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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

sahajsharda.substack.com

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#21

Post by hooloovoo_zoo »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #14
colechristensen wrote: post #3

The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.

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.

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.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#25

Post by xbar »

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players.

Here's the solution:

1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated

Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies.

The quality of the education will significantly exceed the average of any of these institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_for-profit_universitie...

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#26

Post by [deleted] »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #21
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#27

Post by derbOac »

colechristensen wrote: post #3

The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.

This is the internet, so I'm willing to let people wildly speculate in interesting ways.

Having said that, I don't know this is as impractical as some seem to think (or at least in the ways some are thinking -- there might be lawsuits about taxation but in terms of establishing a school, less so).

All you have to do is admit students with appealing enough characteristics (GPAs, GREs, whatever you can quantify) and you'll immediately establish a reputation out of the gate. Then you build out your faculty by giving out insane incentives to start, from undervalued individuals in the right places. There's enough oversupply in academics to fulfill this need.

I might be skeptical too except I've seen this work at the high school and college level. Brand new high schools established that immediately have super high test scores; it establishes a brand immediately. At least one university I know of had a windfall and was smart enough to vacuum up undervalued properties and start pulling in whole colleges and departments spontaneously by making remarkable offers to the right people. Their only problem was that they weren't a new university, so they had a sort of existing old reputation to overcome.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#28

Post by buzzy_hacker »

Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that students who are prepared enough to succeed in the school are entered into the lottery and those who are not sufficiently prepared are not entered.

Then the freshman class is simply selected by choosing the number of available spots by random from those who have passed the threshold and entered the lottery.

It seems this would take a lot of pressure off high school students since meeting this threshold would be a well-defined goal. Once they've met it, they can start investing their time, energy, and resources into other pursuits like passion projects or time with friends, which would be a boon to mental health.

And the admissions process is essentially random anyway for the elite colleges, assuming you have sufficiently high scores. Making it explicitly random would take some (perhaps undeserved) prestige, status, and exclusivity away from the degrees from these schools -- not that the schools aren't good, or that it isn't hard to get in, but that there are many more who are just as well qualified that do not as there are who do; a fact that would be more well-recognized in society if the lottery approach were adopted. Of course, the elite schools don't want their status (and therefore degree value) tarnished so we're unlikely to see this happen of their own accord.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#29

Post by jjeaff »

pcmoney wrote: post #19

Its not like those schools are demonstrably better its that those schools are exclusive and provide social connections to elite social classes. The whole point of them existing is to be exclusive more than it is to educate.

I don't think there is any proof that the elite connections make any difference on average.

The Dale and Krueger study in fact found evidence that there was no statistical difference in lifetime income for ivy league grads vs less elite schools when controlling for factors like sat scores. In fact, they compared people who were accepted but did not go to an ivy league vs those who did go.

Other subsequent studies by others have seemed to bear that out as well.

So I don't even think that too much can be made of the connections one might make at elite universities.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#30

Post by bushbaba »

50B is a crazy large endowment. Especially when you realize the top 10 engineering schools that are public universities have literally 1/10th or less the endowment.

Some of these public universities are higher ranked than Harvard for STEM degrees.

I have to assume additional funds has diminishing impact to university success. Similar to business, where over-capitalization does not ensure success where-as under-capitalization can be a root cause of failure.

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