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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

sahajsharda.substack.com

221–230 of 237 posts

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#221
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Harvard enrollment increased 4 times since 1800s from 1.5K to 20K. ? You might mean 4 "doublings", but then the other number doesn't make sense. Or 14 times? > It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism. How do you double elite universities? It's more like we have an eliteness gradient (T10, T20, etc...) and the masses together decide what's "elite enough". Is WUSTL eli…

> You might mean 4 "doublings" Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times. > How do you double elite universities? Doubling elite universities: I mean more outreach from let's say T10 with next 10-20. This doesn't happen. Ex: Top 5 won't cite papers written by someone in the middle. It happens but that's quite rare. Ex: Faculty recruitment does not propagates from bottom rankin…

> Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times.

But 20,000 / 1,500 is 13x.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#222
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK just codified this into visa law. It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating…

That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area. 3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.

> London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich

Citation needed. I've seen London attract Europeans but a lot more people are trying to jump from London to the Bay Area than the opposite.

> compared to cultural wasteland of bay area.

Ironically, there are two prominent Bay Area schools listed in the special interest list from the UK government. [0]

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-potential-in...

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#225
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK just codified this into visa law. It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating…

That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area. 3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.

A good senior developer makes 70-90K in London (which is not even close to 80% of Bay Area), a place where a 2-bed flat cost 2K a month and nursery cost 1.5-2K. A junior dev making 50K in Berlin or Munich or Hamburg is much richer, let alone what’s going on in Zurich or Silicon Valley. Italians and Spaniards are better off going to Germany or the Netherlands.

Besides, London has a cultural life that’s not comparable to Paris, Rome or Berlin or even Hamburg (try to get a pint or a coffee at 2AM) and it’s hell if you are not wealthy (try to explain what a section 21 eviction is to a French or a German).

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#226
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?

This is like saying a public school teacher can't buy a cigarette because his money actually came from "taxpayer funds".

The moment the money enters the teachers account it is no longer taxpayer money. The same is the case for the university. How they spend the tuitions is entirely upto them.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#227
post #215
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People definitely do seem to like status. I think part of it is that competence is much harder to check for than status. Status is inherently very "legible", which can make it useful even if it only kind of correlates with competence.

> competence is much harder to check for than status Is it? I've always thought that competence is much harder to cheat than status. The way I see it, the whole point of status is to decouple authority from competence.

It's contextual for sure, but one example: it's way easier to see "Harvard" on a resume than to conduct an interview that accurately assesses for skill, which is why you end up with things like resume screens ahead of interviews.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I believe the direct lending program consists mostly of the Fed buying corporate bonds, which is loaning money to private corporations. There is also a component where they can loan to small businesses (notably a business with 200 employees is generally considered "small".

These programs are not handouts, they are loans. The Fed did this in 2008 when they bought bonds and even stock in some big companies.

Overall, the Fed made a big profit on all of that when the bonds were paid back with interest and the stock was sold back in tranches over time as the market recovered.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#229
post #57
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.

There is a much larger gulf between Tier 3 and large state flagship research university than large state school and a perceived “elite” school (Some Ivies, Stanford, CMU etc). But TBH some of the best education I have ever received in terms of teaching quality came out of a community college.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#230
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might mean 4 "doublings" Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times. > How do you double elite universities? Doubling elite universities: I mean more outreach from let's say T10 with next 10-20. This doesn't happen. Ex: Top 5 won't cite papers written by someone in the middle. It happens but that's quite rare. Ex: Faculty recruitment does not propagates from bottom rankin…

> Rate of change: Enrollment increased by 4 times. Population increased by 100 times. But 20,000 / 1,500 is 13x.

Not sure how that slipped. Sorry.
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