Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
sahajsharda.substack.com
sahajsharda.substack.com
Then the freshman class is simply selected by choosing the number of available spots by random from those who have passed the threshold and entered the lottery.
It seems this would take a lot of pressure off high school students since meeting this threshold would be a well-defined goal. Once they've met it, they can start investing their time, energy, and resources into other pursuits like passion projects or time with friends, which would be a boon to mental health.
And the admissions process is essentially random anyway for the elite colleges, assuming you have sufficiently high scores. Making it explicitly random would take some (perhaps undeserved) prestige, status, and exclusivity away from the degrees from these schools -- not that the schools aren't good, or that it isn't hard to get in, but that there are many more who are just as well qualified that do not as there are who do; a fact that would be more well-recognized in society if the lottery approach were adopted. Of course, the elite schools don't want their status (and therefore degree value) tarnished so we're unlikely to see this happen of their own accord.
This is assuming it's a problem that can be solved with simple tweaks or "startup disruption". It's an issue very much related to conspicuous consumption as education >in the Ivy League/cohort< is now a luxury good. Modeling a "prestige" factor helps account for the inequality [0].
Freakonomics[1] just did an episode on this, but I've come across similar data points else where. It's a stamp of not just a good education, but a social credential implying you have connections or money.
You can already get an equivalent education to one you might get at Harvard (or better in some majors) at many other public/private universities. The key here is the human connections you form, which go on to pay dividends later given the point above.
MOOCs were the golden child a decade ago, and they are working to some extent, but they're not breaking the elite walled garden of premier higher education.
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29309
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...
yes, and that's basically the crux of the problem. this is a social coordination problem, not a problem of education.
the trivial solution is to "outlaw" this by blinding the prestige credentials of the candidate (so only show a standardized thing like 3 year applied maths bsc) and only ask about previous experience (2 years working as data scientist) or whatever
"obviously" people will try to game this (though other universities can then copy what comes out of the fancy universities)
of course this could quickly lead to the rise of alternative prestige/reputation networks, but if the whole job application is standardized (so it becomes very hard to identify the candidate) then at least it gives a chance for folks to get in the door.
then only the usual biases remain, and the usual unfair questions (and typically the most disadvantaged candidates have the least chance to know about what kind of questions are discriminatory, and even if they know most of the time they don't have the time/energy to do anything about it)
Harvard knows it's whole mystique is based on elitism and the artificial scarcity it creates by denying people admission.
If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures.
Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I very much doubt it.
[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e... [1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/how-will-i...
The only thing that doesn't scale is on campus life, and that's meaningless to the degree that college is nominally about.
With respect, I don't believe that approach could work for the combination of the type of material covered and the type of (often open-ended) questions and discussions that resulted from it.
One of the questions I recall being asked to solve for a first-year Physics tutorial was "estimate the change in the length of the Earth's day if all the vehicles in the UK were to swap to driving on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left"
The social connections and the culture are the key parts of elite colleges. I don’t think you can scale that with online classes.
Polytechnique has 32 university admissions compared to ~300 from the entrance exams.
Harvard is 1/3rd legacies!
If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect and the school from political hostilities. The legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?
It's not like the tests for admission can %100 accurately test the talents of the candidates anyway. Maybe diversity in admission is an actual strength that rest of the world lacks?
What makes an institution elite anyways? I would say its legacy(the alumni) and its future(the candidates). There might be a healthy balance of giving up some resources from the future to keep the connections with the past strong.
There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy.
> If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?
This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads.
Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded.
If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s.
That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management.
Britain had quite a lot of innovation during the 1800s when it coïncidentally also had one of the larger/est economies. As the economy of the US got larger and larger in the late-1800s / early-1900s all of a sudden it also coïncidentally started inventing a whole bunch more things.
How much of the innovation and technology from having the largest economy in the world and the most money/capital to throw around?
Certainly there needs to be a certain culture present, especially individualism and capitalism, but how much is 'brute size' a part of the equation?
And even before the 20th century, American scientific acumen was fairly well-regarded. Benjamin Franklin's reputation in Europe was partially based on his scientific achievements.
Europe's disdain for the Americas was almost always rooted in a belief of cultural superiority, not a belief that American science or engineering was weak.
Despite this the French system has a very low rate of social mobility, and the overwhelming majority of students in top colleges come from parents within the system.
