111–120 of 173 posts
If anything in any country should be free, it should be education. And, obviously, the administration of education should never be a for-profit venture. Valuing democracy and being able to select sensible leaders depends on it.
>If anything in any country should be free, it should be education. I can't tell you're being serious or you're being hyperbolic for the sake of defending education. Most people, given the choice would rather get free food, water, or healthcare.
Material benefits or wealth can be stolen away on the whim of the stronger party, as history has proven over and over again.
No one can steal my education however.
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[1] This is a thing both the strong and weaker groups understood very well for over 3000 years. Who could learn which skills and therefore do what job is what the caste system was all about .
Teachers were and are considered only step below God, your teachers commands supersede even those of parents . Stories like those of ekalavya are venerated for a reason.
The power of knowledge and education was well understood and also closely guarded to create and manage oppression for thousands of years
Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double... In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff. In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff. In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1 This is insane.
What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work. [0] source…
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/p...
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You're assuming they won't make any money on licensing or investments. Which they most certainly will.
and you're assuming they invest like you do in your 401k or whatever. which they most certainly don't. some are more aggressive w.r.t. private markets investment but many focus on capital preservation and don't grow as much as you'd expect. FY24 Cornell's endowment returned something like 8%. this despite an S&P500 gain of, what, 23% ish. institutions and allocators operate with a very different mindset versus indivi…
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Still, 1:1? Please.
I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.
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The parenthetical is doing most of the lifting in that sentence.
It's also true. Source: one of my kids is in college right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parenthetical is doing most of the lifting in that sentence.
It's also true. Source: one of my kids is in college right now.
Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double... In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff. In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff. In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1 This is insane.
> "The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1" > "This is insane." "This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University... School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research…
MIT Staff to student ratio: 1.47
No medical school.
The 17,490 number includes 4,500 Lincoln Lab staff. Backing those out. We get 12,990 MIT Staff.
So an MIT Staff to student ratio of: 1.09
https://facts.mit.edu/employees/ https://facts.mit.edu/lincoln-laboratory/
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>but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid. >It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums. I'm sure…
How convenient. Call money something else to continue ripping people off.
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>but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid. >It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums. I'm sure…
I never said to deplete the endowments. Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs." Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
But you specifically advocated for stripping a university's non-profit status, partly on the basis of having an endowment. Therefore it's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that you don't like the concept of endowments, even if you're not explicitly advocating for depleting them.
>Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs."
The point is that the right like sport programs, but the left thinks they're boondoggles, and the left like humanities programs but the right thinks they're boondoggles. Getting rid of sports programs is a good way to piss off the right, and for them to defund humanities programs next time they're in power.
>Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
You'd rather than universities stop doing things that generate cash for their educational mission?