Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings
forbes.com
forbes.com
That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.
It's all so predictable.
Those lawyers put Penn State in the middle of the pack, even though every fact they thought they knew about Penn State’s law school was an illusion, because in their minds Penn State is a middle-of-the-pack brand. (Penn State does have a law school today, by the way.) —http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_...
As a current grad student here: it's a fantastic research university and a beautiful campus, but the undergraduate experience is terrible. Classes are giant and there's very little faculty/student interaction, because the focus of the faculty is, for better or for worse, not on undergraduate education. Yes, there are some incredible undergrads and some great opportunities for the 0.1% of them who really stand out, and of course the grad programs are great -- if you look at the US News grad program rankings, Berkeley is top 5 in almost every discipline -- but overall the undergrad program is ranked just about where it belongs.
I dont think it even has liberal arts major, heck they don't even have an undergrad business degree because they want you to actually pick something to major in.
Disclosure- I'm a Vandy Engineering School grad
Current CS undergrad at Berkeley. This is the main problem I have with Berkeley. You can interact with the faculty plenty (at least in my experience), especially when you get to your upper division classes. I don't really do that much anyway and care more about how well professor's lecture than anything else.
The problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get into the upper division classes you're interested in. There are just too many people and not enough space. My smallest class is 30 people, but it's a graduate level course, while my other two upper division CS classes have 400 people and 315 with 75 on the waitlist. I thought my classes would get smaller as the semesters went on, but that has not been the case.
The first time I saw videos of top tier freshman engineering, math, and comp sci courses, I was schocked. The problems were manageable, the pace was reasonable, the teachers were engaging..... and when I saw the course material and realized the tests were easier than the ones I took at my much lower ranked school, I realized I'd been had.
The worst, most socially irresponsible aspect of this practice of "funneling" and "trapping" your students into less desirable majors is that students who otherwise would have been engineers end up learning less useful things. Virginia Tech, and schools like it, are responsible for making the world have less engineers than it should.
Now, would we prefer a hard program where students would fail out instead of being stopped at the door? This also seems like a waste of resources, but it could work given the right technology (e.g. online courses).
That's not a specific university. That's engineering schools in general. "We'll throw you head-first into the ocean, and see if you survive. If you do, congratulations, you've learned to swim!"
1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.
2. Inadequate preparation. Similar classes in other departments have more prerequisites. I'm currently attending a machine learning class where more than half the class is probability-illiterate. Take a look at how the core math curriculum is taught (algebra, analysis)
3. Professors and graduate students are out of sync about the material and assignments, which leads to situations where nobody can answer your questions. See cs162, cs61c. I've heard similar rumors about 161.
4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.
5. Less treatment of the fundamentals. Our systems class no longer goes into any depth about malloc. They've replaced it with a section on map reduce. Similar situation with the operating systems class and I believe the security class.
6. The people who rise to the top are the people who were probably going to be successful anyway. That's just my experience/bias though.
I know of almost no university besides maybe MIT where there's no bias in the teaching and research towards certain fields and away from others. It's quite unfortunate, but you have to choose your educational institution based on what specialties you want to enter.
As someone who is an undergraduate TA (for computer science), this doesn't terrify me any more than overworked and underpaid graduate students grading assignments, or overworked research faculty who don't have any incentive to grade well. My anecdotal experience has been that it's generally the top 1-3% of undergrads who end up TAing or grading (in CS, at UVa; mileage elsewhere may vary), and those who do take it pretty seriously (here, at least, we're paid and it's a job). Most of the people I've TA'd with (and myself) take at least one graduate course and actually know the material better than most graduate students (since we've taken the course and universally done very well in it). UVa also rotates graduate TAs out after a year (to research or other things), whereas undergraduate TAs can stay on the same course for two or three years, which offers much more continuity for the professor and fewer TAs who are completely lost. I might be biased (see also: I get paid to do exactly what terrifies you), but I think that if the undergraduates aren't just unpaid volunteers, you get better results than using graduate students for the same things. Unpaid volunteers are much worse: you don't have to pay much, but paying someone for something makes it a job, which switches people's headspace from 'I can drop this' to 'This is my job, and I will do it well'.