Now there are good reasons for social background to be sticky (not the least because I don’t buy the tabula rasa theory that your genes account for nothing in your intellectual capacity, and for the part they don’t, well how your parent raised you should matter), but it is implausible that such concentration is a natural outcome (the respective size of elite vs non elites in the country is such that even with a high natural stickiness, you should still see half or at least a third of a top college generation coming from non elite families, I think France is in the <5% territory).
Having graduated decades ago and not living in France, I follow it from afar, but it looks like the government is actively trying to eliminate the meritocracy part of the system. By preventing elite high school from selecting their own students, by creating as many parallel admissions to colleges that were purely competitive exams based.
I have mixed feelings about it. One one side I like the idea of a cursus to be purely merit based. On the other side the obsession of the French with education is unhealthy, where your career at 50 is still determined by an exam you sit 30 years before, and this tendency of having clubs within clubs for the elite to run the country with little competence or accountability (again an exam you did when you were 20 doesn’t qualify you for everything) has lead to fuck ups after abuses after frauds. I would prefer a decentralised german style system where (from what I understand) what matters is the student, not the name of the college.
I think you nailed it.
There's a strong cultural component to doing well in school. Just the parent's perception of schooling matters a lot (is reading for fun something they do or encourage?). And of course there's a lot of implicit knowledge about test taking and what really matters at school. Someone who navigated these exams before will be a much better guide for sure.
> By preventing elite high school from selecting their own students, by creating as many parallel admissions to colleges that were purely competitive exams based.
How much of that is to increase racial diversity?
> On the other side the obsession of the French with education is unhealthy, where your career at 50 is still determined by an exam you sit 30 years before, and this tendency of having clubs within clubs for the elite to run the country with little competence or accountability
Maybe that's why there are so many French expats here in the Valley!
This is an argument against the article. But the article's plan could be used as a threat. Use it or lose it, expand your enrollment substantially or we'll tax your endorsement away.
"The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking" (from wikipedia)
It is indeed ~free ($1600/year) for Swiss residents at least, and gets most of its funding from the Swiss government.
I would take issue with the "overnight" bit though - the ranking above was not its ranking 30 years ago when I was there (and the EPFL took its current form in 1969). It also took a concerted effort to hire the right faculty, probably recruit the right graduate students, etc, etc.
If you want to do engineering in French, it's either score a spot at EPFL, or go to Polytechnique in Paris (very small) or all the way to Polytechnique in Montreal (8 hours flight time?).
There's plenty of other engineering schools in France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole#Engineering_...)
And, ironically, one of things the EPFL did to improve its quality is teach partially in English (see https://www.epfl.ch/education/studies/en/rules-and-procedure...). This makes it easier to recruit both students AND faculty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#F...
Having said that, I don't know this is as impractical as some seem to think (or at least in the ways some are thinking -- there might be lawsuits about taxation but in terms of establishing a school, less so).
All you have to do is admit students with appealing enough characteristics (GPAs, GREs, whatever you can quantify) and you'll immediately establish a reputation out of the gate. Then you build out your faculty by giving out insane incentives to start, from undervalued individuals in the right places. There's enough oversupply in academics to fulfill this need.
I might be skeptical too except I've seen this work at the high school and college level. Brand new high schools established that immediately have super high test scores; it establishes a brand immediately. At least one university I know of had a windfall and was smart enough to vacuum up undervalued properties and start pulling in whole colleges and departments spontaneously by making remarkable offers to the right people. Their only problem was that they weren't a new university, so they had a sort of existing old reputation to overcome.
Is it? The largest university endowment in the world is $50B. That's wouldn't even crack the top 100 US companies by market cap. If it's a problem, it's certainly not a big one.
I'm still not understanding what the problem with these endowments is, except that they represent money in the hands of people you personally dislike.
see, you did it again. assets are almost never "returned" anywhere. that's typically profits. you don't need an mba, but to have any credibility, you need to at least use these words reasonably.
in a capital structure, endowments are most similar to (long-term) assets, not revenue, income, or market cap (which is a valuation). i'll leave it as an exercise to work out why.
This kind of nitpickery isn't winning, it's just deflection. So deflect away. But you know perfectly well that Harvard University isn't 1/4 the size of Apple Computer.
[1] c.f. your own qualification when you had to say "(long term) assets"! Needless to say that Apple number you quoted wasn't an accounting of any kind of long term investment. It was cash!
As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage.
1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...
Starting with a $10b endowmwnt in North America, Europe, or East Asia would probably create a noteworthy university inside 15 years.
