The 'Veritas' About Harvard | Hacker News Reader

The 'Veritas' About Harvard

chronicle.com

32 pointsyarapavan50 comments

Vanity fair had a (IMO) much better article on Harvard's endowment drop at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/harvard2...

Also, from the Vanity Fair article note: Officially, the university charges $48,868 a year for undergraduate tuition, room, and board that’s an increase of 50 percent over the last 10 years but only a small number of students actually pays that much. Back in 2004, under growing pressure from Washington, and in response to outsiders who accused the school of (a) elitism and (b) hoarding its immense wealth, Larry Summers shook up the world of higher education by announcing that students whose parents earned $40,000 a year or less would be able to attend Harvard gratis. Two years later, that cutoff was increased to $60,000, a figure well above the median U.S. household income.

Still, Harvard pressed ahead in its efforts to ease the growing burden of tuition. In December 2007, declaring that excellence and opportunity must go hand in hand, the university’s new president, Drew Faust, made another stunning announcement: henceforth, students whose parents earn as much as $180,000 a year would pay no more than 10 percent of their family’s annual income in tuition fees.

Some interesting points, but this one:

"In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige."

Isn't the reason Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable precisely the limited supply of them?

Perhaps, but I think there is a much more practical and likely reason. It's just one that won't sell magazine articles: Harvard exists in a finite amount of space.

Anyone who lives in Cambridge knows that Harvard, like many other city-schools, has expanded to the absolute borders of its property lines. It literally has nowhere else to go, which is why it is now buying property across the Charles river in Boston across from HBS.

While it is always fun to criticize "elite schools" for their snobbery, I would suggest that the administration of Harvard actually had a rather simple decision: keep harvard at the scale and size that has proven successful for decades upon decades, or build a satellite campus to hold new students so it can grow it's size. A dimension of a university that is hard to put a dollar amount on is community. While building a satellite campus in Boston is possible, I think this would seriously damage the community, and thus output, of the school by dividing it into two disjoint locations.

Anyway.. I just think it's easy to get mad at a school like Harvard for not accepting more students. But in reality, they simply are a school built a long time ago for a certain amount of students and can't realistically grow much larger.

> Harvard exists in a finite amount of space.

True, but that's not the limiting factor in this time frame. From TFA:

"Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that's precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone."

Those are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from center to center, but Harvard (including Radcliffe) is already 2 miles from end to end. (I know, because I used to have to race from one to the other between classes at times.))

The real scandal with the Allston campus is that Harvard was buying it up piece by piece (most of it was admittedly pretty useless--train yards and trucking distribution points) using front corporations for the past 2-3 decades. Only recently did they come out and admit what they'd been doing.

I suppose there's some argument that they had to keep things quiet while buying, in order to discourage speculators from competing with them.

Now Allston is faced with a huge tax loss, though Harvard does voluntarily pay a property tax fee of $80M a year to Cambridge (or used to). That's probably a lot less than the commercial value of that land, but the non-commercial value of Harvard's central presence in Cambridge is hard to calculate.

Allston is a neighborhood of the City of Boston.

Yes, sorry, was just trying to differentiate it from general Boston.

Isn't the reason Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable precisely the limited supply of them?

Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable because Harvard does not have to maintain the polite fiction that all individuals are equally gifted. As a result, other institutions which have to maintain the polite fiction that all individuals are equally gifted, but which would prefer to get the ones more gifted than others, look for the Harvard label.

I'm confused. Institutions which prefer people educated at elite universities aren't "maintaining a polite fiction." They're using a proxy for quality. They'd admit as much. It's imperfect, and they'd admit that too, but I don't get the "anti-anti-meritocracy" sentiment here.

When firms go recruiting at elite universities, they say it's because they want the best of the best. They don't say "all individuals are equally gifted." This strikes me as a total misunderstanding of why educational credentials are valuable.

I agree with the original poster, though. The "clubbiness" of elite schools is part of what gives them value.

No it isn't - at least, not by your arguments here. Harvard could theoretically scale its operation to select more people of the same quality - or indeed to create more people of the same quality. No one thinks there are only 1600 people of a given age and a given quality in the world; Harvard could potentially put their imprimatur on more of them, in such a way that didn't damage the value of the imprimatur in people's minds. The author of this piece is asking, why don't they want to use their incredible resources to try?

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It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.

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You're spouting some fine bullshit. Suggesting that Harvard could expand to handle more students than it's handling now isn't "socialism". It's rational unless you're suggesting either that there aren't more brilliant students now than already go to Harvard, or that there aren't more brilliant professors now than already teach there. If both those are false, which they are, then Harvard can be seen as wasting its endowment on non-practical things rather than both growing and helping a larger community than it is now.

Scarcity doesn't add to the value of the degree. It multiplies it.

The more the degree is worth by itself, the more restricting it increases its value. There's a balance point somewhere in the middle.

Harvard sells exclusivity, period.

