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Comment by Hasz | Hacker News Reader

You want to revitalize rural America AND solve this tricky problem of too many qualified kids, not enough spots?

Let's bring a new wave of land grant universities. The feds own like ~90% of Nevada, let's put a top tier research university smack dab in the middle of it. Put up some new facilities, draw faculty away from other top tier universities/the rest of the world, and start pumping all these bright, but otherwise undistinguished kids into a place where they CAN distinguish themselves. All that sweet, sweet federal cash flows in, and you can bet people will set up shop around it. For the feds, it's a cheap investment, but one that has paid for itself a thousand times over.

Make it a public bell labs in the desert, then do it across rural America. Huntsville (kind of) did it, why can't we do it again?

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> The feds own like ~90% of Nevada, let's put a top tier research university smack dab in the middle of it.

The feds own 85% of Nevada because it's mostly desert and it's not practical to live there; nobody claimed it during the homesteading era, so it was left to the BLM. There's a whole lot of wide-open sagebrush country striped with the occasional mountain range, and very little water. It would be an expensive place to run a college town, since you'd have to truck in literally everything you needed to live on from somewhere else.

I hear you, but lobbyists will get wind of the money and find a way to divert it into their coffers.

"Why should the fed open a school in Nevada when you can just give that money to us (University of Nevada). We promise we'll give x% of the money out in scholarships!"

The con continues.....

What about the bright kids that can't afford to move away?

What about the crumbling infrastructure in those rural areas which falls apart if you made any attempt to move people out there?

Or what do you do about the poor rural folk you displace through what is essentially extremely sudden government gentrification?

Honestly we have plenty of universities, many of which are not Harvard but still have incredible professors and bright students. Instead of building universities in the middle of nowhere, we should take that money to make higher education (whether it's trade or not) free and help fund people move to those universities. This is a far quicker solution than hoping to fix the problem 20-30 years from now when we need a solution today.

When I say middle of the desert, I literally mean it. If you're living on federal land in Nevada, you're doing something wrong.

I'm also talking specifically about research universities.

I think the debate about cost should be decoupled from this, but I agree -- higher ed should be something you pay for with a summer job, not a decade plus of what amounts to federally enforced indentured servitude.

A better plan would be to take over a decommishioning military base in the plains or midwest. As someone who lives in Nevada, the infrastructure issues are exterme.

> Instead of building universities in the middle of nowhere, we should take that money to make higher education (whether it's trade or not) free and help fund people move to those universities.

Do we even need people to move to physical buildings? If we improve our internet infrastructure we can offer 24/7 education to everyone anywhere in the country. The idea of forcing students to move to a specific place and attend classes at a specific time every day seems somewhat dated.

> Do we even need people to move to physical buildings? If we improve our internet infrastructure we can offer 24/7 education to everyone anywhere in the country. The idea of forcing students to move to a specific place and attend classes at a specific time every day seems somewhat dated.

Lambda School would like to say hello.

(no affiliation... just a fan)

As would Western Governors University(alumnus here).

UT Austin, Notre Dame, and U of Chicago, while not all public, are fantastic universities in the deep interior of the country.

It’s a great point, although I think it’s already been done. There’s a lot of attention on Harvard in particular but there’s plenty of good education in the country. It’s just become very expensive and too focused on the perceived top 2.

I got my Master's degree in Computer Science at UT Austin while working an entry-level tech job full time. My company paid my tuition, but it was only $13,000 for the 3 years it took me to finish it, so it wouldn't have broken the bank to pay that myself if I had to. In spite of having no grants, I incurred zero debt and ended up with a degree from a distinguished program where one of the faculty members received a Turing award while I was attending.

I currently work at a recognizable big tech company side-by-side with people who have degrees from Stanford, MIT, CMU, and so forth. Many of them wracked up significant student debt to go to their schools, and my career seems to have been at absolutely no disadvantage from having gone to a much cheaper school.

Going to school now is MUCH more expensive that it was when you were there. Students now are expected to pay ~3x what you paid to go to an in-state university. If there isn't an in-state one that's good enough though (not everyone has a UT Austin), then they have to pay many times that to go to a public school in another state or a private school.

What are you talking about? UT Texas resident graduate tuition for the school of engineering is $5277 per semester for 9 hours. The degree requires 30. That works out to ~18k for the entire course of study.