I was a PhD student there until my little daughter (4yo at the time) was kidnapped by academic staff and I had to negotiate our safe return to our home country. I still can't believe the kind of abuse we went through and it baffles me how the people that orchestrated this are still there, no consequences at all, after committing a very serious crime against me and my family.
I am writing everything down and plan to publish it on a website someday, because I want others to be aware of this, particularly young students like I was at the time.
To set things straight, I don't put the blame on this on the Saudi government or the Saudi people. From my experience, they are well-intended on this and wish to do good to themselves and others; some people I met there are my friends to this day. I honestly believe that not even Saudi authorities know in detail what is actually going on.
Anyway, with regards to this particular university, it is a place thriving with sociopaths, who are not from Saudi, and who run the place as if it was their own personal kingdom.
Due to the special circumstances of the university, the Saudi government has little involvement with it and it behaves like its own self-contained jurisdiction (even though is not). This created a situation where there is a remote, isolated place with almost unlimited money, run by people who have severe psychological issues and have free, unsupervised reign over what happens there and with an artificial hierarchy of directors/VPs/professors/students/workers that dictates your whole life (because that is basically your whole life while you are there). And then, what happened is that they inadvertently created a Stanford prison experiment of an unprecedented scale, and it is really as bad as you can imagine.
I cannot do much more other than telling my story. People are then free to reach their own conclusions. I wish I've read something like this before going there so that is part of the reason why I share it.
Wow straight up suggesting we steal money from private institutions to give to politicians to decide how to redistribute it. Totally insane.
The government prints $40 billion like it’s nothing. We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. Maybe we should let the few groups and people that managed to actually accumulate money through their own systems keep the money? Highly likely they will be more effective stewards of capital than the money printing politicians.
It's so weird to see memes like this persist. No, no we didn't.
Those spending bills were financed via deficit spending: they were loans. All spending bills are loans. The treasury department raises money by selling bonds. Every deficit dollar the government spends is a dollar it takes in from some investor somewhere who wanted to park money in US treasuries.
Now, that comes with interest obligations. It's not "free". If the money gets spent rapidly vs. being left in a money market fund or whatever, then it can be a Keynsian growth stimulus or an inflationary pressure (which are pretty much the same thing).
But it's not just printing money! That doesn't happen. People need to stop saying that. Why do people keep repeating something that is so clearly incorrect?
Surely some of the inflation and really low unemployment is due to QE. But it's likely a lot more of it is due to an economy growing while the active workforce is shrinking and external factors like the pandemic and war in Ukraine causing supply issues.
Which is... printing money, pretty much. The idea that it's some kind of moral failing or inherently irresponsible is silly, but the description isn't some crazy conspiracy theory.
* I'm sure some people have the idea that Jerome Powell is walking up to a printing press, turning a crank, and literally printing money. But I'm also pretty sure that no one here is under that misconception.
I'm a little less sure every time I read one of these threads.
1) Congress directly modified the Federal Reserve's charter to give money directly to private persons.
2) There were also payments directly from the US Treasury.
3) There were also things that involved that traditional convoluted process of the Treasury selling more bonds to the international market and pretending not to know that the Federal Reserve is the biggest buyer showing up.
In this case, because of 1), we really did create several trillion out of thin air, from the Federal Reserve itself. Basically Congress always could, but didn't. Easiest way to accumulate dollars is to scare people into believing dollars won't be relevant.
Although the US otherwise doesn't simply dilute the money supply with direct issuances for nothing, opting to primarily create dollars in exchange for corporate bonds and treasuries, there is a market tolerance and demand enough for dollars to support a much greater level of it. Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for anything.
People approximate this and think they can just reduce it to one government office when the truth is that literally every single participant in the economy is responsible. If I had to dumb it down I would say that the economy tries to be in balance. If the government appears to be doing one thing, it isn't alone, there are private companies and private individuals doing the complement.
In macro economy it is quite common to split an economy into two asymmetric entities. You, and the rest of the economy. If you earn, they spend, if they spend you earn.
If you borrow (known as printing in conspiracy theory jargon), they save (in aggregate), if they save, you borrow. Of course I am assuming that the balance is being maintained. If someone spends less than they earn, they save but if there is no net borrowing the balance is being disrupted. What happens then is deflation but that implies that the economy is in disequilibrium and must shake off some of the people earning more than they spend. It is kind of ironic that savers want deflation because in a perfect market they would get fired and wouldn't be allowed to work more which prevents them building up more savings.
