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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Here’s a family that donated $37 million to a half dozen schools over several years, ostensibly to increase the odds of his [well qualified] children to be accepted into one or more of those schools.

Personally, I think if someone wants to pay the way of, let’s say, 300 students to get full scholarships, so that their child can attend, this seems like a very sustainable model which benefits everyone involved.

$37 million buys a lot of resources so arguably this isn’t taking a spot away from anyone, if anything it is enabling these universities to provide more spots to students who deserve them, potentially at zero cost.

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I generally agree with your comment, but it's worth nothing that despite the US population increasing and the number of kids attenting college increasing even more the top schools have generally not increased enrollment sizes much at all.

It's interesting to think about why this might be so.

If you're sitting on a minimum of $3.5B in endowment (Brown), up to $34.5B (Harvard), why would you need to expand? Besides, being "elite" is part of the brand. Start letting everyone in, and the Ivy League becomes just another football conference.

> being "elite" is part of the brand.

Exactly. And what public policy needs to do is revoke the non-profit status of schools that fail to make any effort to expand despite having an abundance of resources and qualified candidates.

Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool. That fact that it doesn't spend a penny of its $30 billion endowment doing so reveals that its mission is brand management, not education. And that's perfectly fine. But it shouldn't enjoy a tax-advantaged status predicated on the make-believe that its a philanthropic organization.

Where do you expect Harvard could house the additional 13K undergrads near campus? I live walking distance to Harvard campus and I can tell you that I can't imagine a good answer.

(Unstated above is that I believe that undergrad is fundamentally an in-person experience.)

Satellite campus?

Buy up existing hotels?

The George Washington University has purchased many hotels and condos and converted them to student housing, and that is downtown DC real estate.

Works well when you pay no property taxes.

Doesn't Harvard own a bunch of prime real estate? Tax free, even. How tall is the average building on that land?

> Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool.

Increasing the class size would be good.

But Danny Rubin isn't going to be able to teach screen writing to 120 kids instead of 12, even if he actually wanted to. RJ Tarrant can't expand his personal Classics section beyond 15.

And the undergraduate animal transplant surgery class (12-15 students)? How, pray tell, will that scale? If you wanted to 10x the size of the class... I don't know if there's a single place on Earth that conducts 10 transplants, human or large animal, in one building, at the same time.

Not everything can be scaled. Not even "not scalable" things can be scaled with money, even a lot of it.

A more interesting conversation is why nonetheless billionaires do a bad job at education, despite (not because of) all the money. I think this thinking is part of it. It also shows a lack of understanding of what makes Harvard special. It's not just "brand management."

The solution is simple: hire more faculty, build more and taller buildings. Build more dorms. They can afford it. And if their mission was education, they would do it.

You can’t just hire more top talent. “Elite” is “best”, not “more”.

You absolutely can hire more top talent.

The academic job market is so tight in most fields that random universities in the middle of nowhere get hundreds of applicants for a single tenure-track job. If you go back 100 years ago you would find that Harvard was a lot less selective (there were far fewer academics), but it was still elite.

Overall, society isn't putting enough money into research. Elite universities hiring more faculty would be a great thing, in my estimation.

Agreed. To do this correctly would take long term planning on the scale of decades most likely; growing the faculty from within and providing the necesarry resources to develop them. But it is possible and the elite universities should be moving this way.

For Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League, "growing the faculty from within" really means "actually granting non-world famous people tenue." The Ivys are notorious for not granting tenure to people who come up through the ranks.

Do you know how coveted any tenured faculty position is? Anywhere, let alone at Harvard?

Harvard could dectuple the number of faculty positions, and still turn away a dozen promising qualified academics for every position it fills.

I didn't go to Harvard, but I did attend a comparable fancy lad finishing school. The notion that there's any sort of magic compared to, say, Texas A&M doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The real difference is that the reputational capital of an Ivy League school. Which means that a bunch of impressive people will bend over backwards to become associated with the school.

Which in turn makes the institution itself prestigious. Which then attracts the next-generation of impressive people. Like a social status perpetual motion machine.

Exactly. The only path forward to preserve the essence of America is to grind the gears to a halt

You wouldn't complain if NCSU had this reputation. You're just saying this because you didn't get into those elite schools. "Bring them down". Move on.

> And that's perfectly fine.

