Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel • Hacker News Board

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#151

Post by rtpg » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

pattusk wrote: post #145

isolli wrote: post #140

The situation as seen from France is odd. Here, elite STEM universities are free, and the very best ones even pay their students. Having legacy admissions would be unthinkable; it's the opposite of meritocracy. And you don't need to "socially" prepare since birth with all the right extra-curricular activities.

French universities absolutely do have legacy admissions. It's called admissions paralleles (or sur dossier), you can pay your way in with minimal effort and get the same diploma upon graduation.

Admission sur dossier rarely happens at the engineering schools (which is where most elite go). Or it’s an extremely small sliver of the population (usually people who transfer from universities or other programs).

Polytechnique has 32 university admissions compared to ~300 from the entrance exams.

Harvard is 1/3rd legacies!

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#152

Post by imtringued » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:12 AM UTC

Ziggy_Zaggy wrote: post #104

Freakonomics did another dive into similar issues recently. The take-away was that elite universities aren't work the extra costs unless you are shooting for a specific industry that only down-selects for elite institutions.

Meanhmwhile on hacker news people argue you should be in as much debt as possible. The truth is that the students are the limiting factor. The number of people qualified to be good professors exceeds the number of teaching positions for obvious reasons.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#153

Post by imtringued » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:14 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #2

> To break up elite colleges therefore, all you need to do is break up the endowments. Siphoning resources from school endowments is actually quite easy. Wow straight up suggesting we steal money from private institutions to give to politicians to decide how to redistribute it. Totally insane. The government prints $40 billion like it’s nothing. We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. Maybe we…

I honestly don't understand this colloquial language of "printing money" just call it what it is, borrowing money or just plain old debt. There is no need for secret ingroup language or additional indirection, there is no conspiracy here. The real world is more boring than you think.

The government borrowed money and increased its debts by trillions of dollars, that alone is insane enough, there is no need for some mythical "money printing" that is supposed to be the last straw that breaks the camels back.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#154

Post by Glawen » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:14 AM UTC

wins32767 wrote: post #53

It's not endowments that makes elite universities elite, it's a combination of social cachet, alumni networks, and brand. Cambridge, Oxford, and Sorbonne have been elite universities for centuries, and it's not mainly from their endowments. It's because if you are [smart|powerful], you want to go to a school with other [smart|powerful] people and you know [smart|powerful] people will be going there. A larger marketin…

I think it is more vicious than this, as a powerful person, you want your children to continue in the same sphere. Except that children are not necessarily as good as you. So you create a system where powerful people can put their children and perpetuate the family standing without risks of being overrun by gifted lower class children.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#155

Post by sgt » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:18 AM UTC

It's really sad when increased taxation is seen as the only way to practically solve problems. I prefer the idea of creating a national college that is primarily remote first. See xbar's comment.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#156

Post by imtringued » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #13

ajross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. It's so weird to see memes like this persist. No, no we didn't. Those spending bills were financed via deficit spending: they were loans. All spending bills are loans. The treasury department raises money by selling bonds. Every deficit dollar the government spends is a dollar it takes in from some investor somewhere who wanted to park money in US treas…

Obviously* it's not printing money literally. But it's increasing the money supply. When governments deficit spend, they deposit money in private sector banks, increasing their balance sheet. The net result of this is more dollars in and flowing through the economy. Which is... printing money, pretty much. The idea that it's some kind of moral failing or inherently irresponsible is silly, but the description isn't so…

You call it printing but it happened in response to the private sector desiring to increase its net savings which can only happen if another party goes into further debt. By this logic, saving money is printing money because the money in your bank account is taken out of circulation and stagnates on your bank account, that stagnant money is added on top of the usual supply needed to keep the economy running. This is quite literally a conspiracy theory. Don't you see how ridiculous this framing is?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#157

Post by imtringued » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #61

ajross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. It's so weird to see memes like this persist. No, no we didn't. Those spending bills were financed via deficit spending: they were loans. All spending bills are loans. The treasury department raises money by selling bonds. Every deficit dollar the government spends is a dollar it takes in from some investor somewhere who wanted to park money in US treas…

> People need to stop saying that. Why do people keep repeating something that is so clearly incorrect? Because they have a better understanding of it than you do. The Fed buys government bonds, aka "Quantitative Easing." That is printing money. They started doing that after the 2007-8 recession, because just lowering the interest rate to zero wasn't doing enough (in their view). They didn't want to have negative int…

QE isn't printing money, it is a way to blend treasuries into a finely chopped liquid so that your bank can keep the asset side of its balance sheet just as liquid as it's deposits. Due to liquidity preferences people prefer liquid assets over illiquid assets and therefore demand compensation to give up liquidity. Since the yield on capital is falling, people prefer holding straight up money over investing it themselves in risk bearing assets, this means banks are being flooded with short term demand deposits that can be pulled out at any time. What QE does is effectively make all banks hold treasuries collectively. If one bank sends $1000 to another bank it doesn't have to sell treasuries at the current market rate and instead they just transfer the bank reserves which are a claim on $1000 worth of treasuries. As demand deposits become a greater share of financial capital, the risk of a bank run on a specific bank becomes higher and higher. Basically any bank is at risk of becoming instantly insolvent. The problem here is keeping excessive savings in money instead of capital.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#158

Post by danrocks » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #135

boeingUH60 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia started in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment [1]. As far as I can tell, they’re still not noteworthy on the global stage. 1- https://www.science.org/content/article/can-saudi-arabia-bui...

Doing my part here and sharing my experience, as I have done before in this forum. I was a PhD student there until my little daughter (4yo at the time) was kidnapped by academic staff and I had to negotiate our safe return to our home country. I still can't believe the kind of abuse we went through and it baffles me how the people that orchestrated this are still there, no consequences at all, after committing a very…

It is quite the claim to be making without providing any details. I feel it does not strengthen your argument to do so.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#159

Post by jkingsbery » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #44

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #28

Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that student…

The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible r…

Having had small classes undergrad and larger classes where I went to grad school, scaling a class is not simple, the experience changes. With larger class size comes less in interactive lectures, more reliance on TAs (of varying quality) instead of professors, and different kinds of assignments. We don't have an easy way to scale these things yet.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#160

Post by imtringued » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #47

yieldcrv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The COVID relief bills were actually a one-time exception to a 100 year old reality. 1) Congress directly modified the Federal Reserve's charter to give money directly to private persons. 2) There were also payments directly from the US Treasury. 3) There were also things that involved that traditional convoluted process of the Treasury selling more bonds to the international market and pretending not to know that th…

What individuals did the fed give money too? The stimulus payments were paid through the US Treasury like any other congressional spending bill.

Stop that, you are breaking the illusion. People want a petty conspiracy theory.

People approximate this and think they can just reduce it to one government office when the truth is that literally every single participant in the economy is responsible. If I had to dumb it down I would say that the economy tries to be in balance. If the government appears to be doing one thing, it isn't alone, there are private companies and private individuals doing the complement.

In macro economy it is quite common to split an economy into two asymmetric entities. You, and the rest of the economy. If you earn, they spend, if they spend you earn.

If you borrow (known as printing in conspiracy theory jargon), they save (in aggregate), if they save, you borrow. Of course I am assuming that the balance is being maintained. If someone spends less than they earn, they save but if there is no net borrowing the balance is being disrupted. What happens then is deflation but that implies that the economy is in disequilibrium and must shake off some of the people earning more than they spend. It is kind of ironic that savers want deflation because in a perfect market they would get fired and wouldn't be allowed to work more which prevents them building up more savings.