In any case, I think I was incorrect about the nature of the direct lending program, here is the report from Congress about the CARES Act (the first pandemic relief bill) and how its "expanding the Fed’s traditional role beyond lender of last resort to the banking system and even beyond the more expansive role it took in the 2007-2009 financial crisis"
Its really not a simple "treasury does this, federal reserve does that"
These programs are not handouts, they are loans. The Fed did this in 2008 when they bought bonds and even stock in some big companies.
Overall, the Fed made a big profit on all of that when the bonds were paid back with interest and the stock was sold back in tranches over time as the market recovered.
Disagree that QE-2020 was a "one-time event." I can think back 13 years to 2009 and recall both monetary and fiscal stimulus to provide post-2008 relief.
Because they have a better understanding of it than you do.
The Fed buys government bonds, aka "Quantitative Easing." That is printing money. They started doing that after the 2007-8 recession, because just lowering the interest rate to zero wasn't doing enough (in their view). They didn't want to have negative interest rates like some countries did, so QE was the only choice.
You are missing the forest for the trees. You know all the details but none of the big picture.
QE is increasing the money supply. Since you object to the pejorative "printing money" we can stop using that phrase. It's increasing the money supply.
So are home mortgages. So is giving your brother $200 to make rent. So is buying the AR-15 you've been saving for. The money supply is elastic, and responds to economic activity. Harnessing that truth as an engine of growth is the fundamental insight of modern economics.[1]
The contention upthread was some ridiculous hyperbole about "minting dollars out of thin air", and the truth is that... nothing of the sort is happening. At all.
[1] And by extension, arguing against it piecewise like this is tantamount to demanding we all go back to a barter economy backed by hoarded treasure.
Unfortunately for you, "printing money" is a meme that sticks.
[1] Magical Monetary Thinking
That may be true but I still think we're headed for a big correction in education long term, both economically and in terms of cultural influence.
The moment the money enters the teachers account it is no longer taxpayer money. The same is the case for the university. How they spend the tuitions is entirely upto them.
The government borrowed money and increased its debts by trillions of dollars, that alone is insane enough, there is no need for some mythical "money printing" that is supposed to be the last straw that breaks the camels back.
I don’t think endowment funds make any significant difference. The best students don’t pick a college on the basis of the quality of their AV equipment, financing is available through other means. The quality of the education in the best colleges isn’t great either. Publishing academic papers doesn’t make a professor a good teacher. And the base curriculum is more or less the same everywhere anyway.
So prestige is what holds the whole thing together. And I think the elite universities are working hard at destroying their prestige, by alienating half of the population with their political militantism, and pushing ideology over merit in their grades and recruitment. I certainly lost any respect for those institutions myself, despite having graduated from some of them, and have a policy of disregarding university names when recruiting (I typically don’t trust any credential anyway on any other line of a CV).
So to me the solution is let nature and competition run their course.
If you tax Harvard’s endowment 80% from $50B to $10B, suddenly it’s spending 25% of its endowment per year, so its endowment would need to increase every year by 25% plus inflation — clearly impossible. (So it would have to cut spending, fire faculty + staff, and offer less financial aid to disadvantaged students.)
University endowments aren’t just shoved into a treasure chest somewhere. They are actively reinvested into the economy to generate a return. For example, universities are some of the best VC LPs. They’re actively funding innovation and economic growth.
The US has more top schools, perhaps, than other countries, but not as many seats, I think.
Remember, the constitution restrains the government exactly as much as it wants to be restrained.
No, the American population is unwilling to die for rights any longer, because we're all too comfortable... excepting a few people like the Bundy Ranch standoff situation.
I guarantee you if 50,000 rifle-toting Americans had shown up at the Capitol and told the Federal Government, "Anyone who votes for a federal drinking age of 21 answers to us. Permanently.", we wouldn't have a nationwide drinking age of 21. To an extent, this is even how the Founders expected unlawful conduct by lawmakers would be answered...
They didn't realize we'd become so prosperous that we're no longer willing to die and kill to preserve rights that should be states' rights or local municipality rights.
More's the pity, if you ask me.
- Endowment per student - bonus points for amassing the largest treasure per fewest students
- Selectivity - bonus points for excluding people before they come in which has no bearing on the effectiveness of the school itself in educating
Also a large percentage weight is given to academic peer ratings of the schools prestige which itself is a feedback loop of when US News used to reward pure selectivity (i.e. lowest acceptance ratio per applicants).
The endowment component of the score should be capped so as not to reward stockpiling.