At the undergraduate level, however, the rankings measure something different. Essentially, they measure: 1) the test scores and grades of the incoming freshman class; 2) the reputation of the undergraduate program; 3) how much money (directly or indirectly) the school spends on undergraduates. As a big state school, Berkeley can't measure up in these categories.
Incidentally, I'm not sure the USNWR rankings are totally senseless in what they measure. For undergrad, I went to a big state research university with very highly ranked graduate engineering programs. For law school, I went to a private university whose undergraduate program was ranked in the top 20. While the two situations weren't directly comparable, I have to say that there is something to what USNWR measures. The experience of being a student at the big state MRU was terrible. Enormous freshman weed out classes, professors and TA's that didn't speak English, outdated facilities, etc. The experience at the private university was wonderful. Very supportive administrators, great facilities, approachable professors, etc. My law department was about the same size as my undergraduate major school, yet I got more personal attention from professors in my first semester of law school than my entire time in engineering school.
That said, attempts to game the rankings creates terrible incentives for universities. Pretty much the whole ranking boils down to how much money you can spend. You can buy high SAT's by spending more on scholarships, you can buy smaller class sizes by spending more on professors, etc. That works fine for well-established private schools with enormous endowments, but not so much for state MRU's. Berkeley's $3 billion endowment supports 35,000 students. Duke's $7-8 billion endowment (depending on how you count) supports 15,000 students.
That said, we should also keep in mind what the USNWR rankings don't measure. Washington Monthly did a raking that had UCSD on top, and almost all large public research institutions did very well
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/intro...
The clever angle they took was to ask the question "what have you done for us lately?" USNWR is good for an undergrad asking "what can you do for me?" Washington Monthly figured that since all universities receive massive amounts of government funding, tax exempt endowments, and subsidy for tuition through federal loan guarantees, we should ask what they are contributing back. They placed an emphasis on social mobility (percentage of low income students), research (placing an emphasis on science and engineering), and social service.
It does get to the heart of the matter - the things that harm Berkeley in the USNWR ratings (large numbers of undergrads and a relatively low tuition in spite of decreasing support from the state) also enable Berkeley to enroll more low income students than the entire ivy league combined. Berkeley gets dinged for all the negative aspects of enrolling so many low income students relative to Harvard, but gets no credit.
Should it? It's all a matter of perspective - the problem is that because many other major publications don't consider rankings to be useful, USNWR is an almost unanswered voice pushing a ranking system that rewards small, wealthy, private undergraduate programs with relatively few low income students, and they're broadcasting it through a bullhorn into a quiet room.
When you're at the elementary school level, I understand that there are easily quantified skills that we believe all citizens should possess. Standardized tests seem reasonable for standardized knowledge.
Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? What is the thing being maximized, the thing that can be measured and tested and presumably improved? Creativity? Problem solving? Social adroitness? Rote knowledge? Do I dare say that it may be different for different people?
The notion that colleges could be measured along just a few axes correlating with a few particular purposes confuses me in a way that the elementary school debate does not. What am I missing?
Good question. The lack of a good answer certainly undermines the justification for colleges continued existence and pervasiveness.
Tangentially, I'd argue that any institution which can't even define it's goals should not receive any taxpayer dollars.
At the undergrad level, a particular class at one college is likely pretty similar to a class at another college. And aside from a few exceptional students, you're likely to be able to find whatever classes you're looking for at any college you care to attend. There are more competent people who can teach, and want to teach, intro to Shakespeare, or second-semester thermodynamics, or whatever, than there are teaching positions available.
Most of the benefit you get from choosing college A over college B comes from your interactions with your peers. Some of this is just people working together on class projects, but a lot of it is the pervasive culture of a place. At some schools, people will hang out and talk about political theory. At others, there's a culture of making art. Some places care more about sports. And at some schools there's a culture of building things. Actually, at most schools, all of these things happen to some extent, but you're more likely to encounter them at some places than at others.
