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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#201

Post by ryan93 »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #197
ryan93 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost all endowment increases come from donors and stock market gains. Harvard spends 5+ percent of their endowment per year. It would be trivial if it was happening to prevent tuition going to endowments since tuition is a small fraction of spending at rich universities. Your weird obsession will do nothing to lower costs

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#202

Post by ajross »

AlbertCory wrote: post #199
imtringued wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> QE is increasing the money supply.

So are home mortgages. So is giving your brother $200 to make rent. So is buying the AR-15 you've been saving for. The money supply is elastic, and responds to economic activity. Harnessing that truth as an engine of growth is the fundamental insight of modern economics.[1]

The contention upthread was some ridiculous hyperbole about "minting dollars out of thin air", and the truth is that... nothing of the sort is happening. At all.

[1] And by extension, arguing against it piecewise like this is tantamount to demanding we all go back to a barter economy backed by hoarded treasure.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#203

Post by yieldcrv »

imtringued wrote: post #160
jjeaff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

Mention the Federal Reserve once and someone thinks you are talking about a conspiracy theory.

In any case, I think I was incorrect about the nature of the direct lending program, here is the report from Congress about the CARES Act (the first pandemic relief bill) and how its "expanding the Fed’s traditional role beyond lender of last resort to the banking system and even beyond the more expansive role it took in the 2007-2009 financial crisis"

Its really not a simple "treasury does this, federal reserve does that"

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46329

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#204

Post by rgrieselhuber »

ryan93 wrote: post #201
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost all endowment increases come from donors and stock market gains. Harvard spends 5+ percent of their endowment per year. It would be trivial if it was happening to prevent tuition going to endowments since tuition is a small fraction of spending at rich universities. Your weird obsession will do nothing to lower costs

Not sure how it's a weird obsession to want to know how tax dollars are being spent on universities, especially given the OP. Do you have something to back up what you are asserting, that endowments are not funded (directly or indirectly) by student loans?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#205

Post by 908B64B197 »

cm2187 wrote: post #171
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.

Also all the exams are blind/anonymous, and recruitment strictly based on grades. Or at least they used to be. Despite this the French system has a very low rate of social mobility, and the overwhelming majority of students in top colleges come from parents within the system. Now there are good reasons for social background to be sticky (not the least because I don’t buy the tabula rasa theory that your genes account…

> and for the part they don’t, well how your parent raised you should matter

I think you nailed it.

There's a strong cultural component to doing well in school. Just the parent's perception of schooling matters a lot (is reading for fun something they do or encourage?). And of course there's a lot of implicit knowledge about test taking and what really matters at school. Someone who navigated these exams before will be a much better guide for sure.

> By preventing elite high school from selecting their own students, by creating as many parallel admissions to colleges that were purely competitive exams based.

How much of that is to increase racial diversity?

> On the other side the obsession of the French with education is unhealthy, where your career at 50 is still determined by an exam you sit 30 years before, and this tendency of having clubs within clubs for the elite to run the country with little competence or accountability

Maybe that's why there are so many French expats here in the Valley!

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#206

Post by ryan93 »

ryan93 wrote: post #201
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost all endowment increases come from donors and stock market gains. Harvard spends 5+ percent of their endowment per year. It would be trivial if it was happening to prevent tuition going to endowments since tuition is a small fraction of spending at rich universities. Your weird obsession will do nothing to lower costs

Endowments increase the amount that can be spent. All universities spend all the tuition. Feel free to block tuition from going into endowments; doesn’t matter. https://thedailytexan.com/2019/03/08/ut-now-has-the-second-l... Here is interesting journalism

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#207

Post by AlbertCory »

ajross wrote: post #202
AlbertCory wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> QE is increasing the money supply. So are home mortgages. So is giving your brother $200 to make rent. So is buying the AR-15 you've been saving for. The money supply is elastic, and responds to economic activity. Harnessing that truth as an engine of growth is the fundamental insight of modern economics.[1] The contention upthread was some ridiculous hyperbole about "minting dollars out of thin air", and the truth…

.. and I suppose you're an adherent of MMT? [1]

Unfortunately for you, "printing money" is a meme that sticks.

[1] Magical Monetary Thinking

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#208

Post by clairity »

ajross wrote: post #175
clairity wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

comparing endowment to market cap is misunderstanding basic finance and accounting. endowments are more directly (but not perfectly) comparable to (long-term) assets on the balance sheet. those are typically a small fraction of the market cap of a company. apple, for instance, has a $2.4T market cap, but it's non-current assets are $216B (of which $128B are investment assets).

How so? Universities don't use their endowments like companies use assets either. Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested. University endowments are for income. If anything they under perform the returns that the broader market would use to assign a market cap. A public company with a total revenue /budget of Harvard's would have a market cap rather less than the endowment size. I'm still not understanding wha…

> "Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested."

see, you did it again. assets are almost never "returned" anywhere. that's typically profits. you don't need an mba, but to have any credibility, you need to at least use these words reasonably.

in a capital structure, endowments are most similar to (long-term) assets, not revenue, income, or market cap (which is a valuation). i'll leave it as an exercise to work out why.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#209

Post by clairity »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #190
clairity wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one, especially not some random contemporary, owns the idea of using a lottery once a threshold is met. that concept has been thrown around for millenia to pick lots of all sorts. i've even suggested it as a reasonable approach to hiring right here on hn, and didn't even need to crib the idea off anyone else to do so. it's a rational solution for a decision system under high, but not unbounded, uncertainty.

Not saying Michael Sandel owns the idea, I first heard it in his book Tyranny of Merit.

so reference the book, which is more useful, rather than some rando name.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#210

Post by 908B64B197 »

projektfu wrote: post #36

It would make a lot of sense for the top schools to expand like they did in other countries. Oxford and Cambridge have 12,000 undergrads each. University of Toronto has 44,000. Harvard and Princeton have about 5,000 each and Stanford has like 8,000. The US has more top schools, perhaps, than other countries, but not as many seats, I think.

You're comparing wildly different schools here.

Nobody would reject an offer from Stanford to go to University of Toronto. There are large midwestern public schools that would be a more appropriate equivalent here.

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