Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel • Hacker News Board

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#211

Post by ajross » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #208

ajross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Universities don't use their endowments like companies use assets either. Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested. University endowments are for income. If anything they under perform the returns that the broader market would use to assign a market cap. A public company with a total revenue /budget of Harvard's would have a market cap rather less than the endowment size. I'm still not understanding wha…

> "Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested." see, you did it again. assets are almost never "returned" anywhere. that's typically profits. you don't need an mba, but to have any credibility, you need to at least use these words reasonably. in a capital structure, endowments are most similar to (long-term) assets, not revenue, income, or market cap (which is a valuation). i'll leave it as an exercise to work ou…

Good grief, you know perfectly well I meant liquid assets, c.f. the number you cited for Apple. I'm not talking about factories and capital goods, and you know that. The term as you used it is ambiguous[1], but I engaged in exactly the frame you used on the assumption that you'd interpret it in good faith.

This kind of nitpickery isn't winning, it's just deflection. So deflect away. But you know perfectly well that Harvard University isn't 1/4 the size of Apple Computer.

[1] c.f. your own qualification when you had to say "(long term) assets"! Needless to say that Apple number you quoted wasn't an accounting of any kind of long term investment. It was cash!

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#212

Post by tomcat27 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #77

tomcat27 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US population increased 100 times since 1800s from 5M to 500M. Harvard enrollment increased 4 times since 1800s from 1.5K to 20K. The number of universities in the US did grew greatly during these 200 years, but the funding distribution to these universities is as skewed as the income inequality in the US. For instance, 60% of NIH funds go to The scholarly work at these elite universities might not appear deservi…

> Harvard enrollment increased 4 times since 1800s from 1.5K to 20K. ? You might mean 4 "doublings", but then the other number doesn't make sense. Or 14 times? > It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism. How do you double elite universities? It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough". Is WUSTL eli…

> You might mean 4 "doublings"

Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times.

> How do you double elite universities?

Doubling elite universities: I mean more outreach from let's say T10 with next 10-20. This doesn't happen.

Ex: Top 5 won't cite papers written by someone in the middle. It happens but that's quite rare.

Ex: Faculty recruitment does not propagates from bottom ranking institution to top ranking institution. It's super rare.

Ex: Research collaborations are very clubby.

> It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough".

Masses opinion doesn't count. Eliteness is determined by elite. Consider an elite club exists at the beginning. Every 5 years new members are inducted into the elite club. Their opinion matters way more than everyone's simply because they are elite.

In most departments, the state of the art is a qualitative measurement. Something is great because a bunch of great people think it's great. There isn't a better approach anyway. But that comes with bad biases.

Ex: It's rare to have a Supreme Court justice coming from outside Harvard and Yale.

Ex: Some departments in Harvard would never hire someone as faculty just because they aren't from Harvard, Yale or a couple of other places.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#213

Post by clairity » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #211

clairity wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested." see, you did it again. assets are almost never "returned" anywhere. that's typically profits. you don't need an mba, but to have any credibility, you need to at least use these words reasonably. in a capital structure, endowments are most similar to (long-term) assets, not revenue, income, or market cap (which is a valuation). i'll leave it as an exercise to work ou…

Good grief, you know perfectly well I meant liquid assets, c.f. the number you cited for Apple. I'm not talking about factories and capital goods, and you know that. The term as you used it is ambiguous[1], but I engaged in exactly the frame you used on the assumption that you'd interpret it in good faith. This kind of nitpickery isn't winning, it's just deflection. So deflect away. But you know perfectly well that H…

you keep making the same mistake. it's really easy to look up the balance sheet of apple online, and then look up the line item terms on investopedia (hint: "non-current assets"). luckily it's a random internet board and not a work meeting or something.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#214

Post by rgrieselhuber » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

ryan93 wrote: post #206

ryan93 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all endowment increases come from donors and stock market gains. Harvard spends 5+ percent of their endowment per year. It would be trivial if it was happening to prevent tuition going to endowments since tuition is a small fraction of spending at rich universities. Your weird obsession will do nothing to lower costs

Endowments increase the amount that can be spent. All universities spend all the tuition. Feel free to block tuition from going into endowments; doesn’t matter. https://thedailytexan.com/2019/03/08/ut-now-has-the-second-l... Here is interesting journalism

I'll take a look at the article. If tuition and tax money aren't going into endowments, then I don't really have a problem. To date, whenever I would bring this topic up, it was pretty quickly shut down, which always gets my spidey sense going. The problem of increasing tuition costs is a whole topic in its own right but I think we are also on the verge of bursting the education bubble in general, so that will have an impact.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#215

Post by dqpb » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

alecbz wrote: post #111

dqpb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Status is zero sum Nobody really likes status. Everybody likes competence. Competence increases the pie for everybody.