And if that's the benefit of college, then it absolutely makes sense to say that the best colleges are the ones with the best students.
I'm sure Bill Gates has a more nuanced view on college ratings than this article suggests. Welcome to media.
We all know why the college rankings are the way they are. Frankly, no one cares who the "most improved" olympic athlete was in London. People generally want the unambiguity of an outright set of winners. Unambiguous winners may be ok in sports, but not in colleges, where the rankings have a big impact on education here in the US. Gates points out this flaw and argues instead for a "most improved student" metric.
Unfortunately, Gates' "solution" wouldn't really solve the problem either. What is the positive feedback loop for schools that rank highly on "produces the most improved students"? Would they receive extra government funding? Attract better students? I see neither of these as likely. Try again Mr. Gates.
If nothing else, colleges that are publicly known for effectiveness will have an easier time recruiting and retaining talented employees. They would presumably also be a magnet for results-driven philanthropists, either through direct donations or being somehow accredited for scholarships.
The quality of the graduates of a college depend on a number of factors but probably the two most important are the quality incoming students and the college's ability to improve their quality. In effect colleges perform two functions: sorting and educating.
Sorting people based on standardized testing, high school grades, essays, recommendations, interviews and application details is a useful service in itself. However most of the value and almost all of the cost of colleges comes from educating not sorting.
The current college rating "system" can't possibly separate these two sources of quality. Clearly it would be something useful to know as within any group of similarly ranked colleges there will be differences in the quality of the education component.
All else being equal prospective students would choose the school that offered a best education. More applicants would to schools that were better at their primary mission, educating their students. In turn these schools could be more selective.
Building such a system will not be easy but should be very valuable. Please continue working on this Mr Gates.
In other words, unless it shows what the student "gets" out of the experience when done, they are selling dreams.
A money-based measurement is also heavily canted toward the "old money" set and their legacy admissions to their alma maters.
Money isn't everything. And often it isn't even accurate at measuring how well a school equips students to make it on their own.
Medical school costs (and the insurance load to practice medicine) are already tipping the scales against GPs (low return on educational investment), and many medical students already know this. The real looming healthcare crises will be when the margins on being a general practioneer sinks below the educational investment cost, and all we are left with are specialists.
As far as investment return on the cost of college education goes, earnings would be a useful metric, especially when one has to finance the education with student loans that have fixed rates of repayment. It is the most universally applicable metric, and although it may not make everybody's world go around, it does keep things from coming to a grinding halt (apart from coercion and intimidation).
In any case, I doubt the college U.S. News college ranking is the largest signal to where most incoming freshman apply.
The effect on GPs you describe is already driving a health care crisis in the US. We may be left with an overhang of specialists who will surely argue their education should not become a "stranded asset."
If anything, I am most critical of a single ranking that is supposed to tell me how good something is crafted from within the community that is being ranked.
By putting a lot of pressure on measuring things, people use the data that is easy accessible/comparable. Consequently they put a lot of effort into constructing the argument why these factors are the most important ones. Getting unskewed data is incredibly hard, especially when there is so much to gain from subtly manipulating the data.
[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732353980457826...
Something is broken.
Students are notoriusly bad at rating their professors. This was proved with almost ideal control groups at the Air Force Academy [1] and again with groups of trained professionals/graduate students who learned first hand about the 'Dr. Fox Effect' [2]. Even teachers don't seem to like the teacher evaluations done by students [3].
Anecdotally, I can say that most students in my college classes either didn't show up on the survey days, or they walked out the door as soon as the surveys were being handed out. There's also no incentive to provide useful feedback from the student's perspective. If you're taking a survey about the class, it means the class is over and you'll probably never see that professor again, so why bother? I made an effort only because I felt an obligation to help future students, but I'm not sure there are many kids in college who share that feeling.
> Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll.