Yeah, it's kind of like saying "De Beers has so much money, why don't they use it to mine more diamonds so everyone can wear some." It is the scarcity that makes them valuable.

Despite having gotten a lot out of Harvard, I have not been whipping out my checkbook when they ask for alumni contributions, because it's hard to see how even an extra billion would make any students' lives better.

I guess but at the same time the article points out that due to some lesser qualified students getting entry because of ivy school reason, many very qualified students get left out.

And frankly, Harvard's rep would increase if they had more students achieve success. A larger class size could aid in that.

Those "lesser qualified" students still end up being pretty successful. Rich people tend to stay rich. Admitting rich kids isn't hurting their reputation, and most legacies I met at my school were fairly indistinguishable intellectually.

Yes and no -- there's a chicken-and-egg aspect.

If a Harvard education was useless -- and Harvard alums to a one all room-temperature iq, slackjawed mouthbreathers -- it wouldn't matter how scarce the degrees are, as they'd be valueless.

Once you assume a particular level of educational quality and/or other 'intrinsic' value (here 'intrinsic' == everything other than the pure scarcity premium) it is of course the case that ceteris paribus the degree becomes less valuable the more people have it.

But even then not entirely: if you cut the class size too small the consequent diminishment of the alumni network might take away more than the increased scarcity gave.

The "quality factor" of elite degrees has little to do with the education and a lot to do with who you can network with. Consequently, people think Harvard is the place to go not because they think Harvard grads have the prestige of being particularly smart (like say MIT grads have for CS or Julliard for music) but for being particularly well connected - something that everyone else has to bust their hump to build up happens by default at a place like this.

If the startup community (and well established, famous former startups like Google) only recruited from state polytech schools, those would be the hot schools to attend. Consequently, no-name schools like New Jersey Inst. of Tech would suddenly be full of startup minded people.

If those schools suddenly started charging $50k/yr for tuition and boarding (instead of the in-state tuition), that would select for people with money or access to money.

Make the admission process highly competitive and selective (GPA >3.8, SAT >1400 or parents donate a library wing).

Now NJIT is full of startup minded tech people with money. Add that up and you achieve the same thing that Harvard does for MBAs and Lawyers. Well connectedness with people who have the means to approach and achieve what they want.

There is no doubt that the education one receives at these places is also adequate to the task. Otherwise money, connections and no brains results in dumb ideas like Internet connected toasters and Flooz.com

The value of connections is definitely real.

My class ('76) was one year ahead of Gates ('77), and included Scott McNealy (Sun founder), Trip Hawkins (EA founder), Tim O'Reilly, John Quartermann (sp?), and others.

(Not that I knew any of them well. Gates I knew casually from chatting before/after class, and Trip was the roommate of a friend from San Diego.)

Exactly. What these schools are selling are exclusivity and access to the "club". Not the best education possible. This article shoots that right in the bullseye.

Were you personally able to profit from your connections?

Well, I had a shot at being #8 or so at Microsoft, primarily through another friend (Bob Greenberg, who was #6 or 7), but due to other circumstances, didn't take it seriously.

I worked on extending Chuck Geschke's (founder of Adobe's) PhD thesis from CMU while an undergrad, and got to know him that way. He called me in to talk about starting Adobe while he was still at Xerox PARC, but, again, circumstances made it impossible. (Had just started at another Stanford (Knuth TeX project) spin-off that ultimately went nowhere. At least I got to hang around Knuth.)

So, yes, in theory, those connections could have been useful. ;-)

What you're saying is not undoable; founding a modern-day Cooper Union but with a more entrepreneurial focus would be a more appropriate approach than trying to revamp NJIT.

You're underestimating the impact of combination: those startups will need CFOs and council and so forth and having attached professional schools with their own robust alumni network(s) helps.

Which is an interesting point. Most of the top schools are really only known prestige-wise for one or two kinds of majors (at least in my circles): MIT for engineering and CS; Harvard for Business and Law; Stanford for Engineering, CS and Computational Linguistics; Brown for Social Sciences and Education; Princeton for Math and Economics, etc. etc. etc.

Which is one reason why companies in those respective fields tend to recruit from those schools. I'd be highly surprised for example, if Baker & McKenzie spent a lot of time at the University of Virginia recruiting law students, but would fully expect Google to spend lots of time harassing M.I.T. students (but not Harvard students).

Also, not all of the top schools have representative schools of business or law. And for those schools that do, I'm curious how much interaction there is among the three student groups (technical, law, business).

In my experience: you typical undergrad will as an undergrad have pretty much nothing in the way of interaction with the professional schools, and your professional school students will later have not all that much interaction with the undergrads; a little more mixing between undergrads and graduate students, but not all that much.

What does happen is that later on substantial #s of your classmates while wind up having having gone back to the law school or the b-school or whatnot.

This means that even if you, personally, never met anyone at the b-school, you probably know people who went there later on, making most b-school people only a couple degrees of separation away from you.

