Some thoughts on undergraduate expansion (2021)
math.columbia.edu
math.columbia.edu
> "You could say that it's an investment good, where you're investing in the future, or a consumption good, a four-year party. I think that most parents and students think of college as an insurance policy, this ever more expensive insurance so that students don't fall through the growing cracks in our society"
> "It's not an insurance policy at all. It's a crazy tournament. It's a zero-sum tournament. If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we're going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you're really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that's got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It's branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum."
For one, Stanford admissions are growing over time (even if admit rate is dropping) - https://ivyleagueprep.com/stanford-university-class-of-2024/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-...
Two, growing class size this much is not easy, as additional housing is required.
Three, part of the value proposition of elite schools is to be surrounded by smart ambitious people, and to have the prestige associates with the school to be more competitive in the future. Thiel is right this is partially bad, but realistically competition is inherently part of capitalism. The same is true of top tech companies - their value proposition is not just an absurd salary, but the prestige of working at eg Google and having that on your resume.
And fourth, Stanford offers a lot of online certificates, and has SCPD admissions. Georgia Tech has a whole online Masters degree that has had thousands if not tens of thousands of admits. The trend is for education to be more accessible, not less.
Granted, I'm biased as someone who went to Georgia Tech and Stanford. But this take by Thiel is entirely reductive, even if it does have a grain of truth to it. Much of life is zero sum (what is job hunting if not that) and while it's not ideal, it's silly to single out elite colleges as being bad for it.
With that said, I disagree that much of the world is a zero-sum game. You couldn't have innovation if that was the case.
Graduating class year 2024: 47498 applicants * 4% admit rate = ~1900 students admitted
Graduating class year 2017: 38828 applicants * 6% admit rate = ~2330 students admitted
Seems to be going in the wrong direction, but that's only two data points.
This complaint is about reaching one tenth the size of a good UC. (Berkeley: 41k, Davis: 35k, UCLA: 45k) Berkeley's student faculty ratio is 19:1, while the article is complaining about fluctuations between 7.1:1 and 7.5:1. Yes, larger facilities are needed to handle growth to UC size, but capping student population at 19th century levels even as population grows is its own kind of pathology.
There are other kinds of masters, like one attached to an extended bachelor’s (more classes, a project and/or do-op) or as a consolation prize for dropping out of a PhD program. These are more academic.
What population growth? The US college age population is flat, and the US grade school age population is dropping. US population growth is mostly old people living longer.[1]
New York City's population is declining. Not the whole metro area, just the city.
[1] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-a...
Looking at the linked graphs, looks like you're right over the last five-ish years and quite wrong over the last twenty years: the number of 15-20 year olds grew from 20M to 40M since 2000, and has only been flat for a few years.
55 to 64 year olds have increased dramatically over the past 20 years, due to baby boomers getting older. Like the parent comment said, though, the numbers of 15-24 year olds have been more or less flat over the last 40 years.
After having pushed so hard to bring instruction back to campus, Berkeley is asking a significant share of incoming freshman to do only online classes, which both increases the burden on faculty and removes some opportunities from those students. In 4 years will we see the graduation rate drop because class registration became more competitive and competent students cannot meet all their requirements? Will the distribution of majors change towards those that are most compatible with a hybrid, "I'm not sure whether I'll get a seat in the room" instruction?
Well, no, the reason there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley's class size is that a local activist group got a judge to say it was illegal for Berkeley to increase admissions.
The elitists would simply view that larger school as inferior.
They'd instantly become the Ivy League Safety School, which would deter many of the strongest future applicants from applying and deter many of their strong admits from choosing that school if they had multiple Ivy admittances.
I do think education differences would also occur. It's simply not possible to scale undergraduate lectures, recitation, labs, lecture and small group spaces, etc, by a factor of 7-20x and keep the same quality. (At a minimum, it's not possible to do so quickly/in a single step.)
* I think it's a majority of the source of their prestige, but not exclusive.
What is your understanding based on?
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That’s not “education” directly, but does suggest an extremely strong applicant pool selection effect is happening.
That is interesting and surprises me: Certainly many elite jobs are available to Harvard graduates that aren't available to most others. I wonder how that fact (AFAICT) reconciles with the claim about income.
> That’s not “education” directly
Agreed - the market doesn't reward education, but how well you serve their particular corporate needs. Education isn't vocational training, especially at better schools.
The OP says Columbia is growing rapidly, yet there has been no such reaction. Who are these "elitists"? Can you cite such a reaction?
This seems to hint at the idea that larger institutions are not as prestigious:
"A serious loss of prestige for French universities : in spite of their 12% of foreign students (rank 2 in Europe after UK) , the French universities no longer attract the best students from the whole world; the recent ranking made by the University of Shanghai of the 500 best universities of the world is awful for the French national pride (the best one ranks 65th) : the good teaching and research centers are too small, and the big universities are not good enough ;"
You made the claim, so it is up to you to prove it.
The article clearly objects to mindless growth. It talks about measuring growth and the effects of growth, over-filled classrooms, student stress, stretched resources and the strain on teaching staff.
But _nowhere_ do I see a single word on _why_ growth is desirable? It just doesn't get discussed. It's so baked into the assumptions behind the article that in fact the word "why" does not even appear in the text.
This is an ivy-league university falling into the tragic abyss of modern unreason - the reckless pathology of blind management.
Well no. In this case the universal answer fails.
> Yale Provost Ben Polak told the Washington Post, "At no point in the expansion did we think we'd do it to raise money for the university. This is about access."
That's Yale. But the the article properly deals with the simple tradeoff between "access" and quality at Columbia. It's a bad deal. Nobody benefits.
> President Bollinger in an interview says, "We have to have growth as the institution evolves."
No we do not! This a bare, unqualified, ideologically rooted and - in the current milieu - frankly insane statement.
Give me a single good reason why, when all factors considered growth leads to poorer student and staff experiences, we "have to have" it?
It's all money regardless of what they say.
Isn't that at the top of the article?
There was, strictly speaking, enough space. But the space was often low quality: dark, windowless hallways; dorm rooms in old high rises whose windows faced inner air shafts rather than the street. It was comical.
I always assumed it was just a New York problem. But as this article explains, the actual problem is investment in the campus. There would be absolutely no problem academically or culturally with Columbia expanding (doubling, tripling?) undergrad enrollment (obviously this assumes they could find enough new teachers--huge assumption of course). It's already so big you will go through your four years and never meet most of your classmates. What is there to lose?
I don't think Columbia is as worried about prestige or exclusivity as peer schools. What they're worried about is placing as many graduates as possible in high paying jobs in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. As they rightfully should be. I don't think this goal would be harmed by raising enrollment, if the commensurate investments were made.
All of that being said, I personally think the ideal college is something like a Deep Springs, with a low double digit enrollment of students living and learning together in the middle of nowhere and spending a large amount of their time not just studying but working. If I could wave a wand and dissolve the Ivy League and replace it with 1000 Deeps Springs scattered across the rural Northeast, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But universities are big businesses (someone once said "hedge funds with schools attached") so this will most likely never happen.
With an average tuition fees of 50k wtf are they doing? The world is moving on and this is no way to stay competitive in the education market.
Well I hope they manage to find it somewhere.