/Medical/Business schools are ~50% of graduate employment at Harvard. Take it as read that these are worth borrowing for.

The other 50% -- AFAIK there is a significant portion of students on fellowships/scholarships of some kind. My guess is very few people are taking on a bunch of debt for a Divinity PhD.

At this point, it's fair to say that Harvard offers better financial value at all levels for its programs than many public universities offer their in-state residents.

> The other 50% -- AFAIK there is a significant portion of students on fellowships/scholarships of some kind. My guess is very few people are taking on a bunch of debt for a Divinity PhD.

It's interesting that so many replies function on these kind of assumptions when I am telling HN my literal experience at an Ivy League postgraduate program. I received two of the available three fellowships one could compete for. They covered less than 5% of tuition overall. Six figures of debt was the norm for my program.

Now of course, as you said, no one is forced to get a degree in humanities or what have you, but my point is that if you make expertise in these fields contingent on massive, insurmountable debt, you impoverish the culture.

>> It's interesting that so many replies function on these kind of assumptions when I am telling HN my literal experience at an Ivy League postgraduate program.

You've hinted at your experience without providing details (even the school or the type of graduate program). I obviously can't comment on your situation because I know nothing about it. I am literally assuming nothing about your experience.

I do know other Harvard grads (both undergraduate and grad programs) and have some insight into their situations. They don't have "massive, insurmountable debt." Anecdata abound.

I vigorously agree with your last point.

Was this a professional post-grad program (MBA, Law, etc)?

Why do you need a graduate degree in humanities to make cultural contributions? Many people who have made substantial cultural contributions never earned a graduate or even an undergraduate degree in humanities.

I think cultural contributions means taking powerful positions at culturally significant institutions. This I think is preferred choice of ivy league grads in humanities.

That sounds more like a career goal than a cultural contribution. The grandparent was talking about how our culture will suffer and we will all lose out by not subsidizing humanity degrees. But last I check we seem to be saturated by media with new television programs, podcasts, books, music and other visual arts are constantly being created.

All that I said I do agree we shouldn't be burdening our youth with crippling student debt. But the idea that our culture comes from our humanities departments seems a little absurd and not supported by evidence.

American culture is sustained by paid masters degrees at ivy league schools? That doesn't really seem correct to me.

I don't think the Beatles even went to college.

I think the confusion is that most of us come from a time when the accepted wisdom was that if you didn’t get a full ride in a grad school program you didn’t go. I know that was very common when I came to the end of my undergrad and personally know several people who Didn’t Go for that reason.

As a result the people I know from the time who went on to graduate degrees all had free rides (except the MFAs, who I admit are a mystery to me, and the people who went back for MBAs later).

In any halfway decent graduate program the students are paid graduate stipends from teaching assignments and grants awarded to the advisor. That's important! If you are asked to pay for graduate tution, the program is worthless. Corollary: taught Masters programs are worthless, they are moneyspinners for the university,.

Paid Masters programs are not worthless, because employers pay for masters degree holders.

Not enough in most cases to make up for the earnings lost during the time spent studying, never mind the tuition. MBAs aren’t worth it outside the top tier. There are fields where a Master’s is a de facto requirement but they’re generally prestige fields where the money is crap in any case, for at least five years after graduation, for people with rich parents or spouses. Think publishing, fashion, art curation or working in the aid industry.

There are also fields where a doctorate is the entry level qualification like biotech, materials science etc. even in the private sector, but that's what happens when a there are more than ten times as many PhDs producer as there are academic jobs for.

And if you're already an employee, many employers will reimburse tuition for accredited master's degree programs.

A taught Master’s is a great deal if it will help you substantially with immigrating to the US. That explains the demographics of taught Master’s in CS handily.

Many companies who have tiered hiring packages (many, many employers) by default reward a masters more than a bachelors, and a phd more than a masters. There are quite a few examples (especially at good employers) of a masters being plainly rewarded in writing

Why do they base it on family income? What if you have wealthy parents but they choose not to spend money on your tuition? Students are adults when they go to college - family background should be irrelevant.

That system would be ripe for abuse. Just tell schools that your parents have disowned you and you need a full ride.

