Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

sahajsharda.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 237 posts

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#191

Post by strikelaserclaw »

throw0101a wrote: post #168
mrtksn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them re…

> Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? Britain had quite a lot of innovation during the 1800s when it coïncidentally also had one of the larger/est economies. As the economy of the US got larger and larger in the late-1800s / early-1900s all of a sudden it…

Aren't most of the Phd's in STEM in America foreign born? If America no longer had this "brute force", then those people will likely go to the new cultural/economic capital of the world and a new country will rise which "innovates heavily"

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#192

Post by strikelaserclaw »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #113
colechristensen wrote: post #3

The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem, but it is quite naive to think that you could create a top tier university with an arbitrarily large amount of money. There is quite a lot more to the quality of an institution than the ability to build facilities, pay salaries, and buy equipment.

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...

As others have stated, if Harvard university relocated to Saudi Arabia, i would expect it to become a low ranked university in 10-15 years. Harvard became world famous because it was one of the crown jewel university of the most powerful nation on earth for the last 80 years, take it away from this context and it would have been just a good but not special university.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#193

Post by strikelaserclaw »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #21
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a top tier school would be hard with a large pile of money, but would be a lot easier if you started with a large pile of money and Harvard . This is an argument against the article. But the article's plan could be used as a threat. Use it or lose it, expand your enrollment substantially or we'll tax your endorsement away.

Creating a top tier university with a big pile of money would be trivial. Match every grant dollar for dollar, provide lab space and free tuition for 30 years and you’d have the most productive faculty and the best students overnight. It would just cost 10s of billions.

It always starts with world class faculty, who want to be paid well, have all the equipment for their labs and want to be surrounded by other top class researchers. That will attract the brightest students, you know those that "want to work with professor X because they are doing excellent research on ....", this will attract tier 2 students those whose only goal is to "want to go to university XYZ" and this will have a cascade effect because those brightest students will go and create companies, do great research and will donate money back to their university and that causes exponential growth. If you had 10 billion, i do think you can create a world renowned institution in 10-20 years.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#194

Post by Longlius »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #189
mrtksn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them re…

I would postulate US universities ranking among the top and producing groundbreaking innovation and technology is more a function of US being a cultural, economic hegemony for the past 80 years than it having some magical "system" that works. Before WW2, when you think of groundbreaking research you think of USA as a backwater compared to Europe. It is also my feeling that this American system is going to unravel in…

The USA was hardly a backwater compared to Europe before WW2. Princeton had a world-class mathematics department where people came from all over the world to study and research, among them Alan Turing (whose collaborations with Alonzo Church turned out to be very important to this website).

And even before the 20th century, American scientific acumen was fairly well-regarded. Benjamin Franklin's reputation in Europe was partially based on his scientific achievements.

Europe's disdain for the Americas was almost always rooted in a belief of cultural superiority, not a belief that American science or engineering was weak.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#195

Post by ryan93 »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #184
ryan93 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donors do fund endowments. The schools most dependent on tuition have very small endowments. You don’t seem to know anything about this

Are you saying that no tuition backed by student loans ends up in endowment funds?

Pretty much. Tuition is set by willingness to pay. Most large endowments are actually thousand of small endowments that are earmarked for certain things. Also many of the largest endowments are actually used for giving large financial aid. On principle its not of your business where private endowments come from. The government can of course stop giving loans to anyone and everyone for any amount.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#196

Post by rootusrootus »

brewdad wrote: post #125
rootusrootus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse. What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, tha…

For the record, OSU lists their student:faculty ratio at 18:1. First year gen ed courses are huge but most upper level classes are a much more manageable size. https://oregonstate.edu/about

It's been a while, but I don't remember any of my upper division CS classes at OSU being smaller than ~30 students. That's why I wondered if perhaps admins were counted somehow, or maybe grad students, to get to a lower ratio.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#197

Post by rgrieselhuber »

ryan93 wrote: post #195
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that no tuition backed by student loans ends up in endowment funds?

Pretty much. Tuition is set by willingness to pay. Most large endowments are actually thousand of small endowments that are earmarked for certain things. Also many of the largest endowments are actually used for giving large financial aid. On principle its not of your business where private endowments come from. The government can of course stop giving loans to anyone and everyone for any amount.

I don't care about private endowments, that's the business of donors. There does seem to be conflicting opinions on whether tax money (student loans) flows into endowments and, if so, that should be immediately shut down.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#198

Post by [deleted] »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #179
logifail wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures. Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I…

It can, very easily. Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer. The onl…

[deleted]

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#199

Post by AlbertCory »

imtringued wrote: post #157
AlbertCory wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 themsel…

I hate to resort to cliche, but it's just so apropos here:

You are missing the forest for the trees. You know all the details but none of the big picture.

QE is increasing the money supply. Since you object to the pejorative "printing money" we can stop using that phrase. It's increasing the money supply.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#200

Post by [deleted] »

harmon wrote: post #57
pcmoney wrote: post #19

Its not like those schools are demonstrably better its that those schools are exclusive and provide social connections to elite social classes. The whole point of them existing is to be exclusive more than it is to educate.

I disagree. I went to a "tier 3" school for undergrad and then "elite" schools for post-graduate education. The difference in course and instruction quality, experience level of the professors, student ambition, and caliber of student between the classes of schools was night and day. The "mediocre" undergrads I met during my post-graduate education were as good as the best people I went to school with for undergrad.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN