Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

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Anecdata: In my extended family, we have some members with a fair bit of 'bread'. These family members met at a somewhat known (yet small-ish) college and really loved the place and all the memories they had there. They donated a lot of money over the years and, yes, had a building named after them. When it came time for their daughter to apply to college, the choice was obvious.

However, the daughter was rejected outright due to a multitude of factors. She wasn't violent, or addicted, or lazy. Nothing like that. She just wasn't ahead of the other applicants.

Well, you can imagine that the parents were none too enthused. All the love they had for that college, those dreams for their daughter, gone. There were phone calls and in person visits. Still, the daughter was not what they were looking for.

In the end, things have gone alright for everyone. The building still has their names on it, though the donations have ceased. The daughter is doing just fine at the school she is now at. The college is dealing with it's own issues just as it ever was.

Though there may be corruption at many universities and colleges, there are still a fair number of places where merit and fair decisions still reign. I'd look to those schools for the graduates to hire. Integrity is still in high demand, just as it will ever be.

When I hear stuff like this I wonder what in the hell could have been so great about their experience that they'd want to do something like that. It makes me wonder what I missed out on in college that I don't feel the same way. Did I just by chance happen to not go to some meeting or join some club that would have changed everything?

It really is if you gained access to a circle of people who have moved up in influence in varying sectors.

My Alma-mater gave me access to leaders, hiring and referral opportunities, and even a life long partner with similar ambitions. I can probably name a good long list of of people I can call and get a a little help from now if I was in a bit of a pinch or need a little perspective.

This is bizarrely instrumental reason. Few of my classmates are now captains of industry or even in my career field, but I have extremely fond memories of my college experience because it was a nurturing, supportive environment where I had a close-knit community of friends, access to a lot of different resources to pursue my interests and the freedom to experiment and explore how I wanted to live life, all relatively free of stress and serious obligations.

Granted, I went to a smallish regional state school. The experience there, or at, say, Small Liberal Arts College, may be very different from Big State Engineering or Pressure Cooker Elite U.

bizarrely? the point of college is social connection, growing up. the book learning you can buy the text (nowadays read similar work online)

I see you got some downvotes, but no really this is true. Diversity is a frequent selling point, and you get a chance to meet people from around the world at university. Clubs, sports, frats, job networking, are all socially driven. Some people need the social feedback to drive their studies; we're social animals so there's really no shame in that.

Sometimes though, we need instruments to do science, so that's another major purpose for undergrad work. Occasionally. But if the undergrads decided to all take online courses one day, it would sure help the grad get work done.

Same-ish. My Alma was a great place for me at that time. I grew up a LOT and have very fond memories, specifically of my department. Via the push from professors, I learned so much and I am very grateful for that. I used to donate to just the department, but with a change in leadership, that is no longer possible. That time, that place, and that person who I was, will always be special to me.

> Did I just by chance happen to not go to some meeting or join some club that would have changed everything?

Probably? Personally my first semester at uni was depressingly dull other than the novelty and the subjects (well, mostly dull there too but the future semesters looked interesting and I was programming for the first time). By chance I was walking through a club recruitment event when a single person stopped to talk to me and tried to convince me to join and come to a meeting that night. They got my email too. Well, I didn't go to the meeting but a few days later an email showed up saying the first practice will be tomorrow. I figured why not, I'm not doing anything, and showed up. I stuck with it for four years, taking on duties over time until I was president, it was most of my social life (e.g parties, hanging out) and I made most of my friends through it, shifted my lifestyle from videogames and procrastination to working out, having fun with sport and mastering it, having flow/mushin consistently, and getting work done ASAP, and other considerations.

I've never felt the desire to donate to my old college, but certainly I already have donated to my old club and have considered doing more for it. I assume folks with very good experiences were part of some sort of organization: my high school friends that stuck together in college without branching out had a good time but was overall meh.

>Personally my first semester at uni was depressingly dull other than the novelty and the subjects

Sorry to hear that. What are some ways to cheat school? (waste of time)

Edit: apart from catching on your reading (listening) and scrolling on hackernews.

It's the only instance I can think of where an organization will call you up to donate money while you still owe them money.

I never quite understood why people donate to colleges in such a way that it is the legal entity of the university that benefits.

They provide a service, and they charge money for it. The university operates as a business. I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?

Why wouldn't you instead endow a scholarship for students of your favorite college? Instead of giving cash to Wal-Mart, buy prepaid Wal-Mart gift cards, and pass them out to fellow customers. The university doesn't need your donations. It is fully capable of building its own buildings outright, begging for state funding, or at least issuing bonds backed by future tuition. If someone is so keen on having a building with their name on it, perhaps they should instead construct some off-campus student apartments, and make some nice signs in the same general style as the university signage.

> Why wouldn't you instead endow a scholarship for students of your favorite college?

Many people do. They also give money to improve football facilities, bring speakers to campus, and endow a chaired professor position.

> I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?

Because a university is a nonprofit that exists only for the purpose of improving the world. (Not necessarily the employees, who work there as a job, but it's why universities exist.)

You probably don't see a lot of donations to the University of Phoenix or other for-profit universities.

>Because a university is a nonprofit that exists only for the purpose of improving the world. (Not necessarily the employees, who work there as a job, but it's why universities exist.)

For something like fifteen years of my life I owed well over a hundred thousand dollars of non-bankruptable debt because of the fees this "non-profit" charged.

A "non-profit" university exists for many, many reasons. Giving the dean a million dollar salary is one of those reasons. Student education is likely third or fourth on the list.

"Non-profit" is literally no more than a corporate tax status. That actual charitable causes happen to be non-profit is a coincidence.

> "Non-profit" is literally no more than a corporate tax status

It is a tax status (actually, a group of them), but the name has substantive meaning, since to qualify for any of them there must be no one with a claim on the entity’s accumulated earnings.

> That actual charitable causes happen to be non-profit is a coincidence.

It's not a coincidence, it's an actual legal defining characteristic of the kind of nonprofit to which donations are tax deductible.

A non-profit has to show their outflows but it is quite common to have a non-profit where 100% of the money is doled out as taxable income to the board members.

Correct. Despite this, I choose to donate to my universities because a) when its my children's turn, I want the organization to remember my name, and b) I honestly believe that education is a truly worthwhile pursuit and I want to expand access to, and quality of, education and discovery. PhDs and grad students may be a bunch of blowhards but they drive a lot of innovation.

> when its my children's turn, I want the organization to remember my name

When it's time for my children, I want the organization that will be teaching them about professional and ethical conduct in the real world to not only not be corrupt, but also demonstrably free of all prejudicial biases in the applications process.

Which is to say, I want my children to be assigned a randomized identifier and their personally identifiable information anonymized, before their application is given to an admissions officer, so that irrelevant qualifications like the amount of money parent alumni have given to the organization are not and cannot be used for an admit/no-admit decision.

I'm fine with your kid getting a 2nd-floor room in the posh dormitory, and first bite at class scheduling. You can pay for additional conveniences, but not to deny someone else an opportunity earned by their own hard work.

Well, okay, so I should stop donating to the scholarship fund then? If alumni stopped donating then quality of education or number of students would have to go down.

If my kids aren't going to get preferential status then there is no reason to be a sponsor of that institution over any other.

Given that your top comment is, "I don't understand why people donate to Universities," I'm not sure that you're in a great position to say that others shouldn't receive priority admission. If everyone did what you did then our University system would collapse.

Most universities primary function is research, and tuition doesn't pay for research. Most funds from research (should) come from grants and donations. The research into a cancer cure doesn't come from Jimmy Undergrad paying tuition.

At the more desirable schools, tuition fees don't pay for tuition costs either. There's a correlation between how much the college (and its donors) give to a student and the quality of the college, for reasons that are obvious upon reflection: it aligns incentives. If the school is paying for your attendance, their motive is for you to succeed at something (or else why would they bother schooling you)? If the school is profiting from your enrollment, their motivation is for you to enroll, not suceed.

> Most universities primary function is research

Actually, in the US, at the vast majority of universities, the primary job of faculty involves teaching, extension/outreach, and forms of service like mentoring students. Most universities have research expectations, but that is not how faculty spend their time.

> and tuition doesn't pay for research.

This is a STEM-oriented view. In a lot of fields the primary cost of research is faculty time, and it is often paid by tuition.

>This is a STEM-oriented view. In a lot of fields the primary cost of research is faculty time, and it is often paid by tuition.

