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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.

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King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia started in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment [1].

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...

Because very few young people would list Saudi Arabia as place to visit, even for free.

Starting with a $10b endowmwnt in North America, Europe, or East Asia would probably create a noteworthy university inside 15 years.

Millions of people go to Saudi Arabia yearly...

60% of college students are women. Do you think most women would want to study abroad in Saudi Arabia? Teach? Do research? Seems like you'll have a hard time becoming a notable university when you've alienated the most numerous category of academics.

Do you mean for religious pilgrimage to Mecca? That’s different from what the OP is talking about.

Doing my part here and sharing my experience, as I have done before in this forum.

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.

It is quite the claim to be making without providing any details. I feel it does not strengthen your argument to do so.

A personal anecdote isn't an argument.

Thanks @burnished.

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.

A personal anecdote without evidence is barely a valid anecdote, specially with such extraordinary claims. This person is accusing the staff of the university of very serious crimes but no evidence or more details are provided. I would never ever set foot in KSA due to my own principles, so I have no interest in defending them, but strong accusations require strong evidence.

As others have stated, if Harvard university relocated to Saudi Arabia, i would expect it to become a low ranked university in 10-15 years. Harvard became world famous because it was one of the crown jewel university of the most powerful nation on earth for the last 80 years, take it away from this context and it would have been just a good but not special university.

That’s not that much to start a school from scratch. You need dozens of buildings and a huge amount of equipment to be competitive, and that’s without mentioning the fact that many academics don’t want to work in Saudi Arabia.

Until 2019, nobody could visit you if you taught or studied there. KAUST's problems aren't financial. https://nyti.ms/2mmdeMF

It's a very specific university that focus on STEM. So it lacks certain renown unless you worked intensively with their researchers.

Creating a top tier school would be hard with a large pile of money, but would be a lot easier if you started with a large pile of money and Harvard.

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.

Creating a top tier university with a big pile of money would be trivial. Match every grant dollar for dollar, provide lab space and free tuition for 30 years and you’d have the most productive faculty and the best students overnight. It would just cost 10s of billions.

... and in fact: www.epfl.ch (my undergraduate)

"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.

What's interesting is that, from my experience, they are one of the few schools that don't recruit from the same "pool" of talent as everyone else.

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?).

> 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.

It always starts with world class faculty, who want to be paid well, have all the equipment for their labs and want to be surrounded by other top class researchers. That will attract the brightest students, you know those that "want to work with professor X because they are doing excellent research on ....", this will attract tier 2 students those whose only goal is to "want to go to university XYZ" and this will have a cascade effect because those brightest students will go and create companies, do great research and will donate money back to their university and that causes exponential growth. If you had 10 billion, i do think you can create a world renowned institution in 10-20 years.

Precedent exists (minus students)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#F...

This is the internet, so I'm willing to let people wildly speculate in interesting ways.

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.

> The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem

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.

comparing endowment to market cap is misunderstanding basic finance and accounting. endowments are more directly (but not perfectly) comparable to (long-term) assets on the balance sheet. those are typically a small fraction of the market cap of a company. apple, for instance, has a $2.4T market cap, but it's non-current assets are $216B (of which $128B are investment assets).

How so? Universities don't use their endowments like companies use assets either. Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested. University endowments are for income. If anything they under perform the returns that the broader market would use to assign a market cap. A public company with a total revenue /budget of Harvard's would have a market cap rather less than the endowment size.

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.

> "Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested."

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.

Good grief, you know perfectly well I meant liquid assets, c.f. the number you cited for Apple. I'm not talking about factories and capital goods, and you know that. The term as you used it is ambiguous[1], but I engaged in exactly the frame you used on the assumption that you'd interpret it in good faith.

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!

you keep making the same mistake. it's really easy to look up the balance sheet of apple online, and then look up the line item terms on investopedia (hint: "non-current assets"). luckily it's a random internet board and not a work meeting or something.

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