This means the big alumni network is loosely connected, but is comparatively connected, and predictably so; it's also the case that probably someone in your undergraduate class went to Wharton (or whatever) and thus probably there's some chain-of-acquaintances connecting you to the class at Wharton some year, but it's a lot more tenuous than the intra-university network.

So, short version: not that much interaction @ the time of study; across time, the alumni bodies are much more cross-linked (though admittedly not to the same extent that you see inside the particular sub-schools).

Maybe, but shouldn't they be valuable because it's graduates have proven themselves to be well educated and well balanced people? Should education be valuable because there is so little of it?

Exactly... just like doctors should earn a lot of money because their skills save lives, not because professional associations conspire to limit the number of doctors.

The question is how well does quality education scale?

What I found most valuable during my university days was easy access to great professors. Many of my peers learned more outside the classroom in this way than during lectures.

With more students it becomes difficult to foster this type of one to one relationship. Those less motivated to get to know professors become more likely to fall by the wayside.

True but I think the article's point was that you could maintain the same professor-student ratio and increase class sizes if you have the billlions that Harvard had. Instead they spent the money to make them seem more prestigious.

You could maintain the same professor-student ratio, but you wouldn't be able to retain the same professors. If Harvard expanded, it would be less able to maintain the 'superstar professor'-professor ratio because other colleges would be able to court the professors away with offers of greater access to better facilities and bigger corner offices with better grad student support.

The value is a function of the scarcity of the degree, the quality of the professors and the amount of resources.

Since the last variable has gone up with no decrease in the scarcity there's more value for fewer people, proportionally, than there was a decade ago.

The author argues this just further raises the walls surrounding an already fortunate class (because, let's be honest, if you get into Harvard, you're either talented as hell or extraordinarily well-connected).

This is the same guy who thinks online education will replace traditional colleges:

http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?do...

Here's his ideal fantasy university -- funded by Bill Gates, with unlimited online enrollment:

http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?do...

Given that, more online education is likely his real message here: "Harvard can just expand online! Admit everyone who wants to go! It'll be great!"

I've done online education, correspondence courses, and live satellite courses. They don't compare in any way to college courses, let alone the college experience.

Love this: In early September, endowment officials announced that they had lost $10-billon, a 27-percent drop... Vanity Fair sent a reporter to Cambridge this year to assess the damage. She was told that the university had lowered thermostats by four degrees and would no longer be serving free coffee [because their endowment was "only" ~30 billion].

Btw, endowment or no endowment, Harvard is not in business to give away free degrees. Indeed 10 to 15 percent of students in any given class at Harvard are legacies, who pay a LOT for a Harvard undergrad degree, which, by the way, isn't worth as much as people think.. http://slate.com/id/2112215/

They pay as much as anybody going to a private school. Many state schools charge just as much for an out of stater. If you are gonna spend that much money, you might as well go to a great school if you can.

That article hinges entirely on defining success as reaching a c-level position at a fortune 100.

The diminishing presence of ivy leaguers could just as well indicate a shift in priorities by the kids or the fact that the really big money was in private hedge-funds for the better part of the last decade.

Did you read the article? That's precisely what it posits in the last couple of paragraphs.

You're absolutely right, I made a mistake. You were the one equating worth with a c-level position (which is unsubstantiated by the article) not the author.

My apologies for the confusion.

You've made another mistake: I wasn't the one who made the comment you responded to.

So your role in all this is to defend his erroneous point?

Funny how the author completely ignored a similar college in a similar situation. Yale is building two new residential colleges to add to its current twelve. Construction is underway already. Saying that elite universities purposely limit the number of students admitted is baseless. It's not as easy to expand as one might think. Furthermore, many of these universities do graduate level research that can be world changing. That's also another part of an university's mission, which the author also ignored. This is quite ironic given all the Nobels being handed out right now.

My brother in law just finished Harvard. He got excellent financial aid, as did most in his class. Why should not accepting more people equal stinginess? They have, yah know, standards...

Then they should simply lower the tuition cost and avoid the aid hassle.

They could still just select the top 1600 students a year (or whatever the figure is)...but that would dramatically change the makeup of those 1600.

I highly doubt anyone in that group of 1600 accepted doesn't go to Harvard out of need. Anyone have stats on this?

Because Harvard has the potential to expand out and encompass even more students while maintaining its level of quality. Unless you think no student rejected from Harvard is as valuable as the few it maintains?

I definitely think rejecting most people is very valuable.

I also question the value in expansion - for anyone.

I'd question the expansion if Harvard was bloated, but they're not. If anything they're serving an absurdly small group of people considering their size.

They can afford to expand without diluting their quality. They ought to. (Hell, it would be a good competitive measure along with everything else, and chip away at Princeton and Yale.)

  They can afford to expand without diluting their quality

I'm not so certain about this. Small often causes the quality.

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