People definitely do seem to like status. I think part of it is that competence is much harder to check for than status. Status is inherently very "legible", which can make it useful even if it only kind of correlates with competence.

> competence is much harder to check for than status

Is it? I've always thought that competence is much harder to cheat than status. The way I see it, the whole point of status is to decouple authority from competence.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#216

Post by ryan93 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #214

ryan93 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Endowments increase the amount that can be spent. All universities spend all the tuition. Feel free to block tuition from going into endowments; doesn’t matter. https://thedailytexan.com/2019/03/08/ut-now-has-the-second-l... Here is interesting journalism

I'll take a look at the article. If tuition and tax money aren't going into endowments, then I don't really have a problem. To date, whenever I would bring this topic up, it was pretty quickly shut down, which always gets my spidey sense going. The problem of increasing tuition costs is a whole topic in its own right but I think we are also on the verge of bursting the education bubble in general, so that will have a…

Unfortunately physical metaphors about “bursting bubbles” don’t correspond to reality. People at 18 and their parents are scared to DEATH of failure. They WILL pay exorbitant tuition at any decent university

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#217

Post by blobbers » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #117

blobbers wrote: post #82

Not everyone in the USA needs to go to an elite, great or even good school. What they need is to be taught a little bit about the world, and they need to be taught the value of hard work. These days all the poor people just want to be fed dreams of "passive income" and have "fulfilling jobs". Most jobs = trading time for money. Harder the job, more money you get. So work hard at school, you get more money at your job…

What does your statement have anything to with private university endowment ? If you believe everyone should bootstrap themselves with no help from the state, then shouldn't your reasoning be equally applicable to federal funding given to elite private universities? If they wish to control number of sets to a minimal number despite significant rise in population, then they can get their own funding too. No need to ta…

Yes, endowed private universities should not be eligible for federal funding. It should be based on a per seat basis, with some scoring on how useful the seats generate employment with some lag to avoid flooding market with education seats that don't result in jobs (ie: what happened during the current student debt crisis where these colleges promising interesting jobs didn't deliver).

San Francisco's Academy of Art University is an example of incentives gone bad. Students can get debt, debt goes into pockets of university, student's get an education that is worth less than the debt.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#218

Post by 908B64B197 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

davidgay wrote: post #31

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... and in fact: www.epfl.ch (my undergraduate) "The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking" (from wikipedia) It is indeed ~free ($1600/year) for Swiss residents at least, and gets most of its funding from the Swiss government. I would take issue with the "overnight" bit though - the ranking above was not its ranking 30 years ago when I was there (and th…

What's interesting is that, from my experience, they are one of the few schools that don't recruit from the same "pool" of talent as everyone else.

If you want to do engineering in French, it's either score a spot at EPFL, or go to Polytechnique in Paris (very small) or all the way to Polytechnique in Montreal (8 hours flight time?).

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#219

Post by rgrieselhuber » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

ryan93 wrote: post #216

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a look at the article. If tuition and tax money aren't going into endowments, then I don't really have a problem. To date, whenever I would bring this topic up, it was pretty quickly shut down, which always gets my spidey sense going. The problem of increasing tuition costs is a whole topic in its own right but I think we are also on the verge of bursting the education bubble in general, so that will have a…

Unfortunately physical metaphors about “bursting bubbles” don’t correspond to reality. People at 18 and their parents are scared to DEATH of failure. They WILL pay exorbitant tuition at any decent university

> They WILL pay exorbitant tuition at any decent university

That may be true but I still think we're headed for a big correction in education long term, both economically and in terms of cultural influence.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#220

Post by flashgordon » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #28

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 student…

One thing I have always found wierd is why is the "personal essay" (which is easier to game by folks who have the right connections/support groups/etc) a criteria for getting into a college? It almost feels like this is very hard to establish a transparent bar for, no? Cant colleges does exploit this aspect to get around randomness?