So you can have cheap and unreliable measurements, or you can have accurate but costly ones. Who's going to pay for the latter? The rating agencies? The schools? The students? Imagine the costs to enact such a program across all colleges in the U.S. alone -- some of the larger state schools easily have > 1,000 teaching faculty across a myriad of disciplines, and they're teaching increasingly diverse student bodies.
The thought of trying to implement a thorough, standardized program of that scale is mind boggling. And that's probably why we've been facing this dilemma of measuring teacher effectiveness since the day the first schools opened. Bill Gates is right that we have a serious problem, but it doesn't sound like he's any closer to a solution.
[1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_h...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_evaluation#Criticism_of_...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4559682
linking to an article that reported details of the methodology.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids...
I looked up other research on the matter for the reply I posted in that thread. From the article submitted then, this is one way this process has been validated:
"The responses did indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings. (By comparison, teachers who get a master’s degree—one of the few ways to earn a pay raise in most schools —delivered about one more month of learning per year than teachers without one.)
. . . .
"The survey did not ask Do you like your teacher? Is your teacher nice? This wasn’t a popularity contest. The survey mostly asked questions about what students saw, day in and day out.
"Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:
1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes."
Here is earlier reporting (10 December 2010) from the New York Times about the same issue:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html
Here is the website of Ronald Ferguson's research project at Harvard:
http://tripodproject.wpengine.com/about/our-team/
And here are some links about the project from the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness:
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/ncte/news/NCTE_Conference_Using_S...
Simply put, don't assume that what the Gates Foundation was investigating was the same kind of student opinion survey that I have filled out as a postsecondary student. (But note that I'm not so sure that those surveys are as bad or as useless as college faculty often claim they are.) There is a research base for the primary school pupil and secondary school student ratings used in the Gates Foundation studies, and I have every reason to believe those ratings would help school effectiveness--so much so that I use the same questions to invite my clients of my mathematics program to evaluate my teaching from that point of view.
Other comments in this thread are about the more general issue of college rankings as they currently exist. As a parent who has occasion to look at my children's college search process for four children, I really like the site College Results
http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=11...
which aggregates data that colleges are required by law to report to the federal government into user-friendly data look-ups that allow direct comparisons of similar colleges along many dimensions. For me as a parent, one of the most interesting data views is a view of "comparable colleges" for a college of interest, sorted under the Finance and Faculty tab for a ranking of colleges by instructional expenditures / FTE (full-time equivalent students). That comparison often reveals that even the "scholarships" (discounts from list price) that colleges offer still leave parents spending far more for their children's higher education than the college itself actually spends on educating students. That's a raw deal that more parents ought to know about. Colleges hire expensive consultants to learn how to confuse parents on the issue of value,
http://www.maguireassoc.com/services-challenges/optimize-net...
and parents have to defend themselves by looking up comparable data.
1) Kids between the ages of 5 and 13 often do treat their parents with respect.
2) Kids between the ages of 5 and 13 often do what their parents tell them to do.
3) Home school kids stay busy and don't waste time because the parent(s) aren't going to let the time go to 'waste'
4) Home schooled kids stay on subjects until they understand them and move on as soon as they do, this means little down time or 'review' for other students slowing them down.
5) Home schooled kids go through an correct all the mistakes and talk about how they made them in the first place and work on ways to avoid them in the future.
These all relate to the relationship the child has with their parent/teacher, the teacher is really invested in the child's success, and the precise pacing of subject introduction which is tailored to the student's ability to take in new concepts. The more you generalize more students per teacher, more teachers per student, the harder it is to keep these things optimized.
You are effectively providing the student (your child) with a full time, one-on-one tutor (you) which is significantly more effective (even with a less experienced teacher) than an instructor being asked to teach 20/30/40 children at one time.
A teacher in a full classroom of 30 students simply cannot pay attention to a child's advancement as precisely as a teacher working one-on-one.
Generally we found filling in for the 'good' part of school socializing wasn't a problem and missing out on the 'bad' part of school socializing was a benefit.
