91–100 of 149 posts
>Our European visitors are important to us. This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws. I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
A college where everybody eats free dinner and lunch (We pay 1/10 of the actual cost of the food), pays no tuition, can take student loans with really low interest rates (the amount they loan is not much and it's not same as student loan in Western countries where you take loans to pay for tuition fees rather here students take loan to buy stuff they need like laptops and such.) is supposed to result in prolific peop…
You're touching on a different problem, though one that emerges in international contexts. It's also evident at national levels where higher education is subsidised regionally, but employment is flexible at a national scale. Namely: regions which support low-cost education tend not to see its benefits if they also have a low-wage or low-tech economic base. Such states are simply subsidising brain drain to more afflue…
You touch an excellent point that I never factored in when looking at why western government organizations demand free education in poor developing countries through policy or loan measures.
People who are taking highly specialised degrees and training for free cannot work locally because there is no market.
You earn on reputation, interest, and skilled labour through these measures.
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> They are all Christians. Is it atypical for a Christian college to be attended by Christians? I toured their campus years ago with a friend that was looking at attending the school. I'm not sure why you would go there if you weren't a Christian.
I can't comment on what's "typical", but I have known people who went to a Christian college while being atheist themselves, purely on the basis of it having a good program for the degree they wanted.
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Using Harvard as an example, they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 [1]. In order to cover that, they would need to be having a consistent rate of return around 9% on their ($54 billion) endowment. That a fairly good estimate of the rate of return for the stock market over the past 25 years, so not unreasonable. Though, this ignores that most of the endowment consists of restricted funds that can only…
> they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 Isn’t that a crazy number? How much of it goes to a bloated bureaucracy?
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
If governments are going to fund anything, education and research should be number one, the returns are not even complex to realise and it removes, or at least competes well with and provides alternatives to the corrupting incentives of privately funded research.
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if…
Harvard is free for people not in the donor class, so I'm not sure what your are asking.
Also, universities do research and teaching, and the research costs money separate from teaching/tuition concerns.
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I see a lot of confusion about college endowments on HN. It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. Annual university budgets make use of the returns off of the endowment, often covering more than half of their expenses. Their long-term plan is to never tap into the principal. In fact, the hope is to increase the principal with new donations to expand the annual returns to fight agai…
> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is…
Tenure means a guaranteed job for life, and the university needs the money to guarantee it. The position exists even if there aren’t sufficient student or research grants to fund it.
Harvard is a bad example to use here because they are so massive. Other schools aren’t situated as well. And yea the endowments have taken a life of their own but tenure is a part of why they exist.
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That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/we…
I think for that to work you'd either need some sort of "perpetual students" who hang around a long time, or a reasonable percentage of people enrolling later in life than is typical (and possibly even enrolling as a student after earning a degree elsewhere).
We have this. They’re called grad students and if they hang around long enough we call them professors.
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> they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 Isn’t that a crazy number? How much of it goes to a bloated bureaucracy?
You are probably under-estimating the size of Harvard. That isn't to say that large organizations tend to be ... well large organizations, but Harvard is huge.