An additional component of the score should be based on the student body of the school system (higher # of students in the school system is better) should also encourage the development of systems of universities (i.e. multiple campuses. The UC School System would rank much higher - as well as it could lead to the development of Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Cornell/Stanford/etc. School Systems.
Interesting piece - How to Game the College Rankings
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-...
The amazing thing is US News still pretends to publish news—-likely just to add legitimacy to the college ranking business.
I’d rather see these “elite” universities not expand. The world seems more interesting with universities like Baylor, Ohio State, Florida, Oregon, and Nebraska than it does with Harvard, MIT, and Stanford copy/pasted everywhere. There isn’t anything wrong with those schools, but given they don’t have expertise in growing maybe a stronger case can be made for the University of California system to take over Stanford, and Penn State should turn Penn into a branch of Penn State University, etc. Else it’s really hard for me to see how you’re (not you specifically) not just trying to advocate for expanding “elite” universities just for the brand name.
This "elite university" brand, is imho, totally overrated. Of course you build great social connections, but if you hire a software engineer you don't hire his connections. But I feel like employers try to derive their prestige from the prestige of the universities. This is different for positions with a social dimension, like entrepreneurs, where your social connections matter.
This, of course, does not say anything about whether the prestige of Harvard itself is justified. I actually think so, because in experience people always overrate the education part of a university. It's a small amount of the total operation, way more money goes into research. Harvard does a lot of world class research, it's very good at it, consistently. Also MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc. This needs recognition and care, it's something special. But just deriving your own prestige because you did your undergrad there is stupid I think.
Nobody would reject an offer from Stanford to go to University of Toronto. There are large midwestern public schools that would be a more appropriate equivalent here.
Taking the endowments from these leaches is a fantastic idea.
The Dale and Krueger study in fact found evidence that there was no statistical difference in lifetime income for ivy league grads vs less elite schools when controlling for factors like sat scores. In fact, they compared people who were accepted but did not go to an ivy league vs those who did go.
Other subsequent studies by others have seemed to bear that out as well.
So I don't even think that too much can be made of the connections one might make at elite universities.
Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities.
I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of suspicious that something's missing from those studies based on prima facie examples I've encountered several times in my life.
Really? Is there a list?
The university has to be in the top 50 of two or more of certain ranking lists (which are specified):
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/30/visa-schem...
It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating avocados.
3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.
Citation needed. I've seen London attract Europeans but a lot more people are trying to jump from London to the Bay Area than the opposite.
> compared to cultural wasteland of bay area.
Ironically, there are two prominent Bay Area schools listed in the special interest list from the UK government. [0]
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-potential-in...
Both Stanford and Berkley are isolated from areas they are located in and you have to be student to enjoy cultural life inside. You may visit art gallery/museum in Stanford (it's nice!) but that's pretty much it.
Besides, London has a cultural life that’s not comparable to Paris, Rome or Berlin or even Hamburg (try to get a pint or a coffee at 2AM) and it’s hell if you are not wealthy (try to explain what a section 21 eviction is to a French or a German).
For Google/FB difference in comp by location is there but not as dramatic as difference in average salary for all engineers per location may suggest.
To enjoy social life in Paris, Rome, Berlin or Hamburg you need to speak local language (otherwise you just meet the same expats) which is not problem in London as everyone speaks English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_th...
The networking is not a consideration for the majority of undergrads (aspiring politicians are the obvious exception). Prestige is definitely a factor. But that prestige isn't undeserved.
Global stature is virtually impossible to attain, an unrealistic goal. The world is actually a small place, and global stature is a reasonable goal within one's domain of interest. Both views are indisputably true. One tends to believe the view held by people around you. While it's easy to become a student at an elite school, it's hard to become a professor at an elite school. These are people who have "cracked the code" and naturally see the world as a small place in which one can excel. Most students will never "crack this code", but those in direct contact with good role models are more likely to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sc...
https://www.qf.org.qa/education/education-city
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_City
To consider: what is the yield per dollar of such experiments?
Side note: Education City might not be the best example because Qatar effectively has to pay 2x for employees and supplies/raw materials to compensate people for moving there, so right away all yields are halved.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/freakonomics-radio-goes...
Who would get to spend the $40B? How would it even be spent effectively? Wouldnt it just end up on an educational equivalent Bridge to Nowhere, Big Dig, or end up contributed to insider Union projects, or end up disappearing alltogether?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_nowhere#United_State...
https://nypost.com/2019/02/28/de-blasio-and-co-mayor-wife-ha...
https://nypost.com/2019/02/27/mccrays-thrive-initiative-on-t...
