Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

I could see a good argument for making an ivy league school with an enrollment of 100k, simply to break the ivy league elitist bullshit.

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.

View on HN

Yes _and_ ... the same issues also apply to the UCs. E.g. there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley increasing the size of its incoming class by a third. But my understanding is there was never a plan to increase faculty by the same proportion, or a plan to create 1/3 more classrooms.

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?

> the same issues also apply to the UCs. E.g. there's been a lot of recent discussion about Berkeley increasing the size of its incoming class by a third.

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.

And to be really clear, activist == nimbys, not actual activists.

Why are NIMBYs not activists? I've always found it odd that the same people whose property is taxed are told they shouldn't have a say in what's built with the money and are wrong for protesting such projects.

The fact that there are local and state political forces involved making arguments you may disagree with does not mean these issues (student:faculty ratios, classroom space, etc) don't apply.

It makes them irrelevant. There's only one issue at play with Berkeley's expansion: they're supposed to file an environmental impact report. Student:faculty ratios and classroom space aren't part of the discussion.

even as population grows

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...

New York City grew by 700,000 people between 2010 and 2020, while the metro area grew by 1.15 million. I’m not sure where you’re getting the declining figures from?

Edit: I misread the graph, as the reply points out.

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.

I think you may have accidentally clicked on the timeseries for 55 to 64 year olds, which is understandable because the colors for the two are really close.

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.

I stand corrected!

"I could see a good argument for making an ivy league school with an enrollment of 100k, simply to break the ivy league elitist bullshit."

The elitists would simply view that larger school as inferior.

I think they'd not be entirely incorrect in that view. No school will grow 7x-20x and maintain the same standards in admissions, in education, or in alumni achievement per-capita.

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.

Is the quality of education really better? My understanding is it's all just selection or an IQ test - strongest apply, strongest get in, places hire them based on the prestige of the name.

Even if that is the sole and exclusive source of the prestige*, I think that effect would persist among the 7 Ivy League schools who didn't turn themself into a safety school, because the "strongest get in" effect would be strongest at those 7.

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.

As someone who went to a state school for undergrad and an ivy for phd (and took some undergrad cs classes there), and I can say that yes, the undergraduate classes are definitely much harder at ivy league schools, at least in stem.

> Is the quality of education really better? My understanding is it's all just selection or an IQ test - strongest apply, strongest get in, places hire them based on the prestige of the name.

What is your understanding based on?

It’s been studied.

> 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.

> "... 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 ..."

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 elitists would simply view that larger school as inferior.

The OP says Columbia is growing rapidly, yet there has been no such reaction. Who are these "elitists"? Can you cite such a reaction?

Growing rapidly and still no where near a big school. The article even states that with the growth it's not that much bigger than the smallest ivy league as viewed through the context of comparing all schools.

OK, but where is evidence of the reaction you claim happens or would happen?

Do you have any evidence of prestige not dropping with increase in size or lower selectability? Can you name a large Ivy League?

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 ;"

http://www.understandfrance.org/France/Education.html

> Do you have any evidence of prestige not dropping with increase in size or lower selectability?

You made the claim, so it is up to you to prove it.

Showing up in person is its own kind of pathology. If they offer masters online, why not undergrad? There's a lot of threads here with amazingly tone deaf people who are just "go to school" or "get a masters" when the gating factor is magicing up 4 years of potentially repeat credits to get your undergrad after already being a working professional.

That kind of masters is just credentialism, like the corporate certs people pay for. They are a good moneymaker for the universities.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com