I wonder if people still get caught in the middle with that - their parents could not have disowned them and could still be in a relationship with them, they just don't think that college is worthwhile or something so they don't want to contribute. But then as you say, what stops all parents pretending they don't think college is worthwhile. Which is why it could be better to not look at the parents income at all.

My problem isn't even the family income decision, it's that the universities don't care how many children there are in a given family either.

My parents could've paid for my college education with some sacrifice (I paid for it, but they could have done so financially) if it were just me going to college. But I have two younger sisters, and there's no way they could cover all three of us.

The way the FAFSA program works is even worse. If a parent remarries, the step-parent’s income is also taken into account.

Additionally, any parent can simply refuse to hand over tax returns and the child is left having to pay 100 percent of the costs.

When a large portion of students get their tuition money from their family, then family background can't be irrelevant, because it's relevant by definition.

Financially it also means they have strict quotas on the required wealth of a specific portion of the incoming class, no? They must have a certain number of the incoming freshman class be from families making more than $150,000 a year in order to be solvent.

Like many rich schools, Harvard has had a need-blind admissions policy for decades. This means admissions decisions are decoupled from decisions about who can pay, basically guaranteeing the opposite of your supposition.

Harvard's endowment is ~$40 billion right now. They're solvent.

They have need blind admissions but they have legacy-aware admissions. It's a happy accident that alumni happen to be wealthy.

So in reality it's not need blind.

Not just legacy-aware, they grant admission in exchange for large donations.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...

It’s amazing how a donated building can help the “need blind” admission officers see the light.

In this specific case of making a donation large enough to build classroom space / hire professors , the person is increasing the teaching capacity of the school by more than 1, allowing them to attend in exchange helps everyone.

Harvard's undergraduate size is absolutely not limited by funding.

Need blind (probably) works the opposite way people think it does. Instead of putting a quota on low income applicants, it means that the only people who meet the standards are high income students whose parents have the cash for all of the extra curricular activities and tutors etc. My alma mater just moved to a system where they consider income, so they could do affirmative action based on income.

What university is that? It's a good policy, much better than controversial race-based admissions, but still promoting increased admissions among both minorities and poor white students.

Case Western did this, or was considering it. There was backlash from the alumni though - from appearances and description it sounded like it would function as a cap on students with financial need, rather than an avenue for affirmative action.

Yeah it was Case I was talking about. IIRC this was right as I was graduating (2013), and what I said was the line from the administration. The problem is there's no real way to verify what would happen until it's implemented.

Until you realize over 50% of the school is the progeny of the 1%. Then you realize what's actually going on.

Harvard doesn't care about education, they care about being at the center of the reproduction of the elite class. They're explicit about this. Their admissions and tuition policies reflect it.

Except they get better tax treatment than a hedge fund since they are a "non-profit".

So if you have Harvard-type money now, you can buy land that will be disproportionately valuable in 20 years when water is a problem. An excellent and unusual example of wealth concentration... with a bit of a Dr. Evil / Lex Luthor vibe about it too!

Pretty apocalyptic if you ask me.

This is the plot of Chinatown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)

Somewhat related to California Water: There’s a documentary about California water use in Central Valley by land owners used for pistachios, pomegranates, etc. being crowdfunded right now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7331688/pistachio-wars-...

The story originated in the 2013 essay “journey through oligarch valley”: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/oligarch-valley/

Harvard's average real annual return is 10.2% (Piketty's book "Capital" p569) You need a team of very talented investors to get these types of returns y/y

Isn't that almost exactly what, say, the s&p 500 returns? [0] And you don't need a team of anyone to buy and hold that.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

"Adjusted for inflation, the historical average annual return is only around 7%. " from your link.

There's a 10% nominal return, but a 7% real return. Harvard beats this by 3% annually, which is huge!

the real test is how well Harvard's fund does in year where the s&p 500 is doing poorly.

No, the real test is sustained performance over time in the form of an average.

If the S&P 500 falls 10% in a given year, I can hold 100% cash, light 5% of it on fire, and outperform the S&P 500 - that doesn't make it a sound long term strategy.

Are we also omitting the fact that it's a nonprofit and therefore has grossly better tax treatment?

thats not how taxes work... I am not a lawyer/cpa but if I understand correctly, any investment income harvard receives would be taxed at the normal rate for that type of activity.