As soon as you get out of school you realize that adult life, for most people, is absolutely nothing like school. It's shocking just how much nicer adults are than children. The only social environment school really prepares you for is an institutionalized one (e.g., prison).
And don't even get me started on the distractions, by the time I was 13 or so I spent so much time worrying about girls (and other social stuff, but mostly girls) that learning was the last thing on my mind (I still made a 4.0 in high school, but I didn't actually learn much). I also don't think that those juvenile relationships prepared me in any way for actual adult relationships.
If the impression is home schooling is 1 kid sitting at home all day doing the same things they would do in a class room, you are not seeing what is going on around here. Groups of kids tackling problems and learning about history, math, communication, societies and communities, and all the material you'd normally get in school, just in chunkier bits with the opportunity to go deeper into the topic if you're interested and just pick up the required bits if you're not. Lots of reading, lots of field trips (the Sierras are fabulous for doing geology field trips), museums and such. Oh and lots and lots of reading.
I'd love to see some more rigorous work on this.
Homeschool kids are from a selected group where their parents are extremely dedicated
Look at public school kids who also come from the group of extremely dedicated parents
Tokenadult pointed out some things that MET figured out were highly correlated with effective teaching, he quoted them with : "Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:
My wife and I home schooled our kids through "8th" grade, they went to the local high school. I got to meet a number of kids being home schooled, and their parents. I recognized all five of the factors that the MET identified as being present in a home schooling situation. That is all.
What did you think I was saying?
It is already known that the most important factor in whether a kid learns or not is their home situation. These studies are on the effectiveness of schools assuming the home factor can't be changed easily by society.
Home schooling tends to just reinforce what is already true about the home environment, so there doesn't seem to be any new variable their. Of course, we could argue that schools can have adverse effects and that you are avoiding those by homeschooling, but since home life is so dominant, you'd expect kids to just regurjitate what they've learned at home anyways, at least until middle or high school where teenagers begin to break free.
"It is already known that the most important factor in whether a kid learns or not is their home situation."
My experience would support that hypothesis. Of all the kids I've known over my life those who had parents that were supportive of their educational goals did better than those whose parents were absent or destructive. That said though, it didn't change the fact that for kids who were otherwise nominal (reasonable support from parents, no major mental health issues) learned a lot (and I believe more) in their home school environment than they would have had they gone to public school.
[1] Issues ranged from teachers who were 'bad', district policies (no pocket knives allowed), school choice in their district (gang issues), and 'bad influences' (drug use or sexual experimentation).
In addition to student surveys and teacher evaluations teacher performance measured as "value added" in students test scores. These three components were combined into an overall "teacher effectiveness" measure. This was all done using what look like very good experimental practices (random assignment of students to teachers, multiple schools across the US...).
Although not perfect the "teacher effectiveness" measure was quite predictive of future "value added". So perhaps we are closer to a solution. Of course this study was in elementary and middle schools and it may be more difficult in colleges (students walking out on surveys).
The project's methodology and results are well documented in a number of reports[1] including a detailed research report for those literate in statistics[2].
[1] http://www.metproject.org/reports.php
[2] http://www.metproject.org/downloads/MET_Validating_Using_Ran...
Some departments of the university I'm studying at got around this problem by bribing the students with printing credits after filling out the lecture feedback surveys. Other more general surveys on the campus entered all respondents into a prize draw for vouchers or cash.
Sadly my department did nothing like that and as such our response rates are as abysmal as your experience describes.
I wonder whether this was because they weren't asked the right questions.
The Air Force survey [1] seemed to have more broad, abstract questions like "The instructor's effectiveness in facilitating my learning in the course was good/bad/etc." or "Value of questions and problems raised by instructor was good/bad/etc." or "Amount you learned in the course was lots/little/etc."
The Gates survey [2] seemed to have more fine-grained, specific questions like "My teacher knows when the class understands." and "My classmates behave the way the teacher wants them to." and "The comments I get help me know how to improve."
[1] http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/staiger/files/carre...
