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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

There are colleges all over the world that will treat a donation of a dozen used computers with reverence. Meanwhile an admin at Yale was able to make $40M worth of fraudulent purchases for IT equipment at a single department and no one noticed for 8 years.

If you are looking for a single example to encapsulate America's broken higher education system, this is it.

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Yale is an elite, private institution, with a 40+ billion endowment. 40m is pocket change, relatively speaking. Most ivy league schools, have hardly anything to do with the problem of America's broken higher education in general. These elite schools have decades, and in some cases centuries, old legacy wealth. Being elite means they are highly selective, and if you are from someone with low or middle income that does indeed get selected to go there, chances are you are getting financial assistance from the endowment fund.

If this happened at a public institution, especially one part of a state system, it would be a much bigger scandal. While this is indeed scandalous, this is like crying over some rich people's pocket change, and not something that can be used as ammo against American universities on the aggregate. Again I am agreeing with your premise, American higher education on the whole is rife with waste, schemes, and scandals, but at least Yale and Harvard aren't vacuuming Stafford loans like Cal, Suny, or UOP.

>Most ivy league schools, have hardly anything to do with the problem of America's broken higher education in general.

If the elites couldn't send their children to Ivy League schools then I'm pretty sure America's broken higher education system would be fixed in no time.

The two problems are closely connected. If one were to audit the elite where I went, one would find many scandals like this, albeit more cleverly disguised and perhaps legal. Good questions to ask:

- How many state school faculty come from elites?

- Why do we structure education as an elitist competition for a brand stamp? Why should someone have an advantage in life by having "Yale" stamped on their CV?

Many countries have roughly equal funding to all school, and similar admissions standards. Universities are nice in that as a freshman, you can take a freshman course or a grad-level course. What's the upside of sorting kids by background and sending them to different universities?

All schools also strive to move up US News and be like Harvard/Yale. If Yale jumps off a bridge, the state schools WILL almost always follow. The impact of what happens at the elites is disproportional.

I know no intuition that wouldn't notice a lack of over 8000 tablets in inventory.

Where I work everything not written off will be checked bi-yearly. By an independent department.

Something is fishy.

Sounds like the story was that the tablets were given to external participants in studies without the expectation of being returned.

*public colleges in the U.S. with well known names. They fight for a few hundred dollars so students can have basic stem programs while the admins profiteer and waste funds left and right.

How does it encapsulate that? Can you explain? I see a story about a criminal.

Malcom Gladwell did a whole podcast series on this, season 2 of Revisionist History. But the idea is that some colleges like Yale, Harvard, Stanford have mega endowments that mean they can almost never lose money. Some rich people make huge multi million dollar donations just to make big headlines, but some small state college with a tiny endowment could have used that money across a much broader range of students.

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