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Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

economist.com

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Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#101
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.

Why does the fact that most Americans qualify for some aid make the Yale's 55%-on-financial-aid stat a red herring? (I suspect that, in what I write below below, I must not be responding to your actual point, but can you clarify what your point is?) It's not like Yale is giving lip service to aid - it's giving $92,000,000 annually. This means that, on average, each Yale student gets $17,700 per year. But since we kno…

Good parsing of the numbers here.

The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...

While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.

:(

Re: Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?

#102
post #81

In the UK we said, "We don't need manufacturing, we have our scientists and R&D". Then when our Universities and our R&D started to decline, we said "We don't need our Universities and R&D, we have our Service Economy". Then when our Service Economy went offshore, we said "We dont need all our Service Economy, we have our Financial Services Economy". Everything outside London is a wasteland. The average wage is subsi…

Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.

The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect).

As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.

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