Under capitalism. :)

The US also gives nonprofit status to organizations that do stuff like buy expensive paintings and build megachurches. There's no general requirement that the nonprofits need to be using their money in the highest-utility manner. If such a requirement existed, I don't think elite universities should be the first organizations to crack down on.

Endowments really need to go. Put that towards paying for student's education instead of locking it up.

Theoretically, endowments are _supposed_ to be paying for students’ education.

If endowments go, so do good professors. My wife was recruited by a couple institutions last year. One of our key concerns about one institution was the endowment. Tenure is not nearly as valuable at a institution that is not on strong financial footing.

Why are endowments so important for Professors? They're not seeing a dime from that anyway.

If a university has a strong endowment, it provides assurance that the operating budget will be buffered against economic downturns. If universities did away with endowments (and did not replace them with mind-boggling amounts of insurance), it would increase the chance that professors' jobs and/or salaries would be at risk. Unlike most jobs, academic positions can last for half a century, so it is reasonable to look far into the future when assessing the desirability of a particular position.

It's hard to scale up individual institutions and maintain quality.

What needs to happen is a broadening of the definition of "top schools".

The issue is that a "top school" is a definition inherently limited in size. The top 10 is the top 10 regardless of whether there are 100 or 1000 schools being considered. Also, regardless of how many people there are, as an entire society we can only agree on a group so large before the "top schools" are no longer actually common knowledge (and thus not a "top school" in many important ways).

UCLA is both a much larger and much more highly rated school than it was thirty years ago.

Only solution I see is reducing their influence as much as possible.

They have not increased enrollment but they have massively increased financial aid.

Financial engineering. They set the prices which they pay themselves to appear philanthropic.

I think it's because high end education is hard to scale. I've yet to see an alternative to small class and 1-1 teaching (office hours) that reliably produces as good results.

So if it's hard to fit in more students per professor, then the issue becomes finding more teachers. I suspect that might be more of a bureaucratic/political issue. Research and teaching are conflated, putting teaching at the bottom of the totem pole and pay scale for most aspiring professors unless you're famous for being good at teaching.

Maybe there should be more dedicated teaching openings.

>> US population increasing and the number of kids attenting college increasing even more the top schools have generally not increased enrollment sizes much at all.

Also, while they used to serve almost exclusively US students they now accept students from all over the world, making the chances of an average child getting in more remote. My father got into Stanford a long time ago when you could be a local kid at public schools with nothing distinguishing you but good grades and test scores. Now to replicate that feat you need an athletic scholarship, or an amazing personal story, a legacy, or a huge donation.

I believe this will begin to erode the concept of elite schools truly representing the most capable. In a previous job we sometimes found that kids who were coming from a good public engineering program were often more skilled at actually writing code than people from some fancy ivy league schools. The fancy schools turned out graduates who were usually smart and very polished. But they didn't necessarily have more of the skills we were looking for.

The life experience of DE Shaw himself makes you wonder why he why he values an Ivy League school so much. His biography demonstrates it is not the skills. It is the access and the pedigree.

> Personally, I think if someone wants to pay the way of, let’s say, 300 students to get full scholarships, so that their child can attend, this seems like a very sustainable model which benefits everyone involved.

> $37 million buys a lot of resources so arguably this isn’t taking a spot away from anyone, if anything it is enabling these universities to provide more spots to students who deserve them, potentially at zero cost.

This is very speculative. His children getting admitted to these schools might very well take away a spot from someone else unless they would be admitted anyway or the numbers of admitted students increase. This discussion is a fascinating read, arguments from all directions rationalizing this behavior and somehow making it work within our social contract.

That would be fine if everyone accepted due to donations, athletics, legacy, etc had an asterisk on their diploma. What I find grating is they get to hide among people with no advantage.

It weakens the signal of having gotten into a top institution.

Or maybe it strengthens the signal of people who've gotten into elite schools on their own, because our meritocracy has never really been fully about merit.

Harvard could provide free tuition to all its students for the next 400 years if it felt like it, based on the size of its current endowment, so it's hard to believe a few million extra is providing a spot to someone deserving who otherwise wouldn't get one.

That follows if one person has their way in bought. It doesn't when more then 1/300th of the class does, and that would be 6 or 7 students at Harvard.

Agreed; unfortunately, the schools getting this money already have more than they can possibly spend.

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