Play with the calculator yourself if you don't believe me: https://tuition.utexas.edu/

So someone who takes classes for 3 years now has to pay $31,662 dollars, which is still significantly more than 13k. Also, I'm now realizing I misread your earlier post and you were completing your masters, not undergrad. I feel like the people racking up debt today are mostly doing it in undergrad, as graduate students usually pay little to no tuition and get a stipend.

If you take 9 credits per semester for three years you end up with 54 credits. You only need 30 for a Master's. Why would you do that?

> I feel like the people racking up debt today are mostly doing it in undergrad, as graduate students usually pay little to no tuition and get a stipend.

The person you were responding to specifically said their Master's degree cost $13,000 in tuition. How is undergrad relevant?

Honestly, that’s great for you and I’m sure your skills and future earning potentials don’t differ as it’s all about work performance once you’re in.

But I’m sure you’ve noticed that you’re the exception from your school whereas that’s the norm for HYPS et al. That’s why people strive to go to those schools.

Do you have evidence to back up it being an exception?

> and my career seems to have been at absolutely no disadvantage from having gone to a much cheaper school.

Because you are in an 'in demand' field. Same is true for most people who graduate from medical school. It's a ticket to a well paying job where you attend isn't of that much significance for the 'average' position. And with that 'average' position you can often catapult yourself into something better since demand for what you do is always growing and labor is typically short and constrained in some way.

The newest of those schools is 129 years old. Maybe it was done, but I don't see it being done much anymore.

Because the first thing that would happen is that people from rural areas would be squeezed out of said university.

We've seen it happen in Wisconsin. Which is why we just have a top x% of any high school in Wisconsin gets admitted rule. There are just too many poor people in, say, Milwaukee's suburbs, or Appleton, or LaCrosse. If you have to get in based on strict merit, I would not underestimate the number of, let's call them, "poor urban/suburban whites" who would outperform people in the rural areas.

Unless, of course, this school would be only for poor rural people. In which case they wouldn't do it because they'd get sued.

If you had such a place, I think admission would have to be like the Iowa/Wisconsin system. Sort of, automatic admission if you're in the top whatever percent of a high school class anywhere in US and pass a trivial test. That way, rural people could never be crowded out.

> top x% of any high school in Wisconsin gets admitted

Does this ever result in parents whose children are "on the bubble" deliberately moving to poor school districts?

ITs a great idea but if you want people to populate a new town or city you've first got to move some companies and jobs there. Once jobs are there, the people will always follow. How to get companies to move there? Provide tax incentives: companies will do almost anything to get a tax incentive.

The University goes first. Nevada has zero income tax, almost no property tax. It's about as business friendly as it gets (no 9 on some random list I found); the problem is it's a barren desert devoid of anything worth doing.

You smack a big research university into it, and bam, suddenly construction companies are there, then housing, then food, etc etc. Hopefully some new ventures get spun up by students and faculty, and now we're running.

Or leave the desert as desert, Nature is pretty nice.

Its not all desert. Half of Lake Tahoe area is Nevada and pretty nice mountains and water.

This is a fantastic idea. Economists love it too [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-16/rural-...

Education won't fix America.

Nick Hanauer, of Second Ave. Partners, goes into some depth as to why [0], but his thesis is along Piketty's:

r>g [1].

Sure, education is a part of the solution, but as biologists say: it is necessary but not sufficient.

[0] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2019/06/12/better_schools_wo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Can you explain what Piketty says about education in Capital?

Im not sure he said anything about it. Your googling will be just as good as mine.

This is desperately needed. We have:

1. An oversupply of newly minted PhD's literally waiting for tenured profs to die so that there is an opening

2. A skyrocketing demand from people looking to go to university, with acceptance rates everywhere dropping.

Connect these with building more universities. It might only be possible at the state level, look at how California opened UC Merced in 2005.

2) Isn't true any more. University enrollement peaked in 2011, and isn't expected to reach that level again for at least a decade or more. There are plenty of accetable state schools with 100% or near 100% acceptence rates.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_303.10.a...

> 1. An oversupply of newly minted PhD's literally waiting for tenured profs to die so that there is an opening

Wait, a work-relief program for ... PhDs?

Surely they are intelligent enough to find some form of employment beyond what Uncle Sam can only provide.

Sorry, you want the government to spend money? No, no, that simply won't do.

Isn't that all the government does?

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. Those discussions are always the same and they always get nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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