Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm • Hacker News Board

Re: Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm

#11

Post by eli_gottlieb » Tue, Apr 23, 2013, 2:16 PM UTC

eigenvector wrote: post #10

spindritf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!" My comment boils down to the same point as the blog post: it's very diffiucult to show benefits of any educational intervention, especially long-term benefits. Corollary: it's very hard to be certain that pumping $100M into the City University will have significant positive results. > think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent publi…

Have you looked at the methodology for Times Higher Education rankings? It has nothing to do with quality of education. It's based on reputation. I went to a top 20 school that was utterly mediocre and was ranked highly only because of its research prowess. America having a lot of prestigious research institutions has nothing to do with the quality of primary and secondary education in the country. Half of the PhDs a…

And tertiary, too. Plenty of grad-students in American institutions have their undergrad degree from some cheaper place abroad.

Hell, some of us Americans have left America to go do degrees and careers elsewhere, due to its extreme disinvestment in science. One friend of mine to Montreal and quite possibly Germany for his PhD, me to Israel...

Re: Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm

#12

Post by gu » Tue, Apr 23, 2013, 2:55 PM UTC

spindritf wrote: post #9

gu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no correlation between the blog comment you linked to and the statement you're quoting. Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!" If you want to make the point that bolstering public education is a wasted effort, then think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system. Go on vacation there, and you'll be surprised, for instance, how well the average…

> Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!" My comment boils down to the same point as the blog post: it's very diffiucult to show benefits of any educational intervention, especially long-term benefits. Corollary: it's very hard to be certain that pumping $100M into the City University will have significant positive results. > think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent publi…

Without wanting to sound overly sarcastic, I'd like to point out that if it's "hard be certain" that CUNY would profit from €100m, how can you be certain that the money would benefit Cornell? Heck, following your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, why don't we just stop funding education altogether?

There is the saying that the US has the world's 50 best universities --- but also the 5,000 worst. While this is an exaggeration, there is quite some truth in it. Just to reiterate my point: if you, as a foreigner, address a bus driver in Oslo in English, he will quite possibly reply in proper English. However, talk to a shopping clerk at Sainsbury's in England, or Target in the US, and you may have to concede that the language they speak is closer to pidgin than English.

Lastly, I'll let you know that I have attended graduate school at a top UK university, a place you have heard of. Interestingly enough, only about a quarter of the grad students were British, and according to the rector this was because many British schools and universities don't educate their students properly. Now you may also know that the UK school system does quite a good job separating the children of the plebs from the children of the rich.

Can you see what I'm getting at? Well, I'll just spell it out for you: a very large part of my fellow students in graduate school earned their undergraduate degree from public universities in Europe, which normally implied the complete absence of tuition fees. Yet, for some reason Britain's own talent found it difficult to compete with them. This mirrors the point another commenter has already made regarding the situation in the US, but since you're from Europe, I thought you might appreciate this perspective.

Re: Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm

#13

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 23, 2013, 3:33 PM UTC

spindritf wrote: post #3

rollo_tommasi wrote: post #2

It'd be better for this money to go to strengthen technical education (and more importantly, re-educution) in the CUNY system rather than to burnish yet another elites-only institution, but training and re-training ordinary workers isn't quite as flashy or sexy a cause.

> It'd be better for this money to go to strengthen technical education (and more importantly, re-educution) in the CUNY system It's very difficult to say that with any level of certainty -- The Null Hypothesis in Education is Hard to Disprove http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-null-hypothesis-in-educa...

[deleted]

Re: Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm

#14

Post by davidf18 » Tue, Apr 23, 2013, 3:34 PM UTC

rollo_tommasi wrote: post #2

It'd be better for this money to go to strengthen technical education (and more importantly, re-educution) in the CUNY system rather than to burnish yet another elites-only institution, but training and re-training ordinary workers isn't quite as flashy or sexy a cause.

In 2010 the Jacobs donated $26 million to Israel's public school Technion (Technion is also the co-sponsor with Cornell of the NYC initiative).

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/breaking-news/technion-cor...

"[Technion President] Lavie noted that both Irwin and Joan Jacobs are Cornell alumni and major Technion donors. In 2010, the couple donated $26 million to found the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Graduate School at the university’s Haifa campus."