While I don't doubt there are colleges out there that primarily function of tuition, I'm fairly confident that the schools that the GP was talking about which take in millions of donations, are not funded by tuition - STEM or not. Endowments are practically tax-free hedgefunds. There are several liberal arts colleges in boston with billion+ endowments - where the return alone on the endowment rivals the total revenue from students (assuming they were all paying the full 50k, which they likely aren't).

Per my anecdata, it wasn't a research university, just a liberal arts college. From what I can remember, most of the donated funds that my extended family gave went to scholarships, though I'm not 100% on that.

> Why wouldn't you instead endow a scholarship for students of your favorite college?

Because endowing a scholarship is setting up a charity and donating to a University (the kind anyone donates to, at any rate—no one is endowing chairs at the University of Phoenix) is giving to an existing charity; the two probably have similar tax, feeling of giving back, and status/ego benefits, but the former is more work.

The charity you set up will be perfectly aligned with your interests and values, whereas the highest paid employees of the existing "charity" are probably the president and the men's football coach, and not necessarily in that order.

As charities, universities massage their financials to make themselves look better. They set the tuition rate. They determine the scholarship amounts. They bring in dollar-denominated donations, but the actual "charity" they provide is a nebulous value for the amount of additional knowledge and education the student would have been otherwise unable to acquire without paying more out of their own pocket in tuition. The university decides what that is worth anyway. They move $50k from one pocket to another, and then say they gave away $50k worth of education.

A private scholarship charity can't play those games, because the costs of education are set by someone else.

> The charity you set up will be perfectly aligned with your interests and values

If you are perfect at setting up and managing a charity, perhaps, but then if you are concerned with education, and what something perfectly aligned with your values, may mean you need to set up a university, not a scholarship fund.

> whereas the highest paid employees of the existing "charity" are probably the president and the men's football coach

You assume that this conflicts with, rather than reflects, the interests and values of the kind of people who donate money to the universities. I think that if you explored the issue you would find that it is not the case, and particularly that the variation in whether or not that is true at any particular university correlates very neatly with the values of the people who donate to the university. (As far as causal explanations, I would assume that there is a two-way feedback loop; donors who value football will make a school more likely to pay the football coach well which will attract more donations from people who value football and less from those who do not, etc.)

> A private scholarship charity can't play those games

Yes, but that's just another way of saying that a private scholarship charity has a lot less control of what actually gets delivered as education than a university.

Not sure that's a reason to support the former over the latter, though, especially when the choice is taking the additional effort and cost to set up the former; its just another way of saying "less bang for the buck".

Because almost all universitys are NOT businesses... they are non-profits. They don't provide their services so they can make money, they make money so they can provide their services.

Now, you can argue that incentives sometimes get messed up, but that is the case for ALL charities/non-profits.

Non-profits are businesses--businesses with a privileged tax status.

It is possible to set up a non-profit business such that the money that comes in goes out through different ports than the ownership outflow pipe. A typical setup for a corrupt non-profit is for managers of the business to earn above-market salaries, and to own for-profit businesses that "compete" for service contracts with the non-profit entity.

For example, Jack Grift establishes a non-profit charity for orphan children with fantods. He works the circuit and manages to fund it to the tune of $1M per year. He leases a nice office space in a building owned by Jack Grift AAA Office Space, and contracts with Jack Grift Janitorial Services to empty the trash can, and sets the charity's salary for CEO at $250k/year, and Chief Revenue Officer at $100k/year, plus a bonus of 5% of incoming donations. Jack, of course, holds both positions. He gets $250k as CEO, $150k as CRO, $100k as his own landlord, and $50k for taking out his own trash. He rolls $440k into uncapturable overhead, marketing, and fundraising efforts, and still has $10k left to supply orphans with copies of both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

The finances of universities are even more obfuscated, but it is undeniable that some university employees have the power to spend the organization's money for their own personal benefit. Catered faculty luncheons. Campus beautification in and around personal offices. Settlements from the university to forestall civil suits based on personal indiscretions. Premium parking spaces. These expenditures may, in fact, be justified by the mission of the university, but it is impossible for me to audit any given university's accounting books to make that determination for myself before deciding whether I want to give them more money than they demand on their invoices.

There are a lot of outflow pipes for business revenues. Non-profits only close one of them.

Can you tell us the name of the college?

It's small and in the mid-west, you may have heard of it, but it's also possible you may not have. The point, for the family, was not in 'cred' but because they loved the place.

And doxx himself? Fat chance!

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