Then I transferred to a well-recognized research-centric university, and I have to say, those first-year undergrads had it rough in huge classes with grad students doing most of the teaching. On the other hand, this 'second tier' school had upper-level math and science classes and I got to work in actual research labs with tons of cutting-edge equipment. There were some questionable researchers for sure (borderline frauds), but the majority were top-notch and dedicated to doing good science.
When looking around for a grad school I actually went to one of the 'top elite schools' to check it out - the labs were absolute crap at the one I went to, and the overall snooty attitude was even worse (I don't think they even like grad students at those places, they're more for undergrads). I turned down that offer, and never regretted it.
China's technological boom isn't being fueled by British-style elite schools for the posh to rub elbows at. They're more along the lines of MIT and Caltech from what I understand:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2140178/new-...
America is going the way of Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th with its class divide, and the elite schools are a good example of why that's a bad idea. We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.
While this is a very crass over-generalization, I've found you really see this in the graduates. I've found Ivy league school graduates to be sort of... disconnected from reality? Like experts in education who clearly don't understand any of the on-the-ground realities of teaching (your lesson plan is beautifully structured, but we can't use it because it will make the students cry because they're 7). For the crowd here, imagine reading an academic paper about making improvements to production systems from someone who's clearly never been anywhere near one and is glossing over all the important fiddly details. It's like they've been told that they're smart and going to revolutionize their field and they can do so without ever having to get their hands dirty with more messy details.
To repeat my crass over-generalization, MIT and Caltech style schools seem to do a better job of instilling in students the understanding that if you want to change something you need to understand it, and to really understand it you need to spend time in trenches. I've been consistently more impressed with the results graduates from those schools get.
We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.
The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.
But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.
The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.
I don't generally feel like MIT students aren't particularly less or more well versed in theory than their peers at Harvard. However the approach taken to solving big problems feels very different. I think a story is illustrative.
One of the more impressive people from MIT I know got their degree in electrochemistry. After working in the industry for a while they realized the thing holding back their work was bad software. Their response was to abandon a super senior technical role, take a massive pay cut, and work as a junior software engineer. They worked their way up to senior at a FAANG then jumped back into batteries. They're running a very exciting startup solving some very interesting and important problems.
The attitude that allows for people to both identify that they need to do some pretty unglamorous work to achieve their goals and then do it is what feels more common out of MIT or Caltech.
My experience is that Ivy schools impose more of an attitude of "you're the leaders of society, start solving problems now!" whether or not the students really have the know-how to be proposing solutions.
The attitude problems are common enough that managers used to recruiting out of these schools learn strategies specifically for handling them. I've regularly heard comments like "So-and-so is great but they're very green and just... very MIT" and everyone knowingly nods their head and commiserates. Things usually get better once they've been out of school for 4-5 years (though also, some are great straight out of school).
Graduates with none of these problems generally get snapped up by super prestigious positions so you're less likely to interview or hire them if that's not you.
They also offer a fog of war. Rich dumb kids seem smart because they went to the same place where a lot of smart poors like us went; smart poors experience enough of the wealthy dumb's aura to project themselves as possibly rich (now or in the future). This requires a certain balance. If you let in too many "meritocrats" (smart poors) then the ultra-rich dumb kids who bring the networking opportunities are going to be overwhelmed and go somewhere else.
So, frankly, I don't think this reform would do much for undergraduate education. We already have a great number of schools that are just as good as, or better than, the Ivies... but that lack proximity to power and whose graduates get regular shitty jobs. (Actually, most of the smart poors who graduate from Ivies get regular shitty jobs too, but that's another topic.) Instead, I support it because it would improve the state of research. There are far too few professorships to go around. Whatever these massive endowments are doing, it's not funding a healthy academic job market, and we've become third-rate at everything, and soon China's going to drink our milkshake. Academia's dead and it's dead because it killed itself, and the first step toward reviving it is to fix this gross misallocation of resources.
Some of these public universities are higher ranked than Harvard for STEM degrees.
I have to assume additional funds has diminishing impact to university success. Similar to business, where over-capitalization does not ensure success where-as under-capitalization can be a root cause of failure.
But that belies the whole point of "elite" colleges. They are selling a Veblen good and dilution of the "elite" brand is not what the consumer of higher-ed wants. They are purchasing "elite" status.
Oh wait, in the USA taxing smoking products do to health risks.
But the devil in the details is that they are not similar but dissimilar.
Here's the solution:
1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated
Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies.