[2] http://www.metproject.org/downloads/Asking_Students_Practiti...
Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher because some data fit decided that you are a bad teacher? No way! Anyone who is willing to put in the energy and spend time with kids teaching them stuff should continue to do it. Metrics for self assessment YES, but metrics for firing teachers NO.
Also, the whole idea of "Value added" score has been called bullshit upon here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 --> http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-milli... . [ quote: ... the correlation is so low that I, and many others who have created similar graphs, concluded that this kind of measurement is far from ready to be used for high-stakes purposes like determining salaries and for laying off senior teachers who are below average on this metric. ]
The author basically says that there is no correlation of the "value added" metric that a teacher brings from year to year.
This lack of correlation is masked in the report "Measures of Effective Teaching" because "they averaged the predicted and actual scores in five percentile groups. In doing this, they mask a lot of the variability that happens" to make it look as if "value added" is a good stable metric.
The year to year correlation is 0.3. The correlation across percentile groups is much higher because that increases the sample size and thereby reduces statistical noise.
The conclusion we can draw here is that measuring the performance of a single teacher based on a single class will yield a very large confidence interval. That's not the same as "bullshit".
Are those scores available on a per undergrad-school basis?
While I don't have any links, I think that there are many studies showing that SAT/GRE type scores don't mean very much.
This mis-identification of language in Chrome happens to me probably once a day, though usually when looking at code.
I have a hard time reconciling the various useful things the Gates foundation seems to do with the tendency towards obnoxiousness that defines Microsoft.
We could posit a counter-point to that assumption. The counter-point being the posited, hypothetical idea that not all sectors of society think that "a rising tide lifts all boats". We could hypothesize that there are sectors of society who would be opposed to the working poor getting good educations.
But with such a non-mainstream contrarian hypothesis being posited, we'd have to think of a reason for this. Why would some sectors of society be opposed to this? Well, perhaps they would have a desire for a "reserve army of labor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). Perhaps if they had a company, like say Microsoft, their company would pay dividends. Part of the money the company doesn't reinvest in continuing costs or re-investment, would not go to wages, but stock holders. Of course, with the small amount of stock options most Microsoft employees have relative to their wages (not to mention permatemping), in game theory it would be better for these workers, if money was to go to their wage or the dividend, for the money to go the worker. Perhaps for large MSFT shareholders like Gates, it would be better for the money to go to the dividends, and not to wages.
How can you stop the workers from demanding higher wages? Perhaps having a reserve army of labor, an inflated unemployment rate etc. would help. Perhaps a worker knowing other people as skilled or almost as skilled as him are lining up to try to get work at MSFT to get the wages he is getting, and are being rejected in interviews, keeps him being happy with his wage.
Of course this is all just wild, non-mainstream, out there conjecture. Obviously the world's richest billionaires like Bill Gates only have feelings of benevolence, and aligned interests with the rest of us. You can see how lauded he is for his charity and such in the press.
How about if the person with 50k gave away 25k, but the billionaire gave away double that? Who is more generousness in that case?
It seems fairly plain to me that utility of what was given away is by far the most important factor in determining generosity.
For example, wasn't there just an article on HN within the past week about Norman Borlaug, whose agricultural techniques helped prevent hundreds of millions of people from starving? That doesn't seem less significant.
One can be a philanthropist without being a humanitarian by, for example, donating large amounts of money to creating wildlife refuges. Charitable giving, but not to humans.
From the other direction, people like Norman Borlaug who devote their careers to helping other people are excellent examples of people who are humanitarians without necessarily being philanthropists.
So saying Gates is the biggest philanthropist, I guess, is "objectively true" if you're being pedantic, and using philanthropist in the technical sense. My point was that it's not "objectively true" that he's the biggest benefactor of humanity, which is the more general-use term for "philanthropist."
An alternate reading could be that the statement is meant to be obviously opinion; one school of thought on writing is that it should be obvious which statements are fact and which are opinion by the very nature of the statement, and it is superfluous to preface them with phrases like "in my opinion".