Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law. Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities. I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of s…
> The UK just codified this into visa law. Really? Is there a list?
Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
131–140 of 237 posts
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#132>> For example, Harvard’s endowment is worth something around $50 Billion. If this year, you assessed a tax on Harvard for $40 Billion, you would leave Harvard with a $10 Billion dollar endowment, and enough money to endow four new Harvard caliber schools with $10 Billion dollars each. Who would get to spend the $40B? How would it even be spent effectively? Wouldnt it just end up on an educational equivalent Bridge t…
I think it would be wonderful if it ends like the Big Dig or the Webb Space Telescope. Drastically over budget and behind schedule, but fundamentally changing the field after it is finally done. The Big Dig made Boston so much better and would have been worth it even if was more overbudget than it already was.
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#133Tangential 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 student…
While I support lotteries in many different applications - I wonder if this may lead to people simply wasting years on trying to get in. Or alternatively, those qualified will keep applying until they get in.
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#134The 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.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia started in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment [1]. As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage. 1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...
It's a very specific university that focus on STEM. So it lacks certain renown unless you worked intensively with their researchers.
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#135The 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.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia started in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment [1]. As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage. 1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...
Doing my part here and sharing my experience, as I have done before in this forum.
I was a PhD student there until my little daughter (4yo at the time) was kidnapped by academic staff and I had to negotiate our safe return to our home country. I still can't believe the kind of abuse we went through and it baffles me how the people that orchestrated this are still there, no consequences at all, after committing a very serious crime against me and my family.
I am writing everything down and plan to publish it on a website someday, because I want others to be aware of this, particularly young students like I was at the time.
To set things straight, I don't put the blame on this on the Saudi government or the Saudi people. From my experience, they are well-intended on this and wish to do good to themselves and others; some people I met there are my friends to this day. I honestly believe that not even Saudi authorities know in detail what is actually going on.
Anyway, with regards to this particular university, it is a place thriving with sociopaths, who are not from Saudi, and who run the place as if it was their own personal kingdom.
Due to the special circumstances of the university, the Saudi government has little involvement with it and it behaves like its own self-contained jurisdiction (even though is not). This created a situation where there is a remote, isolated place with almost unlimited money, run by people who have severe psychological issues and have free, unsupervised reign over what happens there and with an artificial hierarchy of directors/VPs/professors/students/workers that dictates your whole life (because that is basically your whole life while you are there). And then, what happened is that they inadvertently created a Stanford prison experiment of an unprecedented scale, and it is really as bad as you can imagine.
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#136A joke I heard is that Big Endowment Universities are basically hedge fund masquerading as educational institutions for tax purposes.
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law. Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities. I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of s…
And yet the majority of jobs don't require that. Was their any indication that those jobs that do require an elite education actually pay better than those that don't?
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#138A large part of this discussion (also the comments) is neglecting that the major role of these institutions is as research institutions. Distributing that would help alleviate the publish and perish state of so much of academia. So many of the schools are cutting the number of actual professors, in part due to lack of funding.
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#139Tangential 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 student…
The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible r…
> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses
If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures.
Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I very much doubt it.
[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e... [1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/how-will-i...
Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
#140The situation as seen from France is odd. Here, elite STEM universities are free, and the very best ones even pay their students. Having legacy admissions would be unthinkable; it's the opposite of meritocracy. And you don't need to "socially" prepare since birth with all the right extra-curricular activities.