The quality of the education will significantly exceed the average of any of these institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_for-profit_universitie...
It seems crazy to me that we have thousands of new faculty members and PhDs begrudgingly spending time developing their own way of teaching material (instead of working on research which is what they actually want to do and are good at) when there are people who are clearly the best in the business at teaching their subject matter whose work we should be using instead.
Not that there isn't a place for research teaching, and students along that path, but like 99% of everyone else would get better results from a different academic culture.
It's real for sure though, this is HN after all. The general idea of free public universities based on an open curriculum is good, but whatever the OP is talking about is not going to get us there.
Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced career prospects in academia, since they are not doing any research.
By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse.
Feel free to point out a flaw here, but I don't think this plan will work. Basically, you'll end up doing a MOOC site, but those...already exist?
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[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-p...
What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.
Even more time is saved if we unbundled university education in general, so that the various paths and credentials are their own thing. IE, Intro to Poetry 101 isn't necessary for someone who's pursuing finance credentials.
How do you figure that?
Mean class size at a university is probably in the neighborhood of 30 students. Yes, there are some classes that have monster, 200+ class sizes, but this is also balanced out by senior- or grad-level classes that have a dozen students in them.
Students also take several classes, and on average, each instructor only teaches ~1 class a semester (especially consider research professors who may not teach a course every semester). So if students are taking ~5 courses a semester on average, I'd expect to see a ratio somewhere around 6:1, nothing even close to 50:1.
I went to University of Washington - if it matters.
You've slightly modernized correspondence school.
Just to start with what's missing, the vast majority of students need some degree of individualized attention to learn effectively.
A lot of people are less welcoming of OP's style now that the ranks of the very online are less exclusively populated with socially primitive young men jockeying with each other for imagined status, but aside from the ludicrous belief that he might have solved major problems by taking a half-assed crack at them, he's not wrong to be going big on this. Of course everything we come up with is going to be impractical bullshit. At best some posters with real and interesting knowledge will be rustled out of the bushes. But people should be thinking about the gap between what we actually need, what we actually have, and what could be done with the means at our disposal.
You could probably deploy most of the courseware using Netlify for a few grand per year. Then you could put that 50 billion in an endowment. I don’t really know how those work, but I’m guessing with a 5% return you’re making 2.5B/year giving you an extra 25k teachers at $100K each. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
Update: frontier [1] is faster and cheaper but my point stands.
These days all the poor people just want to be fed dreams of "passive income" and have "fulfilling jobs". Most jobs = trading time for money. Harder the job, more money you get. So work hard at school, you get more money at your job, maybe. Or you go into sales, marketing, leadership or business.
Why do people always try to blame someone else for their problem? The "elites". Because they don't realize that the only thing stopping them is the person they see in the mirror.
Let me tell you the situation of an old friend. He was working his ass off to put himself through college even with scholarships because his family was too poor to pay for anything and could not qualify for a loan. He worked one job taking care of his special needs brother, and another job at a brewery while getting his degree. Over the summer, he worked three jobs to cover the bills for college. After college he got a job, but still needed to take care of his brother along with his mom (who has no money, dad's out of the picture) - extra cash went to help his mom. His brother could not get a job because as soon as a special needs person has more than 2k in assets, they no longer qualify for help and the extra cash needed to shepherd him through the time with no help is not available. His mom doesn't really make money, but how many people are going to not take care of the single mom that raised them? _Everything_ is a struggle - constantly. It is exhausting for him, and I dare say that most humans would not match his grit. Passive income is a desperate hope to bridge the gaps.
There are plenty of dumbass florida-man people, but writing off poor people for lack of effort is not a useful generalization.
Your friend accomplished more for his effort. He supported his family and himself during education. Of course it was much harder. So did my father, had no resources from his parents, he had to sacrifice his studies to support his sister and finished university years later.
I don't think money is the real barrier, it's attitude towards learning. Some families are more "educational" even if they are not rich. The best academics do not come from the richest families, I think there is even a negative correlation between wealth and academic achievements at the top.
San Francisco's Academy of Art University is an example of incentives gone bad. Students can get debt, debt goes into pockets of university, student's get an education that is worth less than the debt.
I am skeptical that redistributing endowments will have a large net positive impact.
That said, I never attended an "elite" institution and have lamented that they are so revered in our society. The German system of higher education where schools are relatively inexpensive and similar in quality seems to incentivize students to attend in order to learn something whereas the main incentive for attending an elite institution is to open doors to high paying careers.
