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The Misuses of the University

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Re: The Misuses of the University

#111

Post by raddan »

impendia wrote: post #25
DesaiAshu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very he…

I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006. I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off. But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

It’s an open secret that “expensive ancillaries” like polo, crew, equestrian teams, etc, are a sneaky way to have supposedly blind admissions while making sure that the incoming class still contains just the right number of students who can pay full tuition. Smart people are not all that rare.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#112

Post by raddan »

tempacct2cmmnt wrote: post #89
rd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true! I hadn't thought about it like this to be totally honest. It's hard to point fingers at old institutions, especially given they're mostly located in prime real estate locations across the country (Cambridge, Palo Alto, etc.), and it's not really their fault that they need land to operate.

Many of them are prime real estate locations in large part -because- the old institutions are there.

Yeah, this is a silly argument. Go walk around the neighborhoods near MIT and you’ll see company after company that intentionally positioned themselves in proximity to the campus. Many of those companies are also MIT spinoffs.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#113

Post by bpt3 »

nephihaha wrote: post #106
bpt3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they not accept money to do something they are interested in doing? What is the downside to the school of a nicer student union or a public policy/international relations campus in the nation's capital?

They are interested in doing some of these things precisely because they are being paid to.

They're interested in a new student union because they're being paid to? What does that mean?

Re: The Misuses of the University

#114

Post by questionableans »

fsckboy wrote: post #93
141205 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. I…

> Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high. lower t…

I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but neither do you. Students at universities ranked similarly to Michigan absolutely do spend a significant amount of time studying on the weekends, especially if they’re not business majors. And MIT has parties and pranks, too.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#115

Post by matheusmoreira »

noelwelsh wrote: post #14

When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students. It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.

Gotta soak up as much of that sweet student loan money as possible.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#116

Post by samrus »

bpt3 wrote: post #103
WalterBright wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article explains it reasonably well.

Are you talking about the rambling tirade of a bitter professor with an immense distrust of his employer that verges on paranoia, or some other article linked elsewhere in one of these threads? In case it wasn't clear, I don't agree that the original article explains it well.

> In case it wasn't clear

I like the delusions of subtlety

Re: The Misuses of the University

#117

Post by nickwrb »

DesaiAshu wrote: post #12
rd wrote: post #9

I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university. There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...

Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very he…

I can’t comment on the Chinese research universities you mention, but the comparison with IITs is bizarre. They are notoriously extremely selective, and all set in lush, spacious, grounds. I don’t think they back up your point at at all.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#118

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #18
vlz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”'

I was working in digital libraries circa 2005 and we had that bubble pop when people understood the business model was "get a $100,000 grant and spend $20,000 a year maintaining the product in perpetuity." I tried to convince management that if these were part of a system designed for maintenance in mind we could get that $20,000 to $500-$2000 a year, but it seemed the institutional response to this situation was "le…

[dead]

Re: The Misuses of the University

#119

Post by fc417fc802 »

DesaiAshu wrote: post #91
141205 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure" I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.

It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-... https://www.stlouisfed.org/op…

Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.

Re: The Misuses of the University

#120

Post by pu_pe »

Title could be "The Museums of the University". This is not only a US phenomenon, some European universities are essentially becoming museums if you look at their budgets and administrative priorities.
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