The moral bankruptcy of Ivy League America
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The American obsession with race in this specific case translates into focusing on a more superficial problem and polarizing the debate, as opposed to finding an easier solution to the bigger problem of ALDC admissions (namely: ban them), which I assume would be less controversial.
Bribery of congressmen (a.k.a lobbying) or university deans (ALDC admissions) are forms of legal corruptions. You might argue that a private institution can do whatever it wants, and I agree. But in this case it should get 0 tax benefits/subsidies, esp. when they have $B+ endowments.
The rich don't need diplomas, if they can just take over the family's business. In fact they don't even need a job at all. But they may need a few smart people for important positions in said family's business. In an institution composed of both rich and smart people, connections naturally form, so the rich get the smart people they need, and the smart get a good job.
Separate them what will happen is that your future boss will not be as well educated, and will probably hire some of his rich friends instead of his smart friends. And the smart will have a harder time finding the jobs they deserve.
Do I have a right to say "Only my friends can join my debate club"? Do I have a right to say "Children of past participants are always welcome here"? Do I have a right to say "Max occupancy: 1800"?
Most people would say "Yes" to these things.
What if I hire some marketing experts, and eventually my debate club has a really good "brand" and all sorts of companies want to hire participants at enormous salaries for highly influential positions? Once my debate club is a gateway to money, power and influence, do I still have the right to admit who I want? Or does my branding success somehow create an obligation to make admissions meritocratic, rather than some other kind of -cratic (e.g. autocratic, "My debate club, I decide, and that's the end of it," or aristocratic, "Children of members have an easy path to membership", or plutocratic, "Money talks")?
At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?
What exactly creates a moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that trumps "My debate club, my rules," and necessarily places corresponding limits on Harvard's freedom of association?
When your debate club begins taking in federal funding, then you can compare it to Harvard.
One is that all students go there for a quality education. Since the early 19th century if not the very beginnings, faculty have had to acknowledge that a primary function of these institutions is to serve as a holding place for the (often not very bright) children of the rich until they are old enough to get married and do other grown-up things.
Another is that the quality of instruction there is atypically high. Lend an ear to complaints about Ivy League grade inflation and you will realize this is bollocks. While Ivy League graduates do tend to have higher career trajectories, this is attributed to admissions being selective for highly driven people, and for networking opportunities with similar others.
Finally, he assumes the benefits of Ivy League education could be scaled up. For example, suppose Harvard College increased undergrad enrollment from 7K to 40K. What would happen to the networking effect?
This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.
Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments. Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.
tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.
1) Students have to live somewhere. More students living off campus will drive up apartment rent in the area. You can build dorms to increase the housing supply for students and reduce the demand for off campus apartments, but that requires large building projects.
2) Similarly, increasing the student population means more class rooms, teaching labs, and possibly larger lecture halls for the most popular classes (e.g., calculus courses taken by every STEM student). That means more building projects.
3) You need to hire more faculty. While you might be able to get away with adjuncts or postdocs teaching a few things, people that want to go to these schools want to have the opportunity to interact and learn from the top experts in their field, i.e. faculty professors. Expanding the faculty is not an easy thing to do overnight. Even if the will is there to grow, departments are highly selective when it comes to hiring. The person you are hiring is joining the university potentially for life. Moreover, if you choose wrong and deny them tenure, the result blows back on the department. Hot tenure track candidates get many offers, and they don’t want to risk moving somewhere and building a lab for 5-7 years only to be denied tenure and having to move their life elsewhere (they’ve already done that quite a bit throughout their student and postdoc days). Moreover, those candidates need to be courted with resources like spaces for their research lab, so, again, more construction is needed.
4) Where do you build all these buildings? Many of the Ivies are located in major cities (e.g., Boston, New York, Philadelphia). There isn’t a lot of open space to build big new buildings. Moreover, while they often own buildings adjacent to campus and lease them to businesses and tenants, decimating a city block to displace these people in favor of building more lectures or residential halls is a bad look politically and a hard sell to local governments. These schools already draw complaints from the locals about their expansion gentrifying areas and driving locals out through the resulting rise in rents and taxes. Even suburban Princeton has been rapidly consuming their green spaces lately to build new facilities. An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.
Just a technical note: by HN guidelines, the submission URL must point to the original source but I also linked to a mirror that bypasses the paywall in a parallel comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895
(Perhaps I should've labeled it "paywall bypass" instead of just "mirror" but I can't edit that post anymore.)
Also, it could be available to English-speaking people worldwide, including places like Africa, where wider availability high-quality education could make a huge difference - wouldn't that be a win for anyone who is concerned about social justice?
Is it really unappealing to students though? Or is it just unappealing to abstracted others (like some alumni/profs/admins) that are much more interested in university "prestige" than actual education and education-opportunities?
Do you isolate some departments there? That has the advantage of students not having to take the shuttle back and forth for random classes since students in those departments will take most of their classes there, but that makes it a pain for them to take electives on the main campus and separates. If they move into off-campus housing, it’s probably going to be close to the second campus and can isolate them from the broader student community. It also makes it a bigger pain for students in other departments to take electives there. Do you just put dorms there? That removes the issue of going back and forth for classes, but separates them from the main campus life.
Some people may not care about the commute, true, but for a lot of people it will be unappealing. I’ve known graduate students who worked in research-only buildings separate from the main campus and they typically found the situation more annoying than they originally expected. I would expect undergraduates, who tend to care even more about being plugged into the school social environment, would be even more bothered by it. The prestige of these schools is high enough that plenty of students will enroll and deal with it, but their top candidates tend to decide between multiple high-end institutions and these quality of life things can play a big role in their choice.
Weighing this against the logistics of paying down student debt for a lifetime, I imagine lots of students would prefer a 20 minute shuttle ride for a few years if they can cut tuition in half by building outside of historical campus, or outside of the city center.
As for tax treatment, why not just google it yourself instead of assuming? In the US, a tax was added under the Trump administration on revenue from university endowments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_tax#Federal_changes_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895
It's a soft paywall anyway, there are multiple other ways to access the content.
I can't speak for the collective "HN" but the interest in this topic might have something to do with the fact that a lot of people here believe anything but meritocracy is suboptimal and ultimately self-defeating in the longer run.
I decided to share this also because, no matter the topic, it's been a while since I've read anything so succinctly put, and getting to the gist of the matter, gloves off.