Different fields have different balance between these two things.
http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...
But the point of Olympic medals is to assess skill. If the available pool of talented athletes is larger than the number of gold medals, then there is a need for more gold medals.
"That kind of school" is (call it) a Top 10 school in a given field. And there is always going to be a shortage of slots at Top 10 schools whether you have 1,000 schools or 10,000. What potentially makes sense is investments in relevant subject areas in schools that aren't in the Top 10 but are in the Top 100 so they're functionally less distinguishable--except in prestige perhaps--though arguably that's already the case. In the US, cost aside, a qualified applicant can already get into a "good" school.
For schools, like Harvard and Yale, isn't a large part of the value they provide to students derived from the school's network of alumnus and the prestige the school's name holds? If so, don't these schools derive a large part of the value they offer from their exclusivity?
This is a claim I've seen repeated often but have never seen any real evidence to back up. It seems more like "we need skilled workers but don't want to pay them skilled wages." Regardless the problem (in the US) is not an absence of universities like it was in the 19th century - financial barriers to bachelors degrees are significant but that is not a symptom of low supply and high demand.
So no, I don't think the demand exists (in the US) today, at all.
The Morrill Land-Grant Act was, in part, a response for the need for new skills of an industrialized economy.
However, if you believe schools are mostly about credentials and signalling, online learning institutes often have a large accreditation hurdle. E.g., it's generally preferred to have an MIT degree rather than a list of MIT MOOCs taken because there is a certain amount of elite signalling that comes with the degree even if the skills learned are the exact same
From my perspective, it is also much preferable to have an actual degree from Plymouth State University, or even an online degree from Southern New Hampshire University, than a MOOC "degree" from MIT, and I strongly disagree that the "skills are the same" in practice, evne if that might be true in principle. It's not just about elite signaling, there are huge differences in rigor, workload, and personal responsibility with an actual university education versus a MOOC.
MOOCs are fine to supplement a bachelor's education, but if I saw a resume that only had edX/etc, they'd better have good work experience or a great project portfolio.
In my experience, this even holds true for the same degree within the same institution across different timelines. There’s other pressures (financial, political, etc.) that can drive rigor and curriculum to change. That is at least part of why accreditation is important; it’s supposed to provide some third part vetting that the product is meeting minimum standards. (Again, in theory).
I think it will get much more interesting if online courses can fix the quality/accreditation disparity. With colleges no longer having a monopoly on education that’s still their strongest chip to play
>haven't built universities like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc.
I assume the answer is that they generally find that it makes a lot more sense to give oodles of cash to their alma mater or some favored school to get your name on a building and/or really beef up a department than to try to found a new school which would likely take decades to establish any sort of reputation.
That's the rub though, isn't it. I'm not sure even Bezos has money that would be needed to pull that off over, say, a 10 year horizon. MIT has almost a $20 billion endowment to give some idea of the sorts of money flows we're talking about here. To say nothing of the fact that they already have the faculty, physical plant, reputation, etc.
He is barely 10% of Jeff Bezoz. Not just a name on a building either. A whole new program.
Bezos would be dead long before that happens.
- Desired faculty: We'll triple your salary and hire your spouse too. Oh, and give you unprecedented freedom.
- Desired students: Free tuition and board and a great campus environment.
At the least you could jump-start a pretty darned interesting educational institution at least within a certain focus. But I'm not sure the money is realistic, at least at a scaled undergraduate level.
We’re talking graduates who become heads of governments, CEOs of unicorns, etc.
Now you could become “the Harvard of tech” a bit easier, but would Bezos settle for that alone?
The chances of people not knowing what MIT is or their reputation going down is very low. And that’s a big reason why people want to go there.
They have sort of become Billionaires playground.
(Although that might make sense given the mission.)
Hungarian PM recently kicked them out of Hungary, so it moved to Vienna.
[0] - https://www.ceu.edu/
As a nice bonus, why not turn it into a basketball powerhouse school too, something to help brand the school, like Duke or Stanford. Something MIT is missing.
By contrast, in Germany there are no universally notable private universities at all (save for some business schools).
Not to point out the obvious, but 2 of your examples never bothered to stay in undergrad university long enough to get a degree and they managed to succeed beyond all of their contemporaries.
Perhaps it says something about our current university system/paradigm that the current wealthy have chosen not to support this route. Or maybe it says more about the Gilded Age robber barons that they chose this route (in addition to the large inheritance fortunes they left).
Marc Andreessen's "Build Stuff" article[1] pointed at the lack of university capacity in the USA (I doubt this is accurate[2]), but leveling up the average university to be closer to the top tier universities would certainly help or at least justify the current cost of university.
[1] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-college-students-are-there-in...