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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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