There are universities (i.e. colleges) in Greece/EU, where not only the tuition is zero but you also get a good salary as you work towards your degree.
Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
51–60 of 149 posts
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#52This is what I get when I try to visit the website: > Our European visitors are important to us. > This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws. Besides the irony of "being important" and GDPR [0] not having been solved for a simple website, this is the first time in a long while that I see something…
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Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#53One thing that strikes me from this article is a vast bureaucracy, regulation, credentialing structures, accounting, etc. that the story revolves around. In Sweden, where I live, there are plenty of educational opportunities available to people completely free of charge. Entirely subsidized by the government. Instead of assembling elaborate bureaucratic structures, the state spends its money paying school admin and t…
When I went to university (in Sweden), a lot of people were just pottering around, taking additional courses to delay having to get a real job, so I suppose that should be factored in when comparing efficiency between different systems as well.
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#54>Our European visitors are important to us.
This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#55>Our European visitors are important to us. This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws. I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
While I understand refusing to serve 3rd party cookies to European visitors, the message copy seems totally out of tune.
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a lot of confusion about college endowments on HN. It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. Annual university budgets make use of the returns off of the endowment, often covering more than half of their expenses. Their long-term plan is to never tap into the principal. In fact, the hope is to increase the principal with new donations to expand the annual returns to fight agai…
> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is…
Using Harvard as an example, they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 [1]. In order to cover that, they would need to be having a consistent rate of return around 9% on their ($54 billion) endowment. That a fairly good estimate of the rate of return for the stock market over the past 25 years, so not unreasonable. Though, this ignores that most of the endowment consists of restricted funds that can only be used on certain ways. Also, generally you need to cut a few percentage points if you want to guard against inflation.
So yes, Harvard could cover just about all of their budget with the endowment returns, though they probably need some extra income to cover the holes formed by the restricted funds and avoid inflation pressure.
Is their current usage of the returns too conservative? Probably. Do they have an absurdly large pile of cash that they have no business holding on to? Not really; the investment returns roughly correspond with their current operating costs.
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#57>Our European visitors are important to us. This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws. I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#58Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
I actually entirely disagree with the premise that students should work. I think it's wrong, aside from a perhaps holiday job. They should study, that's it. If they are not busy enough to study, then they don't study hard enough.
That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is…
Using Harvard as an example, they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 [1]. In order to cover that, they would need to be having a consistent rate of return around 9% on their ($54 billion) endowment. That a fairly good estimate of the rate of return for the stock market over the past 25 years, so not unreasonable. Though, this ignores that most of the endowment consists of restricted funds that can only…
I was taught that you should estimate a 4% rate of return, which means Harvard's endowment can cover around 40% of their budget. Much of the remainder will come through research grants, and a rather small percentage will be tuition and fees.
Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
#60Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…
That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/we…
I think for that to work you'd either need some sort of "perpetual students" who hang around a long time, or a reasonable percentage of people enrolling later in life than is typical (and possibly even enrolling as a student after earning a degree elsewhere).