211–220 of 231 posts
$50,000 a year for a Harvard undergraduate course exclusive of accommodation and food. Sounds like there's a lot of fat that could be trimmed. Sounds immoral in fact.
It's not immoral, it's business. Harvard has presented a product and you are free to take it or leave it. What is unfortuntate though is that we've been conditioned as a society to believe that a higher education is the most valuable thing you could ever earn.
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It's not like any education representative can change immigration policy or grant some exceptions, it's not up to them. If taking online classes means that the students visas become invalid, or if their current visa restrictions mean that it's prohibited for them to be in an online-only program, then that's exactly what it means, and it's wrong to blame schools or education department about it, it's not about educati…
Surely every person involved should simply be turning to the people above/before them in the chain of command and saying "this is impossible, we need to be more flexible now". And whoever is blocking that escalation is reasonably part of the problem.
You'd have to escalate up to the president, he's the only link between the people the grandparent poster is complaining to and the people who decide the things grandparent poster wants to change. And it may well be that the response of the top administration is that everything works as intended, that the effect you're complaining about is something they want to increase, not fix.
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Well... 40% of the Fortune 500 had at least one founder that was from an immigrant family. I think that's the precise statement, but I might misunderstand. That is not the same as saying that 40% of the founders of Fortune 500 companies were immigrants (which I believe is bruceb's point). To your point: Let's say there were 5 founders. Let's say one was an immigrant. Would the company still have been founded by the o…
I think you are building a straw man from my comment instead of addressing the actual claim, my point is absolutely not about questioning whether the co-founders were relevant to the companies success. My comment should be read as: I have seen the 40% figure given very often on HN and I did interpret it as 40% of Fortune 500 companies being founded only by first-generation immigrants. To me someone who was born in a…
But, to your actual point (I hope): I'm inclined to agree with your definition of immigrants. And yet, if we didn't accept the parents, we wouldn't have the children either.
The problem with that argument is, where do you draw the line? One generation? Two? A few decades? A few centuries? If you follow that argument too far, only businesses founded by Native Americans weren't founded by families of immigrants.
I think that categorizing people as immigrants, (first generation) children of immigrants, and non-immigrants makes sense for this discussion. And if "founded by families of immigrants" means first-generation children, that's still to some degree an argument that we want immigrants because of the effect they have on the economy. Not as direct an argument as if they were founded by immigrants, but still something of an argument.
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Interesting. Describe real wage growth over that time period.
If you think the average wage in 1950 can get you more stuff than 2020, educate me then. The only thing that got more expensive relatively speaking is housing. Which kind of make sense because land area don't tend to change. Look around at your house and answer if you could get the same stuff (or even, poor replacement of the same stuff) if you're at the same percentile of income in 1950s.
1950 to 2020 looks good on paper, until you realize that the bulk of the wage growth happened prior to 1990. Since 1990, the S&P 500 has gone up approximately 10x. Meanwhile, wages have approximately doubled. That means in the last 30 years, the wealth gap has increased. If you consider only minorities, the picture is even worse.
It's almost like, US workers are losing their bargaining power for some reason. If you consider outsourcing, various trade agreements, and white collar immigration, those are all net-negative on US labor. Some demographics have been disproportionately impacted than others, just as predicted.
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It's not immoral, it's business. Harvard has presented a product and you are free to take it or leave it. What is unfortuntate though is that we've been conditioned as a society to believe that a higher education is the most valuable thing you could ever earn.
Harvard is not a business, it is a non-profit.
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@dang - Flagging as [dupe] shouldn't remove an article from the HN front page, especially when none of the other articles are actively on the front page. Also, all [dupe] article comments should be merged and visible under each separate [dupe] article, so organic user dialogue isn't split up and minimized.
Front page space is the scarcest resource on HN [1]. If we didn't remove dupes, the site would be Dupes R Us. Also, since the idea of HN is to avoid repetition [2], there wouldn't be anyone left here because readers would mutiny. We commonly merge duplicate threads, but we don't catch them all. In the case of a sensational story like this one, where there's an endless supply of comments and the threads are more or le…
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+1 to what you said. 18 years for me and no permanent residency in sight. I'd have been a citizen a few times over in any other country.
That's horrible. I have several friends from different origin countries (including USA) who have received Swiss citizenships (which the American right wing holds up as some sort of uber-restrictive standard) in half that time.
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The US allows over 1 million immigrants per year. Maybe less the past year, but still extremely high on an immigrant per capita basis. H1B was being abused and needed to be reigned in. There are still plenty of people coming into the country through various means, the US is still extremely generous with immigration. There are plenty of qualified citizens here and in the zero sum game that is hiring national immigrati…
>the US is still extremely generous with immigration. Everything I read about it convinces me it's a byzantine and capricious process, and largely down to chance. My process of gaining permanent residence in the Netherlands is a cakewalk by comparison. University MSc, then free access to the job market for a year, then after some years of employment and passing a relatively simple integration exam, I have long-term E…
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The US allows over 1 million immigrants per year. Maybe less the past year, but still extremely high on an immigrant per capita basis. H1B was being abused and needed to be reigned in. There are still plenty of people coming into the country through various means, the US is still extremely generous with immigration. There are plenty of qualified citizens here and in the zero sum game that is hiring national immigrati…
>the US is still extremely generous with immigration. Everything I read about it convinces me it's a byzantine and capricious process, and largely down to chance. My process of gaining permanent residence in the Netherlands is a cakewalk by comparison. University MSc, then free access to the job market for a year, then after some years of employment and passing a relatively simple integration exam, I have long-term E…
I know this will be very unpleasant and will entail a lot of hardship for a lot of people but I can't help but wonder if in the long term this will help to start reversing the "brain drain" problem that many developing nations are struggling with. They'll still have access to their classes and be able to acquire the requisite skills, but now they'll be building something in their home country not stuck in a middle ti…
I know several developers from developing nations that have strong ties to their countries of origin, and engage heavily in various "good works" there. They have massively more resources to do so due to their salaries in the US than they would if they were stuck in their countries of origin.