While that's true, they still lag what I think is their benchmark, other top tier schools:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-26/harvard-b...

It's all based off of the Yale system. Basically longer term outlook allows use of decoupled asset classes such as timber and commodities

How much non-campus land does Harvard own? Their troubles with dealing with their overseas land made the news earlier (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-06/harvard-s...). Do other universities do this too?

Most controversial are its holdings in Cambridge and Allston, across the river.

> Based on data from Harvard’s building records, Harvard owns 9.56 percent of the land in Cambridge, 5.70 percent in Allston, and 0.27 percent in Boston.

https://medium.com/harvard-open-data-project/how-harvards-ex...

Harvard is in Cambridge.

Also, the business school is in Allston, and the engineering school will move there in a few years.

When discussing Harvard in Allston, good reporters should spend the time to deconvolute their holdings. They have lots of campus holdings, and that is growing, but they also own plenty of things that aren't campus. They're the landlord for my auto repair place (Oriental Car King) and for the shopping mall with my grocery store (Brighton Mills). These aren't becoming campus any time soon in anything that Harvard has announced.

I stumbled across a planning map during my time at University of Illinois. It was marked showing 50, 75 and 100 year expansion possibilities. The land supporting 100 year expansion is already owned by the university and leased for commercial use.

Harvard is 200 years older than UIUC. I'm sure they are also planning for 100 years in the future.

Indeed. In the past, Harvard seriously considered how to re-route the Charles River so they can "unite" their Cambridge and Allston campuses.

Allston is across the river.

I suspect quite a bit. Real Estate is a huge asset class and correlates well with one of their biggest costs.

> Do other universities do this too?

What, own land as an investment? Yeah, when you have multibillion dollar investment fund (endowment and other funds), as most major private universities will, you probably have some of it in real estate.

Do other universities do this too?

University of Chicago opened a building in Hong Kong.†

"Ownership" is hard to speak to, since it's my understanding that nobody "owns" land in Hong Kong, it's just leased from the government for 99 years. Or maybe I'm confusing that with the mainland.

† University of Chicago to Open New Building Atop “Hong Kong’s Most Notorious Prison”: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2016/11/30/university-of...

By way of further example, and because quite a few universities also do this by "accident" of having land left over after either moving or redoing their campuses, the University of Washington owns approximately 10 acres in downtown Seattle, including (notably for various court cases about where the authority of the university, as a non-political arm of the State of Washington, and municipalities intersect) 4th Ave, a city-maintained street of public use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Tract_(Seattle)

Off-topic, but it's very normal for private entities to own public streets in the US. At the time when these areas were platted and lots conveyed, the streets were dedicated to the public use, but were not deeded to the municipalities.

As a general rule, in most US states the adjoining landowners are assumed to have fee simple ownership and reversionary rights to the land underlying the streets. As a public policy matter, courts are loathe to create situations where tiny little bits of land are separately owned and can't be put to productive use. (the strips and gores doctrine.)

For WA, Holmquist v. King discusses this in depth.

https://outline.com/CwVvyu

Thank you

I thought I had seen this before:

https://www.reuters.com/article/harvard-water/harvard-buys-u...

If anyone enjoys dystopian science fiction, "The Water Knife" plays out the groundwater/climate change scenario in gripping detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife

I'm not sure how water rights work in California, but I think in many places on the west (coast) water rights are not transferable to avoid speculation over what--now more than ever--needs to be a public resource.

Is there any way for common people to invest in water assets or rights?

Freshwater speculation in the future is going to make a lot of people rich, given the current undervalued nature of fresh, clean, drinkable water. The kind that sustains life.

If I was a climate-change denier, this would probably make me reconsider that.

Another source, with a softer paywall:

https://www.thestar.com/business/markets/2018/12/10/harvard-...

Posting paywalled articles here is just advertisement for a subscription service. Anyone who already subscribed doesn’t need discovery and anyone who doesn’t can’t read the article.

HMC appears to be exploiting Tragedy of the Commons for profit: they'll have the most land and the deepest wells while homeowners run dry as they rush to suck everything they can out of the ground as fast as possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com