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America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

economist.com

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Re: America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

#41

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

beryilma wrote: post #25
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #12

Restricting student loans for non stem degrees, student visas, and eliminating the non-profit status of higher ed institutions would go a long to reigning in the fat and excessiveness of tuition. Look at the salaries of college admins and board of trustees. Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. It's gone beyond ridiculous.

> Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. It's gone beyond ridiculous. Not really. There are software developers in Cambridge, MA making $300-$400K a year. The problem is not the salary of individual administrators, but the bloated number of them.

Those software developers actually provide value.

Re: America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

#42

Post by randomdata »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #33
randomdata wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would the market fit be for a university to buck the trend? Those who want to fund research will hire the researchers themselves in order to retain ownership and control. Those who want to learn for the sake of learning turn to the internet. There is no money to be made here. The money is in selling sports and status. The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the…

> The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. You're misrepresenting why people attend university. Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping. Not all of us are gifted. And not all upper class jobs can be filled by gifted people. Some of us just want a way to enter a class that they would otherwise have no way of entering. At least it…

> Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping

Yes, exactly. The gatekeeping and networking are facilitated by it being absurdly expensive hobby. Nobody wants to network with some random nobody from the slums. They want to connect with people who come from wealth. The bloat works to keep the risk high, pushing away those who aren't in the right class.

Re: America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

#43

Post by OkayPhysicist »

naasking wrote: post #38
tech_ken wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok sure I'm on board with it. Now convince the millions of students who vote with their wallets to stop attending these all-inclusive campuses.

If someone offered tuition at half the cost without those services, I bet plenty would vote for that with their wallets. Unfortunately, bureaucrats don't typically have that kind of courage.

These exist. They're community colleges or correspondence courses. The problem is that a university education is a luxury good: costing less makes it worth less, because more people have access to it. So all the students who are either gifted or well-connected go to the top tier universities, the slightly less so the second tier, allll the way down, until you reach your budget options. Since the value of the institution is largely dictated by the quality of the students it can attract, they end up offering a much worse value prospect than those more expensive institutions.

Re: America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

#44

Post by krosaen »

bitbangboom wrote: post #22
satellite2 wrote: post #17

This new, "it's because of liberals, groupthink, wokes" tone is really desacralizing the Economist image.

I disagree, I think this was a well researched and thorough accounting of a concerning trend. Sometimes the opinions and facts provided challenge our worldview, but provide additional information and viewpoints to give us a more complete picture.

Same - this is the kind of article that would have been easy to write in a lazy finger pointing way, but it's clear they took pains to justify their arguments and IMO didn't fall into the anti-work reactionary trap.

Re: America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

#45

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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