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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

sahajsharda.substack.com

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#31

Post by davidgay »

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.

... and in fact: www.epfl.ch (my undergraduate)

"The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking" (from wikipedia)

It is indeed ~free ($1600/year) for Swiss residents at least, and gets most of its funding from the Swiss government.

I would take issue with the "overnight" bit though - the ranking above was not its ranking 30 years ago when I was there (and the EPFL took its current form in 1969). It also took a concerted effort to hire the right faculty, probably recruit the right graduate students, etc, etc.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#32

Post by ryan93 »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #10
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…

How much have those endowments grown through tuitions paid (and increased) by the growth of student loan debt? If there is to be loan forgiveness, it should be paid back from the endowments.

The endowments would run out instantly. And you would destroy great research institutions. Some people just enjoy destruction

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#33

Post by darawk »

endisneigh wrote: post #5

Status is zero sum, so it’s not even possible to create an arbitrary amount of elite schools to begin with.

This is what these discussions always miss. Harvard isn't conferring value, its recognizing it. It's not a value add, its a filter.

People think you can create value by creating more elite universities, but it's exactly the opposite. All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide. You can learn just as much at a non-elite university as an elite one.

Attending an elite university just means you were in the top x% of your age cohort. By definition, the top x% is not a group who's membership you can expand.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#34

Post by derbOac »

jjeaff wrote: post #29
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 don't think there is any proof that the elite connections make any difference on average. The Dale and Krueger study in fact found evidence that there was no statistical difference in lifetime income for ivy league grads vs less elite schools when controlling for factors like sat scores. In fact, they compared people who were accepted but did not go to an ivy league vs those who did go. Other subsequent studies by…

I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law.

Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities.

I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of suspicious that something's missing from those studies based on prima facie examples I've encountered several times in my life.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#35

Post by jjeaff »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #10
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…

How much have those endowments grown through tuitions paid (and increased) by the growth of student loan debt? If there is to be loan forgiveness, it should be paid back from the endowments.

Ya, framing the student loan crisis as "forgiving all student loans" is just silly. Go after the predatory loan companies and the colleges that accepted the loan money. Claw it back from colleges that have been egregiously overcharging while lying about things like the average salary of graduates from whatever program.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#36

Post by projektfu »

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.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#37

Post by alimov »

xbar wrote: post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

an interesting idea…

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#38

Post by quadrifoliate »

darawk wrote: post #33
endisneigh wrote: post #5

Status is zero sum, so it’s not even possible to create an arbitrary amount of elite schools to begin with.

This is what these discussions always miss. Harvard isn't conferring value, its recognizing it. It's not a value add, its a filter. People think you can create value by creating more elite universities, but it's exactly the opposite. All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide. You can learn just as much at a non-elite university as an elite one. Attending an elite university just means you were in the…

> Attending an elite university just means you were in the top x% of your age cohort. By definition, the top x% is not a group who's membership you can expand.

This would all be very well if you decided the top x% via an objective and reasonable standardized test.

However, the mention of standardized tests to determine top x% objectively usually sends people running for the hills [1], and they quickly start talking about "holistic criteria" for admission and how they benefit the students.

If the criteria are holistic, i.e. subjective anyway, I don't see why we can't have more elite universities. They will just be holistic along different dimensions.

To some degree you already see this in the Ivy League – Cornell is considered, broadly speaking, nerdier than Harvard. So just create 10 nerdier Cornells and 10 preppier Harvards, problem solved. It will just be harder to automatically rank people based on what school they went to. Good!

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[1] As someone who has seen and felt the downsides of a standardized testing regimen which objectively decides whether you go to a certain college or not, I sympathize with them.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#39

Post by ajross »

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.

> The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem

Is it? The largest university endowment in the world is $50B. That's wouldn't even crack the top 100 US companies by market cap. If it's a problem, it's certainly not a big one.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#40

Post by tomcat27 »

endisneigh wrote: post #5

Status is zero sum, so it’s not even possible to create an arbitrary amount of elite schools to begin with.

The US population increased 100 times since 1800s from 5M to 500M. Harvard enrollment increased 4 times since 1800s from 1.5K to 20K.

The number of universities in the US did grew greatly during these 200 years, but the funding distribution to these universities is as skewed as the income inequality in the US. For instance, 60% of NIH funds go to The scholarly work at these elite universities might not appear deserving of the preferential treatment from the funding agencies, if we start poking around reproducibility crisis, data hacking etc.

It seems fair to assume doubling elite universities would not be catastrophic to elitism.

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