People think you can create value by creating more elite universities, but it's exactly the opposite. All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide. You can learn just as much at a non-elite university as an elite one.
Attending an elite university just means you were in the top x% of your age cohort. By definition, the top x% is not a group who's membership you can expand.
This would all be very well if you decided the top x% via an objective and reasonable standardized test.
However, the mention of standardized tests to determine top x% objectively usually sends people running for the hills [1], and they quickly start talking about "holistic criteria" for admission and how they benefit the students.
If the criteria are holistic, i.e. subjective anyway, I don't see why we can't have more elite universities. They will just be holistic along different dimensions.
To some degree you already see this in the Ivy League – Cornell is considered, broadly speaking, nerdier than Harvard. So just create 10 nerdier Cornells and 10 preppier Harvards, problem solved. It will just be harder to automatically rank people based on what school they went to. Good!
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[1] As someone who has seen and felt the downsides of a standardized testing regimen which objectively decides whether you go to a certain college or not, I sympathize with them.
I interpret OP's point to be more cynical:
The arbitrary selection is the point. Harvard, somehow, through a secret process, selects those who are likely to form a good portion of "the ruling class" for the next 3-4 decades.
Past performance so far indicates that they do a good job of it, so Harvard remains very prestigious.
Pretty simple really. Why wouldn't existing non-elite universities become elite university. I don't think there is some federal ban on creating elite universities.
Come to think of it University of Phoenix can be elite university as it offers world class online education to students who couldn't get admission elsewhere.
Elite institutions thus only need to get a good enough sample of extraordinary individuals to bolster their status, but they do not live necessarily to bring an exceptional education to those who deserve an exceptional education.
But my point is they only have to maintain their core product well enough to serve that purpose of letting the old money rub elbows with the actual best and brightest. Their goal isn’t to help the second, or third, or fourth best and brightest get the education they deserve.
As someone who hires my goal would be to use these elite college filters, but then try to filter out the legacy admits… but that would be unfair to the truly talented legacy admits. It would be disruptive if somehow that high quality education was scaled so anyone could access it, and that stamp of approval from being associated with the elite colleges was also scaled out and handed to only those that are actually exceptional. For the most part the current system serves the exceptional decently well. Where it fails is with the rest of the population. Given two people of equal 50th percentile exceptional abilities, the one that is really wealthy can buy their way into fake exceptionality and get treated by society as if they were actually smarter.
I just meant to argue against the naive view that we can expand eliteness by letting more people into Ivys, or make more Ivy schools.
I don't really see what the problem is here. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a signal recognized sounds like a bad thing to me.
Destroying such a signal sound like a benefit.
The number of universities in the US did grew greatly during these 200 years, but the funding distribution to these universities is as skewed as the income inequality in the US. For instance, 60% of NIH funds go to <10 institutes in the country.
The scholarly work at these elite universities might not appear deserving of the preferential treatment from the funding agencies, if we start poking around reproducibility crisis, data hacking etc.
It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.
?
You might mean 4 "doublings", but then the other number doesn't make sense. Or 14 times?
> It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.
How do you double elite universities? It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough". Is WUSTL elite? Is Cornell? Is UCLA?
Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times.
> How do you double elite universities?
Doubling elite universities: I mean more outreach from let's say T10 with next 10-20. This doesn't happen.
Ex: Top 5 won't cite papers written by someone in the middle. It happens but that's quite rare.
Ex: Faculty recruitment does not propagates from bottom ranking institution to top ranking institution. It's super rare.
Ex: Research collaborations are very clubby.
> It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough".
Masses opinion doesn't count. Eliteness is determined by elite. Consider an elite club exists at the beginning. Every 5 years new members are inducted into the elite club. Their opinion matters way more than everyone's simply because they are elite.
In most departments, the state of the art is a qualitative measurement. Something is great because a bunch of great people think it's great. There isn't a better approach anyway. But that comes with bad biases.
Ex: It's rare to have a Supreme Court justice coming from outside Harvard and Yale.
Ex: Some departments in Harvard would never hire someone as faculty just because they aren't from Harvard, Yale or a couple of other places.
But 20,000 / 1,500 is 13x.
Nobody really likes status. Everybody likes competence. Competence increases the pie for everybody.
I think part of it is that competence is much harder to check for than status. Status is inherently very "legible", which can make it useful even if it only kind of correlates with competence.
Is it? I've always thought that competence is much harder to cheat than status. The way I see it, the whole point of status is to decouple authority from competence.